BALLET
Right direction
Robin Young
No one programme in a place like the Royal Opera House could vindicate anybody's appointment as artistic director. By the same token, I hold them to be nasty, vengeful and envious creatures who publicly hoped for Kenneth MacMillan's resignation, we are told, when Anastasia proved not to be the major masterpiece which we all (surely?) had hoped for. Single failures and signal successes should not make and break careers at this level of importance. In happy contrast I am here to say that, if the programme did exist which could justify MacMillan's position at a stroke, then it would assuredly have to be something very like the performances we have just been seeing of MacMillan's own Rite of Spring and Robbins's Dances at a Gathering.
To start, as did the programme, with the Robbins, it is irresistible, delightful and an unfailing source of intense joy. I cannot imagine that anyone exists who would fail to warm to it, and to the dancers it so beautifully displays. The dances are set to eighteen of Chopin's piano pieces (pleasingly played here by Anthony Twiner) and they are packed with character, humour, and youthful incident. Watching them is like reading a specially evocative collection of favourite poems.
The Royal Ballet's casts for Dancers have been beyond praise. If one makes special mention of the men, the showy and effervescent Michael Coleman, the refined and haughty Anthony Dowell, the fresh and open David Wall, it is because they kept such perfect pace with Nureyev — who always seems so ebullient and enlivened in this that one thinks he must be peerless until the others are dancing with him. Yet they are matched in very aspect by the girls, and these were, of course, Monica Mason's evenings. For after carrying off the longest and most various repertoire of any of the individual dancers in Dances at a Gathering she had to go right on to bear the brunt of ritual sacrifice in the Rite of Spring.
Inevitably one compares MacMillan's version, surprisingly little performed here since it was created in 1962 (thirty-five performances as against the twenty-four which Dances at a Gathering has notched up in a year and one week), with Bejart's,,,I seen here last summer. Without questiOn;, MacMillan's emerges as the more fcireeful,., the more dramatic, the more adequilteag an accompaniment toStravinsky's'ffiyiiii
No doubt morale in the Royal .14, company is something less than 100 pen, cent. Find me the company where that id' not true. But it simply must have been improved by the adulation which these phenomenal performances provoked, among both public and critics alike.
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