Music: Tables Turned

As the curtain went up, ten masked men, in white gloves and spats, gestured grotesquely around a green baize table. To the impious tango rhythms of two pianos in the pit, the diplomats on stage wrangled and jumped on the table, their arguments increasing in fury until one of the peacemakers fired a toy pistol. That brought war—in which death was represented by a goose-stepping skeleton—into the scene. When all who accompanied Death—soldiers in battle and women at home—were dead, the false-faced peacemakers gathered again at their green table and waved their arms and fought, as foolishly as before.

Last week German-born Choreographer Kurt Jooss’s 14-year-old ballet, The Green Table, was put on as a free show for 350 U.N. staff members, delegates and their wives at Manhattan’s City Center. It had been danced some 2,500 times here & abroad. After World War II came, Jooss (pronounced yose) and his dancers returned to Dartington Hall, Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Elmhirst’s fabulous cultural hothouse in Devon, England, later performed regularly for Britons and Allied troops. The 26-man Jooss Ballet is now touring the U.S. for the first time since 1939.

In 1933 the Jooss company had danced The Green Table for League of Nations members in Geneva. At last week’s performance for the U.N. 46-year-old Kurt Jooss was reassuring (or at least diplomatic). Said he: “I certainly don’t think U.N. is frivolous, like the characters around the second green table.”