Like any ballet company not fortunate enough to have developed or acquired a choreographer of genius, the National Ballet of Canada has suffered from an identity crisis in its thirty-five years. NBC, modeled after founder Celia Franca's alma mater, England's Royal Ballet, knows what it wants to be: a grand company, capable of performing the nineteenth-century classics with distinction, but also of creating important new works. While waiting for the choreographer who will shape not only its repertory but its performing style, the company has collected the great ballets of the last century like a maiden filling a hope chest. The policy has proved a sound one. The classics keep dancers in shape, and performances this spring at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. from March 31 through April 5 showed the company in splendid dancing form.
The three ballets presented during the brief season were shrewdly chosen. Balanchine's Serenade has become an international standard by which dancers can be measured. Ronald Hynd's lavish The Merry Widow, a full-length costume drama, is the perfect "Saturday night out" ballet. And in Glen Tetley's Alice, created for the company in 1986 and greeted with rapture in both Toronto and New York, the company undoubtedly hoped to triumph with a serious work.
Hidden Desires
Alice, however, was not a success here, although Tetley's concept is a good one: the adult, and married, Alice Hargreaves remembers childhood afternoons with Lewis Carroll and the tales he spun. She begins to think that Carroll was the great love of her life, and all four players - Alice, her husband, Child Alice, and Carroll - dance out their hidden desires while the White Rabbit and his friends, still alive in memory, gambol about. But ballets need more than interesting ideas to work, and despite exceptional performances by the entire cast opening night, Alice is ultimately defeated by Tetley's unimaginative choreography. None of his steps are specific enough to really depict character - either human or fantastic - and after awhile the endless arabesques, waving arms, and passionate backbends grow tiresome. Except for a gloriously slinky Caterpillar, the storybook characters rely on Nadine Baylis' costumes rather than Tetley's steps for their effect.
It's hard to make a mark in Tetley's undifferentiated choreography; everybody tends to look like everybody else and one feels sorry for dancers working so hard and dancing so well to so little effect. On opening night, Karen Kain's Alice Hargreaves was as passionate as one could wish, as was Rex Harrington's Lewis Carroll. Kimberly Glasco was wonderful as Child Alice. She seemed to have turned to the Tenniel drawings for inspiration, taking gesture as well as appearance from them. She was completely convincing not only as a child, but as a Victorian child - preadolescent, preawakened, pre-Freudian - whether looking to Carroll for a hug or lying on the grass at his feet, kicking her heels in the air in delight at his stories. The second cast (Sabina Allemann as Child Alice, Gizella Witkowsky as Alice Hargreaves, and Peter Ottmann as Carroll) danced well, but was smothered by the restrictive choreography; and the ballet, long enough on opening night, seemed even longer.
In contrast, Hynd's The Merry Widow asks little of its dancers and gives much. The steps are simple and Hynd had left a lot of room for interpretation. This is not a great work by any standard - nor is it
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