Theatrical careers in the ascendant have a powerful attraction, and David Bintley, the Royal Ballet's resident choreographer, is very much a man of the moment. Prolific, positive, and versatile, Bintley at thirty has behind him a long list of immensely varied ballets. In the last ten years he has steadily flexed creative muscle, maturing into a fluent and inventive master of his art. He is now an established force in British ballet. In America, however, he is barely known.
Born in Huddersfield and endowed with all the Yorkshireman's typical tough individualism, Bintley is a graduate of the Royal Ballet School. Like so many first-rate choreographers, he has never been an outstanding classical dancer. He has an excellent reputation in character work and mime--he must be the best Petrushka of his generation--but from the earliest, choreography has obviously been his métier. Even his first substantial work, The Outsider, composed for Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet in 1978, was confidently handled and full of promise.
Entirely Different
"Still Life" at the Penguin Café, given its world premiere at Covent Garden on March 9, comes after a series of ballets that range from dance drama to pure musical interpretation. Two recent productions bear witness to his growing ease. Galanteries is an entrancing embodiment of Mozart; Allegri Diversi, a sparkling and complex realization of Rossini. The new ballet is entirely different. It is the kind of relaxed end-of-evening piece that equates in degree of difficulty with the actor's task in playing light comedy or the chef's in creating a new and delicious soufflé. It demands disciplined craftsmanship, as well as choreographic ingenuity and an understanding of contrast and pace to send an audience out of the theater in a genial mood.
The title and genesis of the work, like its music, derive from the Penguin Café Orchestra, an ensemble identified with Simon Jeffes, whose compositions are a lively amalgam of classical, modern rock, and folk. He has an international reputation, including a spell of work with Twyla Tharp in New York in 1982. Bintley's score, selected by himself--he is a young man very sure of his artistic needs--uses eight of Jeffe's eminently danceable numbers arranged for a conventional orchestra. The first four are disarmingly cheerful and tuneful, the last four darker and more textured, for this whimsical entertainment has a delicately sketched-in message, a plea for the cause of endangered species.
The curtain goes up on a café with dapper penguin waiters carrying cocktail glasses on trays, skipping and swaying to endearing rhythms ("Air à danser") through a high-spirited crowd of young people in evening dress. Bird and animal heads give this kaleidoscope of social dances the air of a costume ball. One girl, wearing the handsome head of a Utah Longhorn Ram, engages with five men in a free-flowing round dance ("Prelude and Yodel")--a sexually ambiguous notion--before the café setting is abandoned for the cacti of Texas and a trim little jigging and jumping solo for Bruce Sansom as a Texas Kangaroo Rat ("Long Distance"). A Hognosed Skunk Flea, a tiny girl in a burnt orange costume, tangles crazily with a group of European folk-dance boys to bustling, buzzing Minimalist music ("Pythagoras' Trousers").
Comedy is now over. Against a backdrop of the South African veldt, the
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