Dance in Canada Magazine Number 8, Spring 1976

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Dance in Canada Magazine No 8 Spring 1976 compressed.pdf
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Dance in Canada Magazine Number 8, Spring 1976

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One copy of Dance in Canada Magazine Number 8, Spring 1976

Contains the following articles:
- Editorial by Susan Cohen
- Brass Foundry to Dance Lab by Susan Swan
- The Little Church Around the Corner by Elizabeth Zimmer
- Wayne Eagling: A Dancer Prepares by Penelope B.R. Doob
- Profile: Twyla Tharp by Nancy Goldner
- Meditations on the Male Image by Penelope B.R. Doob
- Review by William Littler
- Noticeboard
- Letters from the Field
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Dance in Canada Magazine
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Choreography Toronto Vancouver British Columbia Ontario Ballet Susan Cohen Modern Dance Education Schools Brian Macdonald Fernand Nault Ludmilla Chiriaeff William Littler Les Grands Ballets Canadiens National Ballet of Canada Erik Bruhn Veronica Tennant Agents Ann Ditchburn Elizabeth Zimmer Penelope Doob Dance History Teachers Auguste Vestris Brydon Paige Christopher Wooten Constantin Patsalas Fernando Bujones Frank Augustyn Frank Bourman Gary Norman Igor Youskevitch James Kudelka Kenneth MacMillan Lawrence Adams Lesley Collier Merce Cunningham Miriam Adams Nancy Goldner Paul Taylor Paula Ross Pierre Mercure Rudi van Dantzig Rudolf Nureyev Seda Zaré Susan Swan Terry McGlade Tomas Schramek Twyla Tharp Vaslav Nijinsky Wayne Eagling 15 Dance Laboratorium Ballet Trockadero de Monte Carlo Paula Ross Dancers Paylychenko Dance Company Royal Ballet Vancouver East Cultural Centre Visus Foundation Artere Cantate pour une Joie Colonel Sanders Coppelia Day in the Life of a Brick Deuce Coupe Eight Jelly Rolls La Sylphide Kisses Liberté tempérée Monument for a Dead Body Monument for a Dead Boy Push Comes to Shove Romeo and Juliet Sue's Leg Swan Lake Symphony in 75 The Bix Pieces The Fugue The Sleeping Beauty Composers Interpretation Men in Dance The Brinson Report
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01/04/1976
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Dance in Canada Magazine Number 8, Spring 1976
Dance Collection Danse
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107.2009-55-2083
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Editorial Susan Cohen Editor I Redactrice Our issue this time spans a broad range of topics and miles with articles from Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal , from across the border in New York , and across the ocean in England. Penelope Doo b makes a welcome return to these pages with an intriguing exploration of the male image at the spring season of the National Ballet, a company dominated by the enduring images of two guest artists, Erik Bruhn and Rudolf Nureyev. Or are they enduring? In another piece Doob converses with Wayne Eagling, one of the several Canadian-born stars of the Royal Ballet. The discussion reveals his thoughtfu lness and dance intelligence in preparing roles. Here in Canada we have found certain spaces taking on importance as dance centres, encouraging innovative use of theatrical sites. Elizabeth Zimmer in Vancouver relates the history of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre and freelance writer Sue Swan looks at Toronto's Fifteen Dance Laboratorium . From New York, critic Nancy Goldner talks to the provocative Twyla Tharp, choreographer of the moment with her works for American Ballet Theatre and her own company . In Review this issue, William Littler looks at the big artistic gamble taken in March by Les Grands Ballets Canadiens - a whole evening of new ballets paying homage to the late Pierre Mercure, the composer who was the catalyst of Quebec culture during the turbu lent sixties when the arts in that province found their voice. Littler is the dance critic of the Toronto Star and was first president of the North American Dance Critics Association . And finally , in our Letters from the Field section , the Brinson controversy continues with reaction from the community. Our last issue on Peter Brinson's recommendations to the Canada Council regarding the state of professional dance training here generated a lot of comment. Meetings were held in a couple of provinces to discuss the issue and the Dance in Canada Organization has taken up the cudgels as well in letters and representations to Council. We'll report on further developments as they come up in this important matter.• -= La Revue couvre, ce mois-ci , de vastes sujets et longues distances. En effet, des articles nous vienne n e Vancouver, Toronto , Montreal , de l'autre cote de a frontiere, de New-York et d'outre mer, d'Angleterre. C'es · avec joie que nous retrouvons Penelo pe Doob explore, d'une fagon intrigante, !'image male que le Bal ::.