Contemporary Arts
Ballet at Edinburgh
DRAMATIC critics have com- plained that some manage- ments treat the Festival more and more as an occasion for trying out plays which are—unless unspeak- ably awful—on the way to the West End : Edinburgh, they suggest, is as much a touring date during the Festival as it is for the year's other forty-nine weeks. This use of the Festival as a help- ful shop window for some-
-- thing entirely 'commercial' has been established custom amongst almost all the big managements since the Festival began. The same custom has applied to the ballet com- panies on view, which have been usually chosen for the extent of their repertoires and have never been specifically commissioned to create some- thing new for Edinburgh.
Now, after eleven years, it is becoming hard to find dance companies, either good enough or famous enough to be worth inviting; yet analysis of the ballet programmes since 1947 shows that —apart froin Spanish groups (which don't dance ballet) and the Yugoslays (whose work is almost unadulterated folk-dance)—the only visitors of European origin have been the French, the Danes, and now the Swedes; these were this year followed by a show of African tribal dancing and a repeat visit of the De Cuevas Ballet, a basically French company. It was an unhappy affair for the Swedes, who suffered badly from an unhandy repertoire and also from the by now notoriously inadequate staging facilities at the Empire Theatre. Each per- formance was marred by some hideous error of lighting or black-out, a failure of scene-changing, or a lack of hard rehearsal, and it is proof of the still avid interest in any kind of ballet-dancing that there were packed and enthusiastic audiences all the time. (They would, of course, have been as avid and as' numerous had the company been aPPearing outside the Festival period.)
It is worth noting the chief errors committed, for the repercussions of this visit on the com- pany's European reputation are going to be felt for some time yet. The programme was'unwieldy for a week of eight shows, including a difficult full-length ballet, a shorter one with four scene changes, one involving much stage trick mechan- ism and all of them needing elaborate changes of lighting. The company's novelty appeal had been. based on its revival of a seventeenth-century ballet, its weirdly Modernistic Sisyphus, and its Gis'elle, distinguished by incorporating twenty minutes' worth of score not normally used in any other version. Any one of these curious sensations Would have been enough risk to carry on a first visit to a strange country; it was the impossibility of getting each of these properly working on this limited stage that affected the balance of each rehearsal and also, performance. When, on top of these miscalculations (no fault of any of the dancers), we note that the dance style of the com- PanY is imprecise, indefinite, immature—in the case of all but the leading principals—then it is obvious that a gross artistic error was committed, by either the Company's governing body or the
Festival's organisers, in arranging such a show for the Royal Swedish Ballet's first visit to these shores. The Festival needs, at the planning stage, much more cold calculation and a good deal less ready acceptance of novel ideas merely because they are novel.
The Giselle, being twenty minutes longer, was that much less pointed and that much more filled with irrelevant comings and goings : Cupid out of his Humour required that all the seventeenth- century trick effects should work faultlessly and that the dancers should move graciously, fluently and with supernormal panache in these curious, simple-looking, but fiendishly difficult bransles, galliards, and minuets. The week was saved by the sensitive and 'engaged' dancing and acting of Else Marianne von Rosen, Mariane Orlando, Willy Sandberg and Bjorn Holmgren in almost all the leading roles of the repertoire. This was most notable in the two dance-dramas based on native stories but planned in contemporary terms—Miss Julie, which freshly illuminated Strindberg's tale, and The Prodigal Son, which retold the Bible story through the imagination of a humble peasant of a century or so ago, in ddcor and dresses which sharpened the impact of this cautionary tale for wicked boys.
These two choreographers, Birgit Cullberg and No Cramer, have given a sense of artistic direc- tion to all that goes on in Swedish dance circles by their imaginative pioneer work over nearly twenty years. This was what was worth revealing at Edinburgh (though, for the record, both have shown dance-dramas in similar genres with other companies visiting Great Britain since the war). But if we are to go on taking some risk of artiStic mistakes—provided they are made inevitably— the organisers should cast their eyes in the general direction of the small dance companies which, in recent years, have dared and done so much in Canada, Vienna, Holland, Germany . . . and, of course, Great Britain.
The Ballets Africains is a smoothly stylised copy of real tribal dances, songs, incidents of village life out of. French Africa, handsomely dressed up in a Parisian designer's new imaginings of the native clothes, huts, mats, cooking pots, weapons, etc. Its appeal lies in its vigour, extroversion and emphasis on the fact that Woman is Man's help- meet and servant.
Lastly came the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas, packed with superb and indifferent per- formers, with some vet ballets and almost no artistic meanings whatever.
Ballet is too difficult a craft and too elaborate in its stage requirements to be easily labelled `vulgar' when it is less than perfect; the better word is `tasteless'—an adjective which, for the first time ever, I can honestly apply to this pro- duction of Petrouchka. Imagine Hamlet with scenes in reversed order, with important speeches missing, a Hamlet playing at Benedick, and Ophelia trying to be-Titania, and you may have some notion of the butchery that has been com- mitted on the greatest ballet of the twentieth century.
Yet earlier in the programme an almost fault- less Sylphides had opened the proceedings, danced with style but without affectation and with firm, unobtrusive discipline. It was one of the most atmospherically complete seen in many years. In between came a dull, farcical ballet about an eighteenth-century dumb wife who finally re- covered her tongue with sad consequences for her husband; the excellent music of Paganini (allied to mostly silly choreography by Antonia Cobos) gave the thing a faint air of life. The pure classical pyrotechnics of Rosella Hightower in the Black Swan and Vyroubova's contribution to Les-- Sylphides showed emphatically how good the Company could be if caught in the firm control of someone who both knew and cared about ballet.
A. V. COTON
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