THE THEATRE
Rafiq Anwar and Indian Dancers and Musicians." At the Ambassadors.—" The Sadler's Wells Ballet." At the New.
As one who believes that the basis of art is the expression of a relationship between man and the universe, and that this relation- ship extends from the simple and external to the most profound and inward, I am consequently also one of those who think that all the virtue is lacking in copies when this relationship no longer exists. Why is it, for instance, that all nineteenth-century Gothic churches built in England are lifeless and dead when they are not hideous? Certainly there was as much architectural talent born in England in the nineteenth century as in the thirteenth or fourteenth and far more science. But our nineteenth-century church buildings are bad because they are meaningless. They do not express any real feeling of man about God or Nature. At the best, they are just copies, as near as skill can make them, of what men did when they had some- thing of their own to say in this manner. •
Now I felt precisely the same as I feel about modern Gothic church buildings when seeing Rafiq Anwar and his Indian company performing at the Ambassadors Theatre dances which mostly had originated in religious ritual. The real original feeling, it seemed to me, was necessarily absent and we were present at a modern copy of it. This is not to say that these dances are not worth seeing ; but on a London stage they are more interesting than moving or impressive, and I can imagine sensitive Indians familiar with their origins and meanings finding them as much mechanical imitations as the more sensitive. of us find our modern church buildings. This applies particularly to dances such as Kali, Siva, Bodhisattva and Durga ; but not so much to the delightful Kite Dance. To us Europeans, however, who know nothing of these far- distant conceptions except as represented in their ancient Hindu sculptures and literature these dances may still suggest something of the beauty and significance of their magnificent originals.
The Sadler's Wells ballet began this week at the New Theatre a London season with an opening programme of The Birds, The Quest
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