Glitter

By Michael Walsh

Britain's Royal Ballet brings classics and a tawdry shocker

For the past month, New York City has served as a showcase for two of the world's top choreographers. First came the New York City Ballet's Tchaikovsky gala, a ten-day tribute to the Russian composer that also honored the company's legendary George Balanchine, 77. Then London's Royal Ballet held sway at Lincoln Center for three weeks, offering several works by Balanchine's contemporary Sir Frederick Ashton, 76.

A stylish company noted for its sumptuous productions of the standard repertoire, the Royal is celebrating its 50th anniversary this season with a tour of North America. As the Sadler's Wells Ballet, it burst upon the American scene in 1949 with an exquisite Sleeping Beauty that introduced Margot Fonteyn to U.S. audiences. The Royal's reworking of the Petipa-Tchaikovsky masterpiece became its signature, and was featured on its current tour with a performance attended by the visiting Prince Charles.

Along with classics, the company has unveiled many new ballets, chiefly by Ashton and current Principal Choreographer Kenneth MacMillan, 51. On this trip the Royal brought three works new to U.S. audiences: Ashton's Rhapsody, a glittering display originally created for Mikhail Baryshnikov; MacMillan's Gloria, a dark ode to the generation killed in the Great War, set to the bright strains of Poulenc; and Isadora, also by MacMillan, a tasteless, breast-baring melodrama about Modern Dance Pioneer Isadora Duncan, with a pastiche score by Richard Rodney Bennett. In addition, the Royal performed, for the first time in New York City, MacMillan's La Fin du Jour, a febrile evocation of the vanished world of the Bright Young Things.

Although Ashton retired as the Royal's director and principal choreographer in 1970 after 35 years with the company, he remains active, casting and rehearsing his ballets. "Some of the dancers ask for me specifically," he notes. "They get something from me they don't get from other people." A master of crisp classicism, Ashton cannot read music, but his feeling for it is strong. "My reaction is spontaneous," he says. "Once I've chosen the music for a ballet, I completely inundate myself in it. I listen to nothing else, so that it becomes part of me--I'm drenched in it." For the effervescent Rhapsody, Ashton selected Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, reaching a climax with a pas de deux at the radiant 18th Variation. "You have to get in tune with the composer," says Ashton. "I do what the music tells me."

Rhapsody is a plotless, technical tour de force, brilliantly danced by the suave Anthony Dowell in a version slightly revised from the original seen in London a year ago. Dowell also danced the lead in Ashton's 1976 narrative ballet A Month in the Country, inspired by Turgenev and Chopin. One of Ashton's supremely bittersweet works, it demonstrates, together with Rhapsody, the septuagenarian's continuing artistic vitality.

If Ashton represents the Royal's humanistic spirit, MacMillan is its dark side. Isadora, an artless and tedious treatment of Duncan's life, travels down the same tawdry path blazed by MacMillan's earlier sex-and-violence shocker Mayerling. Portrayed by both an actress (Mary Miller) and a dancer (Merle Park and, alternately, Sandra Conley), Duncan emerges as little more than a slatternly Bolshevik from San Francisco with delusions of grandeur, her life story reduced to an explicit succession of sexual liaisons, childbirths and deaths. Isadora is trash, and even good performances by Park and Stephen Jefferies as her Russian husband could not rescue it.

Far better is Gloria, although the ironic contrast between the hopeful music and the pessimistic danse macabre quickly wears thin. Still, the ballet's final image of a solitary World War I soldier (Wayne Eagling) dropping out of sight into a trench is haunting. Fortunately, MacMillan also was represented by his best work, La Fin du Jour, in which his predilection for having his female dancers constantly hoisted aloft works splendidly in the ensemble-by-the-beach.

Throughout the run, the Royal's disciplined corps provided an elegant scaffold for the best principals: Dowell, the virtuosic Eagling, the impeccable Jennifer Penney, the patrician David Wall and the classy Park. Yet the corps is less precise than in years past, and the younger leads have not entirely compensated for the retirement of older stars like Fonteyn. The Royal remains very much a British company, in both personnel and attitude. During the performance attended by Prince Charles and Nancy Reagan, the dancers ignored three outbursts by I.R.A. sympathizers in the Metropolitan Opera House. "Why should we stop for a little heckling?" Ashton observed later. "We danced during the bombing in World War II. It would have been very un-British to have stopped." --By Michael Walsh

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