• National nous presente dans sa saison printanniere. Ce compagnie est dominee par !'image persistante de deartistes invites, Erik Bruhn et Rudolf Nureyev. Mais e persistent-ils vraiment? Dans un second article , Made Doob converse avec Wayne Eagling, une des nombreuses etoiles canadiennes de naissance du Ballet Royal. a discussion nous devoi le sa delicatesse et son intellig en de la danse dans la preparation des roles . Chez no us, a_ Canada, certains end ro its ont gagne de !'importan ce a titre de centres de danse en encourageant un usa innovateur de sites theatraux. De Vancouver, Elizabe·Zimmer nous raconte l'histoire du Centre Culture! =Vancouver-Est, et de Toronto, l'ecrivain pigiste Sue Swapasse le Fifteen en revue . De New-York, Nancy Gold ne~ critique, s'entretient avec la difficile et fasc inante T w a Tharp, choregraphe dont le nom a fait les manchette: cette annee grace au travail qu 'elle a accomp li po ur s2. propre compagnie et pour !'Ame rican Ballet Theatre Dans ce numero de la Revue, William Littler jette un co :: d'oeil sur la grand defi artistique qu 'ont re leve , en ma dernier, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens - une so iree entiere consacree des nouveautes, en hommage Pie rre Mercure, un des catalyseurs de la culture quebecoise a ... cours des tumultueuses annees so ixante alors que le monde des arts du Quebec commengait se fa ire entendre. Pour terminer, dans notre sect ion "Lett res ouvertes", la controverse continue toujours au sujet dt.. rapport Brinson . Notre dernier numero sur le recommandations que Peter Brinson a soumises at.. Conseil des Arts du Canada sur la situation de la formation professionnelle de la danse au Canada a suscite de vifs commentaires et donne lieu a de chau ds arguments. Des reunions ont eu lieu dans certain es provinces en vue de discuter toute la question, et Danse au Canada s'est egalement mis en campagne par une correspondance assidue et des representations au pres d Conseil des Arts. Nous vous tiendrons au courant de tou developpement dans cette importante affaire.• ·= = = = a a a SPRING PRINTEMPS 1976 Brass Foundry to Dance Lab Editor/ Redactrice: Susan Swan Susan Cohen The Little Church Around the Corner Elizabeth Zimmer Design/ Dessinateur: Page Publications Wayne Eagling: A Dancer Prepares Penelope B. R. Doob Editorial Assistant: Profile: Twyla Tharp Deborah Surrett Nancy Goldner Translator/ Traduction: Louise Meilleur Meditations on the Male Image Advertising Representative: Review Penelope B. R. Doob William Littler Gitta Levi Noticeboard Special Thanks to/ Sinceres remerciements a: Letters from the Field The Ontario Arts Council The Canada Council Jackie Malden Cover/ Couverture: Photo by Anthony Crickmay of Wayne Eagling, Canadianborn star of the Royal Ballet, in Romeo and Juliet. Dance in Canada is published quarterly by Dance In Canada Association. The views expressed in the articles in this publication are not necessarily those of Dance in Canada. The publication is not responsible for t he return of unsolicited material unless accompanied by a stamped self-addressed envelope. Subscription: $6.50 per year. Single copy $2.00. The publication Dance in Canada is included ,with membership in Dance in Canada Association . Danse au Canada est publiee trimestriellement par !'Association de la Danse au Canada. Les opinions exprimees dans Jes articles de cette publication ne sont pas obligatoirement celles de Danse au Canada. Le redaction n'assume aucune responsabilite quant au renvoi de materiel non solicite, a moins que celui-ci ne soil accompagne d'une enveloppe-reponse affranch ie et adressee. Abonnement: $6.50 par an. Prix du numero $2.00. Les membres de l'Assoclation de la Danse au Canada recevront d'office la revue Danse au Canada. All rights reserved . No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior written permission of the individual contributor and the Dance in Canad'- magazine. Tous drois reserves. II est defendu de reproduire toute partie de cette publication sans avoir prealablement obtenu le consentement ecrit de tout auteur et de la revue Danse au Canada. Dance in Canada: 314 Jarvis Street, Suite 103, Toronto, Ontario M5B 2C5 . ISSN 0317-9737. Brass Foundry to Dance Lab ...__ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _... Susan Swan _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _,,, Inside a Toronto warehouse that was once a brass foundry, and then an outlet for washing machine parts, Lawrence and Miriam Adams run Fifteen Dance Laboratorium, a performance space for choreographers who share their boredom with traditional modes of dance. The boredom became a mutiny directed at both contemporary and classical schools who are hooked into repeating old formulas without expanding dance as an art form. The Lab has sponsored a cross-section of creative dance since it opened in October 1974. The range includes new troupes like the Rinmon Experimental Dance Group, young established choreographers such as Chalmers Award winner Judy Jarvis and Anna Blewchamp, former Ballet Rambert and Martha Graham School student, and then lesser known, but unconventional and exciting choreographers, like Lily Eng and Peter Dudar of Missing Associates and Margaret Dragu. Visiting the Lab means first finding it on a confusing downtown sidestreet, then getting past a pair of barking German shepherds and entering finally into an innocuous room partly filled by the wood frame of an airplane Lawrence is building. Video