Music: The Emotional Roots

The liveliest dance show in Manhattan last year was being staged by 36 dusky young people from Guinea. Les Ballets Africains has toured the world for six years and made its U.S. debut last year, but, because the troupe had been too long exposed to civilization, northern style (“certain intellectuals thought we could be cultured by being acquainted with Rimbaud. Picasso and Renoir”), the directors reorganized the company, recruited an almost entirely new group of Guinea dancers most of whom had never set foot on a stage.

The program, too, was modified,, but the basic appeal remained: an air of geysering exuberance that seemed to reveal the dance to its emotional roots. Included were dances of tribal ritual, scenes of village life, a fairy tale about how the lions gained mastery over the panthers—all excitingly expressed in bounding leaps and spins, in sinuous, shuffling walk. The sets were sometimes too elegant and the costumes sometimes too flossy, but in one department of stagecraft the company had scored a clear triumph: New York, which last year had forced the women to wear brassieres, last week permitted them to dance bare-breasted—presumably in deference to the perceptive ruling by the British Lord Chamberlain’s Office that Ballets Africains is art.