Ballet
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Robin Young
Ballet does not really lend itself to the review of the year technique which traditionally stands all critics in good stead about this time. The world of dance, or what we see of it in Britain at any rate, simply is not eventful enough. This year, like many another, we will have Cinderella at the Garden for Christmas, and this year like every other, there will be Nutcracker at the Festival Hall immediately after. A 'Ten Best' article might bring in-a chain of Swan Lakes, a corps of Coppe/ias, or a dormitory of Sleeping Beauties. This year, at any rate, there were enough productions and casts of Giselle available for that ballet to have ,filled every place. High marks for Makarova. Even higher, perhaps, for the touchingly Victorian Barbieri. My own personal favourites would come down, time and time again, to MaclVlillan's Romeo and Juliet and Song of the Earth. Our diet is restricted, even if the best endures an extraordinarily long time.
There has not been a great amount of worth added to the sum total this year. The recent triple bills at the Royal Opera House have summarised it as far as the Royal and MacMillan are concerned — The Four Seasons and the new Rituals.
Conveniently, but not particularly significantly perhaps, Rituals takes us out of the year where we came in. The Royal's first premiere this year was Jack Carter's meatily macabre essay in Japanese feminine militancy, Shokumei. Rituals is MacMillan's piece of Japanoiserie inspired supposedly by the company's tour in Japan earlier this year. It comes in three sections. The first concerns Wayne Eagling's graduation in a wrestling school, of the trip-and-gouge variety favoured by Orientals. To say that Eagling, who usually appears such a nice young man, is unrecogni
sable is putting it mildly. So indeed is everyone else, and the primitive controlledly violent movements are strongly reminiscent of the same choreographer's Rite of Spring. The stage picture, with blank faces, White pates and black top-knots, is impressive and memorable in the same way.
The second episode, which is a little more Origin al, is an imitation of Bunraku puppets Using human dancers. This is carrying imitation a stage further than it has any need to go, since Bunraku is the Japanese attempt to make Puppets look as life-like as possible. Vergie erman and David Wall, manipulated and lifted through a strange pas de deux by teams of anonymous handlers, look lifeless enough, but the Bunraku puppeteers never impede their audiences view of their charges. MacMillan's choreography cannot accommodate that, and the whole thing teeters on the brink of becoming an academic exercise of how to get inert limbs from A to B. Even on that plane 'though, and even if you find the puppets' final death' unmoving, it is interesting, mindengaging stuff.
The third section is the boldest and least successful, and the ritual here appears to concern purification after childbirth. The dancing is emphatic but unconvincing, and here at the least the surprising choice of music Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion — ceases to help. I love Monica Mason, but I never expected to mistake her for
Marcel Marceau, or to think her ridiculous when she was supposed to be being serious.
Make amends for that by saying that in the revival of Les Riches, Nijinska's satire on the mores of the '20s, I thought that Mason (as the pearl-rope swinging hostess) and Georgina Parkinson (as the enigmatic girl in blue) had the feel of the thing much better than the guest stars who followed them in the castings — Bergsma and Makarova.
For the rest this was the year Barishnikov danced first in Britain since his defection to the West. He earned a hero's welcome. Clive Barnes told Margot Fonteyn to give it up, but she won't (though perhaps we will not get the Corsaire pas de deux any more). And Donald MacLeary, the most self-effacing of noble partners, is retiring from the stage, and will be missed. (His lively leading of an all-star cast in The Four Seasons was adequate recent proof).
In contemporary terms the most notable thing was the success of London Contemporary Dance Theatre's long season at Sadler's Wells — with an 80 per cent box office. There were some enterprising new offerings and two attempts to wed classical dance with contemporary, neither of which added up to much. Contemporary dance is a long way from matching the fluent vocabulary or the physical appeal of the classics, and is still not even an adequate mirror for our panic-ridden stumbling times. The classical idiom, at least, still provides a welcome escape.
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