equipment hides behind a scaffold while off to the right is a small chamber with 41 theatre seats. It's the type of tomb-like space that puts the atmosphere 2 right back on the visitor's shoulders. Most journalists like myself rush over to the bulletin board to see what other journalists have said in the few scattered clippings; while other newcomers wander about uneasily at first, then if they wait long enough, discover themselves going through a natural dialectic: What's going on in here? Is this some kind of put down? Ah, nothing's going on in here ... Wait, I'm going on in here. Yes, I'm here. Meanwhile, Miriam and Lawrence Adams emerge slowly, like a subliminal presence that gets steadily more focused: he, shaggy-headed and articulate; she, a small quiet woman with definite opinions. Except for their neatly compacted bodies, they don't look like dancers, or caretakers, as they call themselves at the Lab. The Adams' critique of dance officially began when Miriam and Lawrence left the National Ballet of Canada in 1970. They were married to each other and both were dancers, though Lawrence, 39, was more prominent in the company as a principal lead who played roles like the Prince in Nutcracker and Swan Lake. Born in St. Boniface, Manitoba, Lawrence performed with the National for 13 years as "a dyed-in-the-wool faithful" who came back each season on the premise that next year was going to be better. "Then it hit me," Lawrence says. "I knew that next year was going to be exactly the same, except maybe for a $5 raise in pay." Miriam, 32, from Toronto, danced with the National for this is r.v' ~ncl tl":.:tt' ~1 lt:..-r· ,;:1. c seven years until she left with Lawrence to teach ballet at the Lois Smith School of Dance in Toronto. "I just got fed up with the whole syndrome of dancers spending their lives taking classes until somebody says, do you want a job, kid?" Miriam says . At the Lois Smith School, they found a group of dancers who wanted to choreograph and perform their own works. So in 1972 Lawrence and Miriam founded Fifteen Dancers. They did their first show in June that year at the Poor Alex. Next came Colonel Sanders, Lawrence's first performance with video at the Mississauga Library Theatre. In 1974, Fifteen Dancers was reconstituted into Fifteen Dance Laboratorium and supported by a picture-framing business run by the Adams. Now it's financed by grants from the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council which together provide it with a yearly budget of $15,000. From this, Lawrence takes a caretaker salary. The Adams perform their own works here at the Lab, but they don't want to found a new dance school and they don't give criticism to performers. Their job is providing free -facilities and they pay small fees to dancers eager to take advantage of the Lab's interest in creativity. "We don't like a lot of stuff that goes on in here," says Miriam Adams. "But we don't want to get involved as personalities and end up creating that old student-teacher dependency dancers have been brought up on ." The Adams are trying to avoid what Lawrence calls the 'yea-booh' syndrome. It (along with the hyper-disciplined dance training) has bred passive dancers who spend their lives learning to emulate somebody else. "I'm not interested in burning down the National Ballet School," says Lawrence, who is critical of ballet companies spending millions of dollars recreating 'bad imitations' of works by Fokine and Massine. "But dance has been the least creative historically of all the arts. In the others, there is always energy put into expanding tradition. In dance, that same energy is put into discipline." Members of traditional dance bastions like the National Ballet do not come to the Lab. Once, when Miriam did a parody of Nutcracker, a few National Ballet people appeared but had to be turned away at the door because the Lab's then 35 seats were already full. But the Adams are recognized within Canada's young artistic communities which borrow from each other's art media and share a regular following of those who use art as a lifestyle. Together with Terry McGlade, a Toronto video artist, the Adams established Visus Foundation, a company which uses video to document Canadian dance. In 1974, Miriam was the first runner-up for the Chalmers Award. As a member of the dance committee of the Toronto branch of International Women's Year, she took part as an organizer and performer at its Festival of Women and the Arts during May and June of 1975. · .;l:rl.s is me ::n(1 th.:.t ,..;:.: : :iric. .