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British Dance at the Crossroads: Heading Into the Nineties
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15757 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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1 / 1989 |
2,781 Words |
| Author
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Kathrine Sorley Walker
Kathrine Sorley Walker is ballet and dance critic of the
London Daily Telegraph (London) and author of Ninette de
Valois: Idealist without Illusions (Hamish Hamilton, London,
1987) and De Basil's Ballets Russes (Atheneum, New York, 1983). |
The image of British ballet was set in the United States by one brilliant evening at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1949, when the Sadler's Wells Ballet, on its first transatlantic visit, staged The Sleeping Beauty. The success was sensational. Audience and press were entirely captivated by the production of the great nineteenth-century ballet, originally produced in Imperial Russia. Marius Petipa's choreography had been lovingly reproduced under the aegis of the company's founder-director Ninette de Valois and the sparking and imaginative designs were by Oliver Messel. Equally, everyone fell in love with Margot Fonteyn, an incomparable Princess Aurora--Time magazine featured her on the cover with the caption 'For Sleeping Beauty, an awakened audience.' The impact of that performance, and another British import, the Powell-Pressburger film The Red Shoes starring Moira Shearer and Robert Helpmann, affected a generation of American ballet lovers.
Modest Orgins
Of course there was much more to the Sadler's Wells Ballet (now the Royal Ballet) than The Sleeping Beauty. Its development from modest beginnings in 1931, with important modern creations as well as faithful revivals of the classics, is one of Britain's cultural romances. In 1949 it already had a record of solid achievement and its subsequent history has been varied and eventful. The swinging and permissive sixties, for instance, when Britain was internationally identified with the Beatles and the trendy fashions of Carnaby Street, were strong years for the company based at London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In 1960 Frederick Ashton, their brilliant resident choreographer, created his enchanting ballet La Fille mal gardee, and later launched a superb pairing in the young Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley in The Dream. Their contemporaries, Lynn Seymour, Merle Park, Christopher Gable, and David Wall, each had a special place in the story, while from 1962 Fonteyn's partnership with Rudolf Nureyev constantly made world headlines.
Other companies existed in Great Britain. There were the Royal Ballet touring company, smaller and quite distinct from the one at Covent Garden; London Festival Ballet; the Scottish Ballet; and Northern Ballet Theatre. The main talking point of the period, however, was the establishment of two modern dance groups, a completely new development. In 1966 Ballet Rambert, the celebrated little classical company that had launched both Ashton and Antony Tudor, was metamorphosed into a modern dance group with Norman Morrice as Dame Marie Rambert's codirector, and three years later Robin Howard founded London
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