Ballet: Dancers at Play

Two little girls jumped rope. Two fierce little boys drew their wooden swords and thwacked at each other with all their might till both little boys ran away. Two little girls wheeled out a big baby carriage and propped up a life-size doll. Then they dressed it up with all the grown-up ladies’ clothes that Mama had stored away in the attic ages ago. One little boy skipped and jumped over to a big blackboard, chalked up those deathless words: MARY LOVES BILL.

Children at play? No, dancers at play. These were members of Britain’s Western Theater Ballet company dance-miming a sugar-spun spoof of small fry called Street Games. It was one of four ballets danced in a one-night stand at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater in New York by the British troupe, which has been making its official U.S. debut at the Jacob’s Pillow dance festival in Lee, Mass. This is a casual group that sometimes seems more inclined to do a cha cha cha than an entrechat. Rather like the American Ballet Theater, the Western Theater company wants to avoid dance in the abstract and stress the psychology of personal relationships and straight storytelling. Artistic Director Peter Darrell’s hyperkinetic choreography accents every musical bar and beat with vigorous leg, hand and head movements, creating a continual sense of animation.

Sonate a Trois, based on Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit, was the only offering at Central Park that made demands on company and audience. Peter Cazalet, Hazel Merry and Sylvia Wellman danced their eternal season in hell with affecting desolation, though Choreographer Maurice Bejart’s strained balletic invention at one point reduced them to peering dolefully through the symbolically barred backs of chairs. Returning to Jacob’s Pillow, the company put on The Wedding Present, an emotionally charged dance drama with homosexual overtones, about the crackup of a marriage. A dance shocker, of a sort, was offered in a scene in which two males embrace and kiss.