--: . Last November, during a week-long display of live and video performances by eight dance artists, the Lab attempted to publicize its approach to dance. They coined 'dance artist' as a transition word - a bridge to changing public expectations and perceptions about dance. A dance artist, according to a Lab press release is "one who uses dance as an art medium". "We really should be known as artists," Lawrence says. "I'm not interested in dance. I'm interested in art. But my vehicle or medium is dance." The week featured work by Susan Aaron, Peter Dudar and Lily Eng, Jill Bellos, Elizabeth Chitty and Margaret Dragu, plus a short piece by Miriam Adams called Symphony in 75 and an audio book by Lawrence. In Symphony, Miriam walked in, dressed in tails, and swirled a baton at orchestras on 11 TV sets arranged in front of her. Lawrence's book (which is still on display at the Lab) consists of pictures of a brick along with instructions on a tape cassette. It's an extension of several earlier performances which culminated in his last live show A Day in the Life of a Brick held at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in 1974. While the lighting effects simulated night and day, Lawrence moved about an eight-foot high, sixteen-foot long styrofoam brick on the stage . Lawrence's brick - now in book form - sits on a shelf and can be taken down and played at random. "The only performance is the action of the person who is examining it," says Lawrence. Their move toward conceptual and minimal art stems in part, at least, from a mutual frustration with "the ego tripping" behind many artistic performances. It came to a head for Lawrence while watching a recent production of Red Emma, a play by Toronto writer Carol Bolt. "The play was totally unimportant," Lawrence says. "What was really going down was DID YOU SEE ME, DID YOU SEE ME, DID YOU SEE ME?" As an artist, Lawrence tries to separate his personality from his works: "Naturally, I can't separate me from the art object. But I can separate myself as a personality from the work." For Miriam, the notion of performing has become personally distasteful. Symphony in 75 will be her last live performance: "I felt ridicu lous doing it, though I admit, whatever I do, I'll want somebody to see it ." Theoretically, anybody can perform at Fifteen Dance Lab. But the Adams have restricted poets and visual artists from using the space, because they tend to overshadow dance which needs more attention. Meanwhile, despite their efforts to remain secondary figures behind Fifteen Dance Lab, a mystique is growing around Miriam and Lawrence Adams. Dancers come to the Lab, perform and want a reaction. When it doesn't come, they speculate. The Adams would be competent practitioners of the avant-garde in dance-oriented New York and their judgments count here in Canada with its small feuding dance factions and its slowly growing dance audiences. 3 \ From the Ivory Tower to the Great White Way to the Little Church Around The Corner: that's been the journey taken by Christopher Wootten, director of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. The church, formerly Grandview United, stands at the junction of Victoria Drive and Venables, in Vancouver's East End. Wootten is one of a triumvirate to emerge, in the midsixties , from the chairmanship of the University of Briti sh Columbia's Special Events Committee into professional arts management. His former colleagues, Murray Farr and David Y.H. Lui, are both members of Dance in Canada's board of directors and ardent promoters of international dance on the Canadian scene . Wootten, on the other hand, is promoting, very specifically, home-grown professional arts on the Vancouver scene. A returned native, he did a stint with Murray Farr at New Arts, the company they formed to manage the Alwin Nikolais/Murray Louis dance juggernaut in New York, and worked as we ll in Boston and with the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. H~ came back to Vancouver in 1970 "to have a more normal family life." After his heady experiences south of the border, he knew he wanted to work in the arts, but " I wasn't going to work for a mediocre artist." A couple of sessions as an OFY project officer introduced him to most of the emerging performing groups in the area and gave him useful experience in the mysterious workings of the Ottawa bureaucracy . A friend and colleague at the Secretary of State's office , Darlene Marzari, came across the underused church, then occupied by a coalition of anti-poverty groups. Now an alderperson on Vancouver's City Council, she encouraged him in the project of turning it into a showplace. A group of interested young entrepreneurial types took over the building, leasing it from the church, in January of 1973. After months of adm inistrative wrangling about how to manage it, during which the whole enterprise almost 4 Chris Wooten. Photo: John Mahler. collapsed, Wootten took control. Renovations began, and are still continuing; in October of 1973 the Centre opened with a "first": two sol id weeks of performances by the Anna Wyman Dance Theatre, which gave the young company the baptism of a "long run." Since that time, such groups as the Paula Ross Dancers, Mountain Dance Theatre, and local choreographers Jamie Zagoudakis, Savannah Walling and Karen Rimmer have used the three-sided arena stage area for dance presentations. Wootten's hope is to devote at least one week in eight to dance. He observes that contemporary dance has been the slowest art form to develop regionally in North America. While music and theatre have decentralized to a great degree, the centre of professional dance activity is still clearly New York. He grudgingly allows as how Max Wyman 's conjecture that Vancouver was the second dance city on the continent might be accurate, "but second in the sense that it's