danceview
a quarterly review of dance

Reviews

London Report

Summer tours by the Royal and
English National Ballets, new
choreography, Northern Ballet Theatre’s Dracula, Scottish Ballet, and Martha Graham in London.

by Jane Simpson
copyright © 1999 by Jane Simpson
Summer 1999

England in the Spring, and it’s time for the mini-tours. Each year the big guns-the Royal Ballet and English National Ballet—send out a couple of groups of 20 to 30 dancers, visiting theatres too small to accommodate the full company, and with a repertoire very different from their usual fare. Programming for these tours is a real problem, and neither company has yet got it right. Audiences who see little ballet through the year want—or at least are believed to want—traditional fare, meaning tutus and toe shoes, but delivering worthy productions of the classics, or even classical pas de deux, on tiny stages is difficult. ENB tries, while the Royal Ballet takes a completely different approach, and uses the tours mainly as opportunities for young choreographers to create new work away from the hothouse of Covent Garden. A worthy aim, of course, but one that often leaves audiences perplexed: one man asked for ‘just something to show why the Royal Ballet is a great company’. A revival from the ‘heritage’ repertoire—not always wisely chosen—is sometimes included to meet this demand, but the overall impression over the six years of the Dance Bites programme has been of a series of glorified workshop performances. This is in fact the last of the Royal Ballet’s tours in this format, and no plans for a successor have yet been announced: but they will have to do something, as the main company scarcely tours at all in Britain, and the vast expenditure on the rebuilt Royal Opera House has focussed a lot of attention on the company’s accessibility.

I caught one group from each company in Cambridge, where the Corn Exchange does duty as a theatre—possibly the most utilitarian and unatmospheric in the country, but at least having a stage slightly larger than some others on the tours. This year’s programmes from both companies were better balanced than some in the past, but even so neither came near filling the theatre. The Royal Ballet had new works by William Tuckett and Mark Baldwin framing a revival of Ashton’s Monotones—chosen presumably because of its small cast, but looking horribly cramped, and not helped by casting two of the largest men in the company in the ‘white’ trio. Tuckett seems to have abandoned his earlier complex, introverted works for something much lighter, both in style and in content: one assumes this was a conscious decision to make his work more accessible, but it is such a complete departure that one has to wonder how much his heart is in it. The Baldwin piece, Towards Poetry, delighted one critic so much that she would have Baldwin take over running the company; to me it seemed one of the most arid exercises in step-spinning I’ve seen in years. Both the new works are to be shown in the RB’s London season this summer.

English National Ballet puts out a very different mix. New choreography is provided by company member Christopher Hampson, whose Concerto Grosso, to music by Scnittke, continues the promising series of neo-classical works he has made over the last couple of years. At the end of the season he is leaving, and giving up dancing, to concentrate on choreography: a good thing, as his current work suffers from the rare problem of too many ideas, and I can imagine him producing much more satisfying ballets when he doesn’t have to cram a whole year’s worth into one piece. The centre of this programme had a classical pas de deux (Le Corsaire) and the ‘balcony’ pas de deux from Derek Deane’s Romeo and Juliet—both at least respectably done, and better than that in the case of Tamara Rojo’s Juliet—and ended with Ben Stevenson’s Three Preludes, a sentimental and depressing piece. Finally there was the Grand Pas from Paquita, impossibly squashed on this small stage (and unimaginable on the much smaller ones they’ve apparently had to use) and mercilessly exposing the limitations of the dancers; but at least they wore tutus and managed to look happy.

The ENB dancers were enjoying a last taste of variety before a long tour of Derek Deane’s in-the-round Swan Lake, taking in Hong Kong and Australia before various dates in Britain. I saw them in the arena where this production originated, the Royal Albert Hall in London. I had missed this spectacle the first time round, and found it both better and worse than I’d expected. Better, in that despite the jugglers and acrobats and the doubling or trebling of the classical set-pieces, the production isn’t vulgar-according to its lights it is tastefully done; worse, in that the size of the arena and the huge cast depersonalise the dancing, reducing all but Siegfried and Odette to ciphers. Adapting classical choreography to be seen from all sides inevitably loses all the subtlety and shading of epaulement, and it exposes to the public view some aspects of partnering that should never, ever be seen, most notably the knees-bent-and-bottom-stuck-out walk of the Prince supporting Odette as she hops in arabesque. For me, though, the major flaw had nothing to do with the shape or size of the stage. Deane has dispensed with the mime at the beginning of Act II, when Odette should explain her fate to Siegfried and tell him that the spell can only be broken when someone swears to love her and keeps his vow faithfully. If Siegfried doesn’t know this, a whole layer of moral responsibility disappears, and with it a high percentage of the dramatic impact; on the other hand, this ‘lite’ version of the story makes Deane’s happy ending (though rather feebly done) seem less of an anticlimax.

Much publicity has been generated by the 60 swans and the wonderful patterns they make and how well drilled they are, but the pleasure I get from that aspect is more or less the same as I’d get from watching massed marching bands at a military tattoo. Sixty is in any case too many; 48 fill the arena perfectly well, more gets dangerously close to parody; and any poetry is drowned in the thunder of their pointe shoes. Getting them all on and off is a major problem, not always elegantly solved: the most ingenious is the way files of them leave the stage in succession in Act lV, in a fashion distantly reminiscent of Ashton’s poetic version.

