Ballet from Britain

On the stage of the dance theater at Jacob's Pillow, Mass, stood an erect, grey-haired little woman, smiling before the skirl of applause. As it drummed on, she leaped from the stage like a 20-year-old ballerina. "You can't imagine," said 71-year-old Marie Rambert, "with what fear and trembling we came here." Occasion: the U.S. debut of the Ballet Rambert, Britain's oldest dance company.

Although Britain's Royal Ballet is much better known to the public, the 33-year-old Rambert company is more revered by balletomanes as the most important modern breeding ground of British choreographers and dancers. At Jacob's Pillow, the company presented one contemporary work, Kenneth MacMillan's Laiderette, plus a full-length Giselle, long a specialty of the house. Neither as grand in its effects nor as fiery in its execution as the Royal Ballet, the Rambert version demonstrated a warmly intimate style that emphasized reality instead of fantasy, dramatic clarity instead of pyrotechnics.

Polish-born Marie Rambert studied briefly in Paris to be a physician, gravitated to the dance because of her admiration in the early 1900s for the U.S.'s flamboyant Isadora Duncan. After dancing in the famed Diaghilev company, she settled in London and opened her own school. To it thronged pupils who later graduated to Founder Rambert's company and then to careers in larger companies--Choreographers Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, Andree Howard, Agnes de Mille. Swaddled in wrinkled black tights and shapeless pink top. Teacher Rambert would roam the practice room correcting ("Long the arms"), scolding ("You use your leg like a mop"), occasionally doing exuberant cart wheels across the floor. Still as exuberant as ever, she now celebrates each birthday by doing a "fish dive" into the arms of the nearest partner.

A less serious but more widely ballyhooed British dance product was also on display in London last week: the first ballet of Playwright Noel Coward, titled London Morning. The 32-minute work was commissioned by Britain's Festival Ballet and was suggested to him, said Coward solemnly, by the nursery jingle, "Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?" To a tinkly, tearoom blend of Coward tunes, the curtain rose on a fantasticated fac,ade of Buckingham Palace, at which an ice-cream-suited American was directing a battery of cameras. In quick succession, an Indian girl, a trio of tarts, and two wing-hatted nuns danced onstage to gawk at the bearskinned sentries. A school girl got her head stuck between a sentry's legs. In the ballet's climax, the cast crowded about the palace gates to salute the Queen with ringing, patriotic cheers.

Enthusiastically applauded by a dressy first -night audience, the ballet was drubbed by the critics. "No amount of balletic license," said the Financial Times, "can really excuse this parade of cliche and low comedy." But Playwright-Composer-Actor Coward had an answer: "If I wrote for the critics, I would not be so happy--or so successful."

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