on the next planet!" The VECC is now a non-profit society, operating on its own income (running about $60,000 annually) and subsidies from the city and the province (which this year total $76,000) . The theatre holds about 250 viewers at dance concerts, in two tiers of newly upholstered old movie seats. More people can be accommodated at music and drama events, which take up less floor space. _The place is booked solid more than a year in advance, with concert series, plays, a grand Christmas craft fair festiva ls of women in the arts, film showings, and theatr~ for children. It is in use nightly, all year long, with children's matinees on frequent afternoons. The charming lobby areas serve as gallery space for interesting work by local graphic artists and photographers. Government subsidies make it possible to keep the rentals affordable; Wootten thinks they are the lowest in the country. "We charge $30 a night for groups which are not funded by the Canada Council, $50 a night when they are, and take 20% of the gate, up to a maximum of $100; that will go to $125 next year." For that fee, theatre users get the services of the Centre's staff of six: Wootten, his co-director and publicist Wendy Newman, a technical director, a house manage r, a custodian and a secretary. They get cashiers, and the advantages of a well-organized publicity effort: ten thousand copies of an attractive program poster are mailed out mont hly, as well as a 12-page release to all local media, listing and backgrounding everyth ing coming up. A recent survey indicated that patrons attend Centre events on an average of five or six times a year. The Centre's facilities include 40 lights, a 10-dimmer board with 2-scene preset, a complete sound system and house intercom, and a Marley stage floor. There's casual, self-service coffee in the living-room-like lobby, a beer and wine bar, attractive large round wooden tables and chairs. The restrooms are full of plants, a fine old sta ircase winds up to the balcony; pervading all is a sense of good will and enthusiasm for contemporary creative arts. "I n this business," says Wootten, " the fun is booking." He's bringing in the Tarragon Theatre production of Hosanna from Toronto . But all you company managers across the country whose fingers are inching toward your telephones, itching to play in this congenial environment, take heed: "We're working almost exclusively with local art ists, based on what we feel is best for the local pe rforming community. We're trying to clear more space for local dance. Until there's more performing space in the city, we can't go looking to out-of-town groups. We have a responsibility to our own performers first, who can't afford th e rents of the larger theatres, or the costs of union labour." One of the Centre's difficulties in booking dance events is that it programs nearly a year in advance, and most local dance companies are so shak ily funded they f ind it impossible to plan that far ahead. Another problem is the unusual open stage area, which eliminates the proscenium and the distancing possible with a conventional stage. Although Paula Ross has been choreographing specifically for the space f or some time, with increasing effectiveness, Anna Wyman, who prefers the formality of a proscenium stage, has moved to the larger Queen Elizabeth complex in downtown Vancouver. The Centre is located near the geographic centre of the Lower Mainland metropolis, in a multi-cultural district which includes many Chinese, Ital ians and Portuguese. It is fairly handy to public transit, and its audience comes from all areas of the city. While the neighbourhood people do not patronize the Centre heavily, their child ren do, packi ng the house for school performances which cost 25¢ a seat. The kids walk to the Centre from six local schools. T hey seem to prefer the dance events over all the othe r offerings; "t hey get off on the sexual aspects of it," says Wootten with a g rin. When Wootten returned to Vancouver in 1970, there was virtually nothing happening except the large, established arts organ izat ions like the Symphony. "The performing arts we re just starting to cook then. In the last five or six yea rs the city has come alive." Providing a well-run base for a number of the younger performing groups, an intimate environment for chamber music, experimental theatre, new dance and nostalgic cinema, is satisfying ChristopherWootten's desire to work for himself, in the arts, and in the city he loves. He likes it here and he helps make Vancouver a brighter, more provocative place to live. Paula Ross Dancers. Using space effectively. On e of the most sparkling of the Royal Ballet's many rill iant dancers is a 25-year-old Canadian , Wayne Eagl ing, promoted last year to principal dancer. Virtually nknown in Canada, Eagling is a favourite with London al let regulars thanks to his splendid technique, his uperb line, and his sensitivity to style. Graced with c entred precision in allegro, ballon, infectious joie de ivre, and remarkable musicality, Eagling has impressed ch oreographers as well. Kenneth Macmillan, artistic director of the Royal Ballet, made Triad (1972) for Eagling, An