QUESTION' WHAT IS BALLET? ANSWERED

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 49, 13 March 1937, Page 13

QUESTION' WHAT IS BALLET? ANSWERED

"Yes, but what is ballet?" No doubt the question is often asked, particularly among younger people, in a country which, properly speaking, has never seen ballet, although it has seen one of the greatest ballerinas in Anna Pavlova. It is a difficult question to answer satisfactorily to tkose who have not seen ballet, but one devotee has deseribed it as "rhythm, movement, grace, the blending of the arts of music, painting, and the theatre all in oue." And another says, "It is a communication, between dancer, choneographer (designer), composer and painter, on the one hand, and the author on the other, of an- emotional state. Words fail. Ballet, inte.Uigently conceived and presented, never f ails. " John van Druten, the playright, in a foreword to Irving Deakin's "To the Ballet!"' (Allen and Unwin) has deseribed how, in 1919, quite by accident, he went . to see the Diaghileif Russian Ballet in London. He.went unwillingly and prejudiced. "As for ballet, I knew all about that from the fantastic hodgpodge, like a mixture of vaudeville burlesque and musical comedy, that is the English pantomime. In these ontertainments, to wh'ich I was taken every .Christmas, there is always the dragonfly ballet, the butterfly ballet, the porcelain ballet, or the dance in the Cave of Jewels, in which dumpy and not very young women, dressed in tights with spangled wings, perform ungraceful, meaningless and convcntional measures, or attired as "Watteau ■ shepherdesses, go clumsily through the movements of a formal minuet to the intense boredom of the children who are waiting for the next appearance of the funny man. I was convinced that all ballet must .be like that, a little better, technically, perhaps, but just as uninteresting. ' ' But af terwards,— "There is no way of describing good ballet to those who have seen only bad; 'yes' one must say, if one is pressed, they do pirouette, and jump and dance on their toes, and do all the things that you say bore you, but they do them beautifully, they do them with meaning." Ballet became something to which he would rather go than to any other form of entertainment. The past, so far as New Zealand is coneerned, has known the Danish dancer Adeline Genee, of pre-war days, and the immortal Anna Pavlova. But these wexe stars of their own, companies, which would bear little rescmblance to the present venture of Colonel de Basil. A number of experienced dancers head his company, but the majority of its members ara a ohoscn team from his "Babies" oi 1932. When he took over the company he placed a number. of 13-year-old staaents from Paris with the dancers of Diaghiloff's Monte Oarlo Company, from whose names the ballet stars of the future will arise. Pavlova gave the world a new word — " balletomania. " Its victims are "balletomanes," lovers of ballet who follow their favourite ballerina from city to city and country to country. Voltaire was the earliest recorded and such great nineteenth century artists as the Italian Taglioni had their perennial following. Pavlova 's admirers are legion, and the present revival of Russian ballet is finding the same circumstance. No longer are the balletomanes princes and noblemen in silk hats and magnificet estate. They are earnest students and writers perhaps, men and women of moderate means and inconspicuous clothes — modern pilgrims on the trail of Art.