Music: Sea Sprites & Demons

The hero and heroine stepped aboard, the sailors cast off the hawsers, the ship glided away from the jetty. The sky glided with it. Seconds later, with the ship supposedly in open ocean and the waves quartering in on the windward rail, the crew started swaying fore and aft. The attempted stage illusion, like the ballet to which it belonged, was handsome, arresting—and just short of convincing. The occasion: the U.S. premiere last week of Ondine, Choreographer Frederick Ashton’s most ambitious work to date.

A hit in Britain before the Royal Ballet brought it to Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera House, Ondine was freely adapted by Ashton himself from a fairy tale by German Writer Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777-1843) describing the love of a water sprite for a mortal.* Although it bore all the marks of Ashton’s familiarly gentle, classically oriented manner, it discarded the classical ballet conventions that appear in such Ashton successes as Cinderella and Sylvia. What he was trying to suggest, says Ashton, was “the ebb and flow of the sea: I aimed at an unbroken continuity of dance, which would remove the distinction between aria and recitative.” As a result, Ondine offered few pyrotechnics, gained its effects instead through sinuous mass movements in which the undulation of arm and body suggested forests of sea plants stirring to unseen tides. The sense of submarine fantasy was reinforced by Stage Designer Lila de Nobili’s fine scenery: a castle of mist and fruitfulness, shadowy crags and waterfalls, aqueous skies streaked pink and green.

In the title role, Ballerina Margot Fonteyn offered one of the finest characterizations of her career. From the moment she stepped out from behind a grotto, her body elfin, her face sharply kittenish, until she tremulously bestowed the kiss of death on her faithless lover Palemon (ably danced by Michael Somes), her movements had the kind of effortless grace that commanded immediate conviction. At one point, hovering in her lover’s arms, she reached down to stroke his hair in a gesture that caught the whole measure of the heroine’s innocence and fear. Ondine’s weakness was its length: as much dance drama as ballet (a British habit), it was studded with arid passages of exaggeratedly old-fashioned pantomime. Moreover, the fragmentary score by German Modernist Hans Werner Henze—sometimes lushly impressionistic, sometimes brassily strident—added little to the wispy plot. As Romeo and Juliet does with Ulanova, Ondine moves only with Fonteyn.

An equally ambitious, far more controversial ballet with a supernatural theme was stirring up critics in Europe last week. The work: Dybbuk, by Choreographer Herbert Ross. Staged by Ballets of Two Worlds, the company recently formed by Ross and his wife, Ballerina Nora Kaye, Dybbuk proved to be a three-act excursion into cabalistic legend. Long intriguing to dramatists,* the Dybbuk legend in the Ross ballet version was set to a sparkling score by Vienna-born Composer Robert Starer. Ballerina Kaye was cast in the role of the heroine, Leah, whose body is possessed by a dybbuk, or demon.

At the opening curtain. Leah appears demure and dutiful, dressed in a flowing pink skirt. Her trouble begins when her true love Channon implores the aid of the Devil to prevent her marriage to the man selected for her. Channon promptly dies, and the hateful marriage begins as scheduled. At that point in the performance, Ballerina Kaye begins to twitch and shudder, her stride becomes stiff and masculine, her mouth twists open, and from the orchestra pit (via a tape recorder) comes the terrifying scream of the invading dybbuk. Despite the efforts of nine rabbis to exorcise the demon, she dies. At the Festival of Flanders in Ghent two weeks ago, the audience applauded the work; in Berlin last week, most of the audience walked out before intermission, and the critics were savage. To add to their woes, Choreographer Ross and Dancer Kaye were struggling with a dybbuk of their own: friction with their impresario, Belgium’s Henriques Pimentel, was about to cause the Ballets of Two Worlds to disband only four months after its founding.

* The most notable modern treatment of the theme: Jean Giraudoux’s play of the same name, in which Mel Ferrer and Audrey Hepburn starred on Broadway six seasons ago.

* Most recent: Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote a modern version in the current Broadway hit, The Tenth Man. In Jewish folklore a dybbuk is an evil spirit or the soul of a dead person acting through the body of a living person.