thony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley; since then, acmillan has created roles for him in Elite Syncopations (1 974), The Four Seasons and Rituals (both 1975). Hans Van Manen gave Eagling and Dowell a challenging pas de deux in Four Schumann Pieces (1975) , a minor asterpiece, and in 1973 Jerome Robbins and George Ba lanchine chose Eagling for the Royal premieres of Requiem Canticles and The Four Temperaments (Eagling d anced "Phlegmatic"). Many of these roles have exploited Eagling's technique, but what is most exciting about his recent career is his ex ploding artistry. He adjusts easily to the varied demands of abstract ballet (Balanchine's Agon and Serenade, shton 's Monotones 1, Macm illan's Concerto) and co medy (Elite Syncopations, parts of Robbins' Dances at a Gathering) , but surely the greatest test of artistry lies in ra matic roles like Siegfried or Macmillan's Romeo. Here Eagl ing excels. As this interview shows he understands th at the best acting comes from fusing careful forethought w ith spontaneity and he has a flair for discovering those spec ial touches that high light action and character, that make every role curiously and distinctively his own. It was chiefly on the subject of acting that I interviewed im in August, 1975, two days after he had danced an i nt oxicating Romeo (his fourth) . His unpretentious good um our was refreshing, and as we talked I began to see a c rucial aspect of his artistry: he is a modest perfection ist, s in gul arly generous with praise of other dancers but astonishingly diffident about his own achievements. Eag ling attributes much of his dramatic ability to the c oach ing of Michael Somes, the example of Dowell, David all, Lynn Seymour, and Donald Macleary (all of whom e admires intensely), and a familiarity with the work of other companies; he says much less about his own obvi ous passion to act well, the love of dance that drives im to learn as much as he can from the perceptive analysis of other dancers and of the role itself. He is similarly reluctant to acknowledge his technical st rengths; since his crisp entrechats are facilitated by " my sway -backed legs (slightly hyperextended knees) ," hey're not worth much praise, and his ideal physique for bal let (he is slim, almost bonelessly flexible and perfectly p rop ortioned) is dismissed casually: " I have a very easy body for ballet; I'm really too loose for a man, I can afford ot to be so elastic." He values most what he finds most di fficult, a multiple pirouette, and laments that "I can't do a il lion." Yet when pressed, he admits that before a recent a nk le injury he could do ten turns "almost automatically. " hat j ust isn't good enough for him . What matters most both in acting and in technique isn't o ing better than someone else but doing his best, coming as close as possible to his vision of the ideal. It's ard ly surprising that a man with such high standards is proving almost daily, showing every sign of becoming ne of the finest dancers in the world as he matures. As the 'ol low ing excerpts from our conversation about his om eo show, Eagling is an intelligent and reflective an cer profoundly committed to his art. ayne Eagling. Photo: Anthony Crickmay. PD. Your Romeo was breathtaking , and one of the most amazing things about it was that, unlike many young dancers , you d idn 't seem to have based your interpretation on anyone else's, although there was a general fam ily resemblance to Dowel l's. WE. I may have been influenced by him. It's hard to say what's modelled and what isn't, because I've seen it done so many times by so many different people. PD. How do you interpretation? go about finding your own WE. I find it very difficult to prethink a character. Of course, I always know more or less what I want to come across, but what I feel I'm g iving isn 't always what people pick up, and I'm very bad in rehearsals. PD. Does having an audience really pull you up? WE. Not for anything they do, but simply because they're there! I dance only for that, really . I can only act when there's an audience. Maybe it's because I'm terribly shy. PD. That's interesting, because I felt that beneath the gracious or even boisterous surface, your Siegfried and Romeo were very shy , characters who'd learned to wear the appropriate personas in public but who were slightly uneasy with the roles they had to play. Your Siegfried was much friendlier than any I've ever seen, and the friendliness was almost entirely convincing until ~uddenly everyone left and you did that terrifying adage with a desperate loneliness. WE. Yes, I felt very lonely at that point! It's so hard to make that adage look easy. PD. But that slight difficulty was very moving; it gave Siegfried a kind of split pe rsona lity, a sense of someone very shy who puts on masks to be able to function with other people, but in the rare moments when there's no one around, there are no masks, no roles to play, and what can he do then? There was a similar split in Romeo , between the starry-eyed kid adoring Rosaline and the gangster who hangs around with Benvolio and Mercutio. WE. Yes, but it's very difficult to convey something like that. A lot has to do with experience, which is the hardest