Contemporary Arts
Un-balance Sheet
ONE of the obvious signatures of that progress in the arts which is a phenomenon of the postwar decade is the 'ever-open-door' policy at Covent Garden. At one time opera and ballet were exotic offerings oc- cupying brief spring and summer seasons, each of a few weeks' dura- tion. Now, Govent Garden's doors are scarcely closed between New Year's Day and the next New Year's Eve. When the home companies vanish for holiday, or tour to appease the appetites of provincial audiences, foreign groups of similar weight and repute appear in their stead. This is one of the few years since 1946 in which no visiting ballet company will be seen in the theatre. Opera will be the order of the day (apart from the ballet's August fortnight) from now to J958.
The ballet season just ended was marked by a series of happenings unlike the crises, climaxes and thrills that have punctuated the other post- war seasons. The forced cancellation of the Moscow visit last November (in exchange for the October visit of the Bolshoi Theatre Ballet) meant that the company reappeared at Covent Garden during November and proceeded be- tween then and late June to give there about 120 performances—roughly, about three times as many as would be appropriate if a certain standard of creative and performing quality were meant to he maintained. Dancers are not (despite the illusion to the contrary that some of them present) performing mechanisms which can be kept going indefinitely if suitably fuelled and oiled.
Inside this period visits were paid to Dublin
and New York; an experimental three-act ballet and a Fokine revival were staged at considerable cost in money, ingenuity and good intentions— an expenditure which the artistic results have not justified. Two of the five female dancers next in rank to Margot Fonteyn decided to deprive the company of their services during this period; the big-scale creation of Ondine, promised over a year ago, failed to materialise. These oddities and (possible) disappointments could, however, all be overlOoked when the really big news event of the season broke a few weeks ago. This was, in fact, a double blow to the hitherto existing struc- ture of large-scale English ballet; its first phase the announcement of the granting of a Royal Charter, its second the carrying out of certain powers implicit in the charter, namely the obliteration of the second company based on Sadler's Wells Theatre. This process will take a little time, but will be effected within a few months, by when the dancers (and possibly some of the ballets) will have become incorporated into the Covent Garden group. .
The supposed reason for thus wiping out of existence an organisation (which, like all other healthy theatre groups, had a life and a sort of validity of its own) serving several useful ends has been a financial one. Opera at Sadler's Wells sells better than does ballet, and the junior com- pany's tours have cost a lot of money and ex- pended a good deal of artistic goodwill; the solution might have been to persuade the Arts Council to put up more money (a laughable con- tingency in view of the fact that, ultimately, someone in the Treasury would have suggested a tit-for-tat through a scaling-down of the ad- ministration and the necessity of a White Paper
giving some details of the expenditure on the company in the past eleven years). What hasn't yet occurred to anyone in a high position is the fact that the .absolute raison d'etre of the existence of Sadler's Wells Theatre has been half betrayed. Lilian Baylis opened the theatre to provide a North-of-the-Thames counterpart to the Old Vic —a place providing good quality theatrical fare at modest prices. With opera only as its offer- ing, the theatre can justify its existence (and its Arts Council grant) only if, in every particular, it provides operatic fare of a sort not possible or practicable at Covent Garden.
All these curious developments in the fortunes
of our largest balletic organisation might be re- garded by some as indicative of an odd state of balletic health in the metropolis. In fact, they will probably lead to a true revitalisation of the art of ballet, for the pitifully few other companies still existing have two clear fields open for all their operations from now on. They can skim what little cream there may be off the touring market, and they can, during their London ap- pearances, offer a challenging rivalry to the establishment—if they will dare (as they very probably will) to put • on new, newish, experi- mental, or in any way different, ballets from the genres which comprise the Covent Garden reper- toire. One cannot be smoothly optimistic about this; the small companies have suffered from acute financial starvation of recent years and have only in the most limited way_ maintained their functions as, well, the closest thing we have to an avant-garde movement in contemporary ballet.
A certain amount of speculation is astir con-
cerning a possible 'comeback' of the male dancer; this is more of a hope than a con- tingency, for, despite the vast harvest that time, opportunity and artistic disappointment have recently garnered in the field of female dance talent, the appeal of ballet is still strongly based on the fascinations of the female anatomy as displayed in dance and mime. Male dancing would have to improve about 500 per cent. before there would be discernible a decline of interest in ballerinas.
Certainly the ballerina-appeal is the strong
selling line at the moment (witness Fonteyn's fabulous success now in Australia); and it is un- doubtedly still the same selling point for the Royal Ballet's five-months' American tour— which, one now sees, is an essential function for 1957, for how else except by this dollar-hunt can Covent Garden put back in the joint cash- box the £60,000 spent on The Trojans?
A. V. COTON
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