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Diversities from the North
  
“Cinderella”, “Suite from Artifact”, “Middlesexgorge”, “Episodes”
Scottish Ballet
Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London
14-18 March
 
by John Percival
copyright 2006 by John Percival

Under its founder-director Peter Darrell, Scottish Ballet was one of Britain’s outstanding companies, with a fine and very distinct repertoire admirably performed by a strong team of dancers. But after his premature death in 1987 it declined under a series of directors and new policies, alleviated at intervals by revivals of a few Darrell ballets and some Ashton borrowings. Then in 2002 Ashley Page was appointed artistic director with a commission to revitalise the company.  His backround: principal dancer with the Royal Ballet, most notably in modern works; choreographer since 1982, creating many short works, most of them short-lived. The most popular, “Fearful Symmetries”, seemed to me too obviously a Forsythe imitation, and not as good as Peter Martins’s treatment of the same John Adams score.  He made some more interesting ballets for Rambert under Richard Alston’s direction, and has worked also for West Australian Ballet, Dutch National, etc.

Page’s first action in his new post was to suspend performances for nine months of intensive training and rehearsal, after which he has presented a largely new company (all but eleven of the 41 present dancers have joined since his arrival) in an almost entirely new repertoire. Reports from north of the border were encouraging, especially of an all-Balanchine bill that got the company to last year’s Edinburgh Festival, and now they have played Sadler’s Wells for a week with two programmes. Every performance but one was of a new “Cinderella” which Page staged in Glasgow last Christmas; this sold well, got mostly favourable reviews, but I was not alone in finding it absolutely ghastly. Midweek they gave one showing of a triple bill by three American choreographers; this played to a thin house—but how much better the dancers looked in this more demanding and more musical choreography.

The main problem with the “Cinderella” is that, watching it, you might almost think Page is stone deaf. I say that partly because the dances are so graceless, utterly boring and ill related to the music, but also because the plot clashes with Prokofiev’s intentions. Above all, Page decides to introduce the punishment of the step-family which occurs in some versions of the story but not normally in the ballet.  So he gives them a final entry in which the sisters are blind (eyes pecked out by two white doves, the synopsis tells us, but that isn’t shown), and they abandon their mother in a wheelchair—and this bit of nastiness actually ends the show, performed to the “happy ever after” music intended for the lovers. Equally nasty is another of Page’s innovations: the stepsisters smear black powder over Cinderella’s face—and again it’s the synoposis that tells us this is her dead mother’s ashes. Yuk. I ought to mention that the fairy godmother is supposed to be this dead mother, and that a lot of hoo-ha about shoes is introduced, but it’s not logically followed through so I shan’t try to explain it in detail.  Maybe the one really amusing invention of Page and his designer Antony McDonald is to send the heroine to the ball in a hot air balloon. But the most awful thing about the production as a whole is that it left me wondering how what looked like such lumpy, misshapen dancers could have attracted praise.

Well, the other programme explained this. It began with Balanchine’s “Episodes”, not seen in London since New York City Ballet’s 1965 season. As a choreographic reading of four orchestral pieces by Webern—music, Balanchine wrote, which “is written for atmosphere”—it showed us deprived spectators (or reminded us of) striking new treatments within his highly inventive, personal neo-classical style.  Although created only in 1959, this is the oldest work on display all week, but it is the company’s most recent classic acquisition and did reveal some of the dancers as not yet entirely at home in it. Eve Mutso, however, in her dominating duet with Robert Doherty to the Five Pieces Op 10, and Soon Ja Lee leading the finale (Ricercata in Six Voices) with Brice Bardot, are excellent.

William Forsythe’s “Suite from Artifact” similarly uses a large cast in highly intricate ensembles. They are led by two couples (Claire Robertson and Jarkko Lehmus, Patricia Hines and Erik Cavallari) and comprise complex patterns in Forsythe’s early classic style, repeatedly interrupted by a falling front curtain behind which they change positions. Mutso has only simple gestures in her solo entries but still succeeds in commanding the stage. The ballet’s two halves hold together in spite of contrasted music, a Bach violin chaconne recorded by Nathan Milstein, and Eva Crossman-Hecht’s piano inventions played live by Margot Kazimirska. I seem to think I’ve seen this ballet even more convincingly danced by the Dutch National, but even so it’s a great experience.

Given between these two works and providing a complete contrast is Stephen Petronio’s “Middlesexgorge”: powerfully aggressive, sexy dances to punk rock recordings by Wire. Diana Loosmore and Paul Liburd, with Hines and Lehmus again, lead its taut, pushy cast of nine, dressed by H. Petal in costumes obviously meant to provoke by revealing the men’s bums. The ballet is only fifteen years old but probably few find this shocking any longer (except maybe in Scotland?)

If this mixed bill had been given more than once, I would have wanted to see it again, but I can’t imagine myself willingly sitting through that “Cinderella” another time. Adding insult to injury, it supplants Scottish Ballet’s excellent production by Darrell to music by Rossini. Ideally, Page should perhaps concentrate on his curatorial functions and leave choreography to others—but you can bet that he isn’t going to take my advice on that.

Photos:
First: Paul Liburd as The Dancing Master and Glauco Di Lieto as The Equerry in Page's Cinderella. Photograph by Bill Cooper.
Second: Limor Ziv as The Mexican Princess, Nathalie Dupouy as The Japanese Princess, Kara McLaughlin as The Indian Princess, and Victoria Willard as The Prussian Princess in Page's Cinderella. Photograph by Bill Cooper.
Third: Diana Loosmore in Petronio's "MiddleSexGorge." Photograph by Andrew Ross.

Volume 4, No. 11
March 20, 2006
copyright ©2006 John Percival
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last updated on March 13, 2006