thing to get in the Royal, with so many wonderful dancers around. PD. Yet you make everything, even being in the corps, good acting experience. You 're always doing something, either focussing on the principals or inventing delicious bits of business. WE. When you 're a villager in something like La Fi/le Mal Gardee, keeping your enthusiasm going is harder than doing a technically demanding role. If we're all dancing around madly and then everyone rushes to the side and collapses in a heap, it's just awful. I try to stay interested in things when I'm in the corps these days! It's hard to be a corps dancer, but it's also hard making the transition to being star of the show, because you're so conditioned to stand in line, to blend in in a nice little pattern. Suddenly to be there, in the middle of the stage - you feel terribly alone. PD. But it must be easier for you to act in the middle of the stage precisely because you're acting all the tirrie in the corps. Incidentally, how do you know what role to play when you're simply a villager? WE. You make a role, you get into the spirit of it. I try to do everything as if it were just me walking down the street - I try to make it all absolutely natural. That may not be such a good idea when it comes to principal roles; Derek Rencher tells me to make every role different, and not just 7 different from each other, different from me. He says, "Don 't do Swan Lake like Wayne Eagling, do Swan Lake like Siegfried!" I find that very hard. But it's satisfying to feel more confident about my acting, which is a novel experience. Oddly enough, doing Siegfried helped - it's the first time I've done classical mime, and that's much more difficult than anything in Romeo . Making yourself say something like "She is Swan Queen" - you feel such an idiot. But you have to be lieve it, and as soon as you get through the initial difficulty, everything else seems easy. For instance, doing Romeo this time, I didn't feel I had to rush around; before, I ran up and down stairs, I never stopped moving. I can stand still now and not feel silly. Very little feels silly after "She is Swan Queen!" PD. Can we go through some of the things in your Romeo that seemed particularly yours, to see how you arrived at them? First, your Romeo was painfully vulnerable, standing plucking away at the mandolin in mute frustration, hoping desperately that somehow Rosaline would notice. But he's also a cocky kid who eggs on Mercutio and Benvo lio. Both faces are real, and the result is a subtle portrait of a confused adolescent. WE. I try to play Romeo very young, and I try to be very natural. I think about being 14 or 16, though I know it was different in Shakespeare's time . But since people who dance Romeo are much older, the problem is to bring the role back down, to show a very young boy who suddenly grows up. That's how I do the first scene, very young; I feel Romeo's lost at that point, totally out of his depth throughout the first act. For instance, I come into the ballroom and there's Rosaline, a mature lady! All I can do is say "hello" and then there's nothing else to be said . I try to make Romeo - well, not embarrassed exactly, but certainly not aware of what life is all about. Rudolf (Nureyev) does it completely differently: in his first scene he's mature, he plays around with the whores, he: obviously very experienced sexually. But my Romeo isr that confident. It's a difficult scene: you come on, the n r e three fellows are all mucking around together, that's ve"' young, and then all of a sudden there's the w ho·e challenging you, and what can you do but brazen it o L::- PD. I liked that - you looked a little shocked at firs t, b~ you recovered quickly; you shook your head at e· wagged your finger mischievously, and then ran over:her and grabbed her. It was quite macho, but also ver engaging! Was that your invention? WE. Oh yes, that's mine! I could never have done that las· year, I'd have felt that nobody else had done it and s couldn't do it. It was very natural; I hadn't planned it, but a: I was dancing she ran away, and I thought, "All righ t you!" PD. And then , in the fight in that scene - WE. (laughing) When I dropped my sword? PD. No - that was original! Later, when the bodies ha ,'" all been piled up, you're totally unconcerned that any o e has died . Does Romeo really not give a damn, or is i a matter of pride - all those Capulets are watching , s:: you're not going to show a trace of weakness, of emotio - WE . At that point I have absolutely no feelings at all f • anyone who's died. Everything to do with that fig ht : routine - something that happens every day. That's t e way life is. What really upsets me is having to hand in rr _ sword after the fight. PD. You did that very well; there was a quick cha n e from outright defiance of the prince - "Who the hell does he think he is?" - to realizing how you cou Id be one up othe Capulets by being the first to obey . WE. Collier and Eagling in tomb scene. Photo: Anthony Crickmay. Usually Romeo and Tybalt walk in together, sta :: there glaring at each other, and lay their swords down a: the same time. I thought that was one bit I'd do different! I'd spend all my time arguing