Ballet
Tokyo Noes
By CLIVE BARNES Of course, there is a certain cuteness, a quaint exoticism, in seeing a miniature red-hot momma in a flowered kimono belting out a pop-song with diligent, even admirable, mimicry. Equally, tired expense accounts who would not cross the street to see the long-stemmed, mechanised kicking of the Tiller Girls or the Radio City Rockettes, may find that the same jerking, impersonal knees produce a new frisson when attached to a lepidopterist's collection of forty madam butter- flies. But all this is not so far from that feeling of distasteful amusement you get when you come across a sad-looking cafe in a Spanish seaside village that advertises a 'cup of tea just like mother makes!'
I wonder what audience Tokyo 1961 is hoping to attract? It is basically a dance show, but any- one remembering the glories of the Japanese Kabuki dancers, and naïvely hoping to see again just something of that petrified beauty, is in for a shock. The dancing here comes in all shapes and flavours, from tap to ballet, and although it utilises no fewer than five choreographers (all grouped together in the small programme credits, below the name of the stage manager, but com- fortably above the box-office staff and the Jeyes' Fluid) not one of them seems worthy of the money that has been showered on the show. There is a parody of Swan Lake, set in the back streets of Tokyo—with Odette, presumably as a whore, Rothbart as her pimp, and Siegfried as the back-street Galahad who takes her away from 'all that.' While Tchaikovsky materialises, somewhat battered, through the saxophones, there are merry hints of the original Ivanov choreography (the Dance of the Cygnets for be- jcaned and be-sweatered Japanese street-girls is a collector's item) and the whole thing is mildly amusing for those who know the ballet well. Other theatregoers will, I suspect, find it tedious, and a small voice inside me suggests that it was not meant to be funny, merely original.
Much the same is true of the Don Quixote pas de deux, which regular ballet-goers will find dis- concertingly comic. It takes the Minkus music, and the same Oboukoff choreography that is used by the Royal Ballet, but splits it up between six dancers and a madly enthusiastic corps, all of whom are o'er-parted but battle their way through with a grit and determination we so often ascribe parochially to the true British. There are two dance-dramas (one is school of Gene Kelly, while the other has apparently been educated privately), and a few unfortunate excur- sions into muddy paddy-fields of modern jazz- dancing. A dreary folk-dance (so they say) has the grace to be performed before an enlarged Hokusai print, and there is a Samurai sword dance on a strictly cabaret level.
Cabaret is doubtless the key to it all. This is really a huge, extravagant cabaret with no expense spared, many sumptuously beautiful costumes (here the natural Japanese taste for theatrical spectacle remains unimpaired by any anxiety to copy Western models), pretty girls with beguiling geisha smiles and, best of all, an excitingly staged car ride called 'Sneed Maniacs.' With a couple of suicide drivers in a car on stage shown against a cinema back-projection of flashing roads and scenery, this is a must for anyone wishing to titillate his death-wish.
It was a sad occasion at Covent Garden last Friday, when the young Spanish dancer, Pirmin Trecu, gave his farewell performance. Forced into premature retirement by a knee injury, Trecu, a Spanish Civil War refugee, had been a distinguished member of the Royal Ballet since 1947. Appropriately he gave his last performance as the tragic and bewildered Country Boy in Andree Howard's La Fête Etrange, a ballet of misty, adolescent disenchantment, set to Faure's music and based on an Alain-Fournier novel. Trecu, ironically, seemed to be dancing as sensi- tively as ever. A completely original dancer, with a poetically careless style and vivid personality peculiarly his, he was one of the Royal Ballet's few non-conformists, and will be greatly missed.
Previous page
