An Exasperating Procession

When Salvador Dali's ballet, Mad Tristan, opened in Manhattan in 1944, it provided one critic with "a 25-minute yawn." Most other balletgoers yawned, too, if not so long-windedly, and Mad Tristan flopped. Last week, the Grand Ballet de Monte Carlo had given it five performances in London. This time the madness proved catching.

Shouts of "Stop it!" and "Rubbish!" were raised in the audience. Blurted a visiting conductor: "I think this is a public scandal."

A few critics liked it; one thought Mad Tristan "beautifully presented." But the Times spoke for the majority: "Regurgitation is a hygienic, not an artistic, process. Salvador Dali, turning aside from surrealistic painting to drama, has swallowed Wagner's Tristan and Isolde and spewed it up with much of the murky contents of his unconscious adhering to the gobbets."

The ballet opens in a "forest of idylls," with Tristan and Isolde dancing before an altar on which stands a love symbol: a pair of giant legs topped by a hairy mask. In Scene 2, on "the Isles of Death," Tristan first dances with an insectlike apparition, then with something dressed as a sailing ship. In the end, Tristan is destroyed by his love, as in "the tragic nuptial rites of the praying mantis, in which the female devours the male."

For customers who still did not get the pitch, the program notes explained: "Dali sees the whole romantic philosophy of Wagner as an uninterrupted complex of impotence. An exasperating procession of wheelbarrows, heavy with the earth of reality, struggling up toward the inaccessible heaven of the ecstasy of love, at the summit of which there is only a precipice--love in death and death in love . . ." Only the New Statesman and Nation had the wit to smile at such Daliance and say the sanest thing heard in the hubbub: "How odd that people should have taken Mad Tristan ... so seriously!"

The dance also raised temperatures at the Holland Music Festival, where Negro Dancer Katherine Dunham & company last week presented her torrid Caribbean Rhapsody. The Dutch had never seen anything quite like her. Dancer Dunham did not wear a pearl in her navel (as she did in Tropical Revue), but some of the audience were nevertheless overcome by all the pelvic commotion, hesitated in bewilderment before applauding. Most of the audience, however, got the idea: they were seeing precise dancing and brilliant choreography. The Dutch critics were two-minded about her. Wrote one: "Mostly it is sheer vitality, but sometimes sheer corn."

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