The evening was held together by a fine performance of Siegfried from Patrick Armand , who has returned as a full-time member of the company and was looking in far better form than in Corder’s Cinderella last Christmas. He knows how to project, and alone on the stage for his solo at the end of Act 1 he filled the hall more effectively than any number of swans. Tamara Rojo, the evening’s Odette-Odile, is a 25-year old from Spain, where she studied like so many of today’s stars with Victor Ullate. She is widely admired, and is indeed a lovely dancer with no technical fears; but on this evidence she still has a lot to learn about how to make her feelings understood through her dancing—she seemed unmoved, and therefore unmoving.

This Spring we’ve had visits from two companies usually kept out of London by the conditions attached to their funding, Northern Ballet Theatre and Scottish Ballet. Unfortunately, poor programme choice meant that neither made the most of the opportunity to enhance their reputations. NBT, under the directorship of the late Christopher Gable, had built a repertoire of half a dozen stongly characterized dance dramas, but chose what I hope is a poor sample for a fortnight’s run. Their Dracula (also performed by Atlanta Ballet) has choreography by Michael Pink and sets and costumes—its most successful feature—by Lez Brotherston, who is rapidly becoming the #1 designer in the country after a string of successes both with NBT and with Adventures in Motion Pictures. There were complaints from both press and audience that there was not enough dancing in this version of the Bram Stoker story (the first in this country, incidentally; it hasn’t yet gained the wide popularity it seems to have in the US)—but for my money there was, on the contrary, too much. The tyranny of the three act format means that the story, well told and quite chilling, has to be padded out with all-dancing scenes, one in each act. None of them is good, and the worst—a tea-dance in a hotel in Whitby—seems interminable, with lots of cheery and completely extraneous characters getting their turn in some rather banal choreography.

Elsewhere Denis Malinkine in the title role was excellent-menacingly sinister without overexaggeration, and horribly attractive in his seduction of the heroine. The dramatic effect of the ending is ruined by being played against a lot of fuss about the death of the heroine’s best friend’s fiance’s best friend—not someone in whom we felt much interest, and the equivalent of ending Swan Lake with the accidental drowning of some guy Benno met in a bar. For a company which prides itself on the drama of its productions this seemed to me an astonishing miscalculation. NBT has appointed the Italian Stefano Gianetti as Director following Gable’s death, and it will be very interesting to see if he changes the course the company has been following for several years now. A triple bill—originally planned by Gable, and the first for a long time—is planned for next season; the company’s extremely loyal audience can also look forward to Gianetti’s first work, a balletic version of Great Expectations.

Scottish Ballet brought an only partly successful programme, opening with a revival of Kenneth MacMillan’s 1960s piece, Diversions, redesigned by Philip Prowse, whose costumes for the Royal Ballet’s original version were some of the best of that decade. His second thoughts, though still making a fine stage picture, are less distinguished when considered individually. It is a rather dry classical work, dominated by a dreary score (by Arthur Bliss), and most of the dancers had to put too much effort into managing the steps to have anything left over for interpretation. nIghT LiFe is the first work for the company by Tim Rushton, an Englishman who works mainly in Copenhagen. He handicapped himself from the start by setting the ballet to Bach, but on the other hand he had the benefit of a simple but very effective set by the ubiquitous Brotherston. Supposedly based on the club scene in Glasgow, the ballet overlaid what I thought was some quite genuine choerography with irritating mannerisms to give the dancers some individuality. The only real success of the evening was Lila York’s Rapture, written for the Juillard School in memory of Clark Tippett and Christopher Gillis, and now in the repertory of several American companies. The freer style suits the company well and the huge release of energy at the end of a rather low-key programme at last lets the dancers show some potential.

The only major visitor in the last few months has been the Martha Graham company, making its first London appearance in 20 years and therefore completely new to a large section of the audience, including me. Appalachian Spring was a mixed experience—the pleasure of seeing such a classic on stage at last was diminished by a poor recording of the wonderful score, and by the feeling that it simply wasn’t well enough danced. The men in particular underacted and looked underpowered, but I felt the whole thing wouldn’t have looked much different danced by a ballet company.

The middle section of the programme started with two of Graham’s own solos: Deep Song, though done with absolute sincerity by Terese Capucilli, needs a blazing theatrical personality to make it live; Satyric Festival Song was much more successful, made to look almost easy by Fang-Yi Sheu. Errand into the Maze was danced by Christine Dakin on the first night and Miki Orihara on the second, revealing rather different aspects of the role , but again neither had the sheer magnetic power to stun and shock like Graham apparently did.

The big surprise of the programme was the last section, three fragments from the 1936 piece Chronicle; the last two movements in particular had the audience cheering, and let them go home feeling they had finally seen something still filled with genuine theatrical life.

The talking point of the last month has been the resignation of Anthony Dowell as Director of the Royal Ballet, due to take effect at the end of the 2000/2001 season. Dowell has had a hard time of it recently, and admiration is due to him for having kept the company from complete collapse during the closure of the Royal Opera House; but the problems with his directorship date back to well before that, and cannot all be blamed on lack of money. The very qualities that helped make him such an outstanding dancer and partner—restraint, good manners, self-effacement—have counted against him as a leader, and one does wonder if he’d have had a happier life devoting himself to the coaching of young dancers, which seems to be where his heart lies, and what brings out the best in him. The Board of the Royal Opera House has committed to advertise his job—the first time this will ever have happened—and to appoint someone before the end of next season; which leaves us about a year of speculation and gossip about possible successors. At least a dozen names have been mentioned already, some of them wildly unlikely (at least I hope so). One school of thought insists that the job should go to someone in, or at least originating in, the company; personally I’d prefer to see someone new, with a fresh outlook and without any baggage of personal allegiance.