Ballet: Two for the Season

Perhaps it is because the U.S. has entered a new era of romanticism that exalts esthetic feeling and the passive enjoyment of sensuous spectacle. Perhaps it is because the dance has developed artistic strength and social consciousness. Whatever the cause, the cheerful effect is clear. American audiences in recent years have been enjoying a steady boom in good ballet.

Things new, exciting and theatrical are rare in the arts at any time. At the moment, most of the theatricality seems superficial and hastily pasted on; not so in dance, which constantly erupts with interior energy and hot creativity. New companies are being born. Old companies are being rejuvenated. Ballet groups are crisscrossing the country, offering a bewildering assortment of dances, some fiery and full of meaning, some backed by rock music and psychedelic lighting, some conventional and harmonious. Two groups are currently drawing more attention and stirring more delight than any others. One is John Cranko’s rollicking Stuttgart Ballet (TIME, June 20), now being seen by U.S. audiences on a 15-city cross-country tour. The other is New York’s brand-new dance group, Eliot Feld’s American Ballet Company, which has just presented its first season in Brooklyn.

Stars from Stuttgart. Cranko’s company has chosen to concentrate on three full-length works, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet and Eugene Onegin, all richly staged and costumed and all choreographed by Cranko. He handles large groups of dancers with remarkable dramatic effect. But the Stuttgart Ballet has been devastating audiences all across the U.S. mainly because of the dancing of two new stars, Marcia Haydée and Richard Cragun.

Strong and effortless, Cragun tactfully puts a matinee idol’s figure at the service of his roles, making Romeo, Petruchio and even Onegin believable and remarkably affecting. The marvel, though, is Marcia Haydée. Experts correctly point out that she is not a great dancer technically. Most would turn puce at the thought of mentioning her in the same breath with Margot Fonteyn. But few dancers within memory have projected the rangi of whims and wishes or invoked the delicate interplay of emotions that flow from the least gesture of Haydée’s body, the slightest tilt of her head. Her Juliet is funny, touching and finally heartbreaking. Her Tatiana melds waif with woman so successfully that the pools of bathos beneath the surface of the Pushkin-cum-Tchaikovsky Eugene Onegin never once spill over. Her Kate is a farouche wallflower on the surface, a child within. Kate’s trustful obedience, when it is finally granted to Petruchio at the end of a rough-and-tumble parody in which Cragun and Haydée hilariously demolish the pas de deux, seems an emotional accolade, a lover’s gift of infinite worth.

Now 29, Haydée joined Cranko eight years ago, after an unpromising dance career. Born in Brazil, she studied at London’s Royal Ballet School before joining the Marquis de Cuevas’ ballet company at 17. Fat and morose, she seemed an unlikely choice ever to be anybody’s prima ballerina. One friend summed it up: “Marcia was a mess.” Cranko, however, sensed her potential. Under his direction, she thinned down, grew more buoyant and developed her own style. “Marcia was really there all along,” he says. “I only helped her set herself free.”

Bridgehead in Brooklyn. Eliot Feld has a similar gift for both bearing down on and bringing out youthful talent. In pulling together a new company and launching a repertoire of ten ballets in less than ten months, he needed it. One-third of Feld’s American Ballet Company is well under 20, and the troupe has few experienced dancers. One of his notable accomplishments lies in the way he chooses roles for them and encourages them to break away from the studied poses and pretended invulnerability that sets most ballet dancers apart from the audience. Feld has been known to invoke characters from Dostoevsky in explaining a role to his dancers. His rehearsals somewhat resemble the exhortations of method acting. “You look like a prince,” he complained at one point to John Sowinski, one of his best and most elegant male dancers. “I’m interested in a Fuller Brush man.”

Feld is far from revolutionary. American dancing has grown steadily richer by combining the dramatic expressiveness of modern dance with the disciplined beauty of ballet. Feld, only 27, once turned down an offer from George Balanchine to play Baby John in the stage and movie versions of West Side Story. He first became a star dancer with the American Ballet Theater, where his first, two ballets, Harbinger and At Midnight, were performed in 1967. He would have danced leading roles in six ballets this fall if he had not broken his foot six days before opening. He was able to borrow the City Center Jeffrey Ballet’s Edward Verso. Ballet Theater’s Bruce Marks and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s Richard Rutherford but, even so, performed one ballet, Pagan Spring, himself, on a taped foot.

Patterns and Passion. The complete company repertory included four Feld-choreographed New York premieres (Meadowlark, Cortege Burlesque, Pagan Spring and Intermezzo) plus six others, most notably Herbert Ross’s balletic vision of Goya’s Los Caprichos and Jean Genet’s The Maids. Performing without Feld beside them (but under his critical eye), the new company’s young dancers proved best at interpreting the milder shores of love. In Cortege Burlesque they successfully executed a fond parody of the pyrotechnical pas de deux typical of classic ballet, and in The Maids they projected murderous resentment and febrile neuroticism.

The choreography suggested parallels with the work of the young Jerome Robbins. It also provided a refreshing and pointed example of certain balletic virtues. The company’s official new home is the refurbished Brooklyn Academy of Music. Feld’s emphasis on the artlessness that conceals art was appropriate to someone trying for an artistic renaissance just a short subway ride away from mid-Manhattan’s superculture. Feld’s offerings were a marked contrast to the fashionably hopped-up pace sometimes practiced by both the Harkness and Jeffrey companies.

Feld’s virtue is the eloquence of understatement. He contrives intricate human compositions that nevertheless seem to flow and drift informally with the music. With remarkable success, he bridges the credibility gap that so often afflicts the dance when it tries to blend formal patterns and fleshly passion by giving the illusion that the disciplined body lifts and figure groupings of ballet have evolved out of private emotion.