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“The Royal Ballet: 75 Years”
by Zoe Anderson
published by Faber & Faber, 2006

by John Percival
copyright ©2006, John Percival

Anniversaries are all the rage right now. We’ve had Bournonville 200, Balanchine and Ashton 100. (Will anyone commemorate the shamefully neglected Tudor in 2008?) And as I write, the Royal Ballet has commenced its 75th anniversary performances, while Rambert Dance Company celebrates its claim to be 80 years old. Personally, I agree with its first historian, Lionel Bradley, that the Rambert company actually dates from 1930, with seasons at Hammersmith and the founding of the Ballet Club; earlier presentations were small one-off ventures or try-outs. Even so, Rambert beats Royal by a year, but it later suffered closures and drastic changes of style, whereas from its first complete performances in May 1931 Ninette de Valois’s company enjoyed continuous growth and development.
In coming weeks I’ll report on how the Royal is commemorating its anniversary with an only partially successful new production of “The Sleeping Beauty”, a mixed bill of old and new work, and some fascinating programmes involving contributions from Australia, Canada and Turkey (all de Valois homages). Meanwhile, let’s look at a new book: “The Royal Ballet: 75 Years” by Zoe Anderson.

The author has a serious disadvantage by comparison with predecessors such as P. W. Manchester, whose “Vic-Wells: A Ballet Progress” in 1942 chronicled the first decade; Mary Clarke (“The Sadler’s Wells Ballet: A History and an Appreciation” in 1955); Arnold Haskell and his fellow authors in “Gala Performance” (also 1955); and above all Alexander Bland with “The Royal Ballet: The first fifty years” in 1981. (Note the different names over the years for one company.) These writers had watched all or most of what they wrote about; Anderson is something of a newcomer and has to rely on what she reads or is told. That need not be too great a problem but she makes things worse in two respects. First, although she interviewed various people including former dancers, she particularly thanks two friends and colleagues, Mary Clarke and Alastair Macaulay (the latter also with limited direct experience), for their suggestions and comments, and a preponderance of quotations seem to come from Clarke or her mazazine, The Dancing Times, ignoring other critics with dissenting views. This can hardly help putting a degree of bias on her assessments. Secondly, once we reach her own experience, she unbalances the story by including detailed reviews giving her own opinions of individual performances.

Even so, from my viewpoint the biggest fault in her book is what’s not in it, namely the sort of factual appendices which make Bland’s fifty-year book one of the most frequently consulted volumes on my shelves. Compiled chiefly by Sarah Woodcock, with help from Kathrine Sorley Walker and others, these list every dancer in both Royal Ballet companies, with date of joining. Details are given of every production: choreographers, composers, designers, when performed and how often, with casts for the leading roles. There are also lists of choreographers and their ballets, chronologies and detailed itineraries. How I wish all this had been brought up to date. Anderson offers instead just one terse and incomplete list of dates for premieres and a few major events. Moreover, she mostly ignores the “second company” which began at Sadler’s Wells in 1946 and is now Birmingham Royal Ballet.

Inevitably the new book contains a few errors, e.g. Nicholas Sergeyev is described as retiring when he left to join International Ballet, “Bugaku” is reduced to a duet, “Mam’zelle Angot” lasted longer than she says; some spelling errors too — but how did nobody spot that the Association of Teachers of Operatic Dancing had become “of Operating Dancing”? She reckons that visiting French and American companies in 1946 showed that standards of British male dancing had slipped; actually, they showed what we had never achieved. (Yet how odd not to mention the brilliant Harold Turner in the context of “The Three Cornered Hat”.) She asserts that Benno used to do much of the partnering in Act 2 of “Swan Lake” — no way. As so often, de Valois is attacked for favouring Fonteyn; we are told for instance that “dancers such as Beryl Grey and Moira Shearer were given little chance to challenge Fonteyn.” Not true; they had many chances, but Fonteyn owed her long supremacy to one simple fact: she was better than the others.

John Cranko is persistently underrated by Anderson: how on earth can she describe “Onegin”, so internationally admired, as “structurally and choreographically thin”? David Bintley likewise; whence comes the idea that British and most American critics sternly disapproved of “Still Life at the Penguin Café”? But then she finds most of Ashton’s “Ondine” choreographically thin and structurally stodgy, and dismisses his “Jazz Calendar” as a weak ballet. No wonder that she roundly condemns all Nureyev’s productions (and fails even to recognise that the arabesques in his “Bayadère” are far from conventionally British); she also challenges his performance in Balanchine’s “Apollo” — which he had dutifully studied with John Taras. Sylvie Guillem gets attacked as unorthodox and frosty. I could go on, but you get the point.
Among the company’s directors, Anderson seems to me wickedly unfair to Norman Morrice, blaming him for a decline in dancing standards although her own text (page 203) shows this began before his time. On the other hand, Ross Stretton gets off perhaps lighter than he deserves. There are one or two notably attractive illustrations but taken as a whole their effect is disappointing; not complete enough and sometimes oddly chosen. I note that Anderson’s text to cover 75 years is quite similar in length to that of Mary Clarke’s volume covering 24 years. The total effect, I’m afraid, is a light-weight skim through a major subject. A pity.

Volume 4, No. 20
May 22, 2006
copyright ©2006 John Percival
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