with my father, asking w h; had to give up my sword, and then I'd just walk in very fas · throw it down, and get out. PD. The contrast between your Romeo before and afte• meeting Juliet is remarkable you change frorr sometime punk, sometime kid with a crush, to a yo ung man in love, and I think the transformation is related your handling of the moment when you first see her in t e ballroom scene. Don't you delay noticing Juliet muc longer than anyone else? WE. Yes. Most Romeos notice her as soon as she star.s her dance, but I thought I'd be totally absorbed Rosaline, that I should turn around only when she tu rns and only then should I see Juliet. PD. When other Romeos see Juliet, they're totally a ~ inexorably in love right away. But your falling in love s more gradual - you seem to think, "Now there's ainteresting girl," and then suddenly she turns around the dance, there's eye contact, and that's when you fa ll love. WE. Yes. That meeting with Juliet is something else I t . to think about. If you see someone for the first time, eveat 14 or 16, you're not about to fall in love immediately. : has to take just a little bit more ti me than that. And I alwa s find Juliet's reaction - her just standing there - a Ii e strange. If I were playing Juliet and I turned around ari: saw Romeo staring at me, in a daze, I'd back away. PD. Just after you meet Juliet, you cross from stage rig : to stage left, as she's still dancing with Paris. You look a· her, then you turn away as if you can't bear the sight of he· because the emotion is so intense, and then you cross .a- :i ' inally you turn back and look for her, very tentatively, ,ery righ tened . You can joke with the whores, you can .a:: re Rosaline, but you can hardly look at Juliet. Is that -9-, ? E. Yes. When I did it first, I just backed away, looking at alt t he time. . You r balcony scene was the sexiest I've ever seen . -=- E. Th at was the best part of the ballet Saturday. And I ::: :: 't thi nk at all about how to dance it- it just happened . ~ as th e only part of the performance I was really pleased , Lesley Collier was alternately intense and skittish, :a ght between love, coquettishness, and a real terror of -~e consequences, while you seemed drunk with desire. - , e end, you were dripping with sweat and looked _-:erly exhausted; you kissed Juliet's hand tenderly, let -e~ go, and then almost collapsed , totally spent. And • -ally , ju st a shade late, you raced off to raise your hand ·: ard s her in the final tableau . It was electrifying. E. I enjoyed it intensely. It's what makes dancing hwh ile. , Aft er that, your Romeo is a man gentled by love, who ::: . es all the world because he loves Juliet. ls that how you :ee it? E. Yes, right up until Mercutio fights Tybalt. Collier and Eagling in balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet. Photo: Anthony Crickmay. PD. In the first scene of the second act, one of the whores covers your eyes - the "guess who" ploy ; you shrug her off and walk downstage, totally enrapt. You give yourself a little hug , and then you laugh as if at a secret joke. That's your invention? WE. Yes . I wanted it to seem as if I was remembering Juliet, how nice it was. You see, that's another case of having the confidence to do someth ing new, of feeling natural doing it. It's what I would do if I were walking down the road, rememberi ng something like that. PD. When you push your friends away later, you push them exactly as you did the whores - a gentle "Sorry this isn't the way I'm going to live any more." WE. That's probably basically the same with other dancers. When the who re comes up and puts her hands over your eyes, you think it's Juliet, and when it's not, you want to be alone. She keeps pestering you , and you 're still so happy in your own thoughts that you push her away almost without thinking about it. Later on , when your friends come up to you , you 're still in your own little d ream , and when they want to talk to you , you say, " Go away! " It's exactly the same as with the whores. And when the whore comes back again, you get a tiny bit annoyed. But then you realize that you 're annoyed because you 've 9 become introverted, so you think, "Oh well!" and you call her over and give her a little kiss. And then you can't hold you r joy in any more, and you rush to you r friends and tell them you're terribly happy, and then you think, "Oh my God - now I've got to run around this bloody great stage!" PD. That solo is wonderful - pure effervescence! But later in that scene there's a real problem: the nurse comes in and you and your friends tease her about which of you is Romeo, so it's a long t ime before you get your hands on the letter she's brought from Juliet. I th ink it's totally out of character for an ecstatical ly happy Romeo to tease anyone connected with Juliet or to wait a second before reading her letter. Does that bother you? WE. Well, I've grown up seeing t he letter scene as part of the ballet; I'm so used to it that it doesn't really bother me. But now that I think abou t it, it is out of character. If her nurse arrives with a letter, the first thing I'm going to do is read, and I found out that at that point the Prince has sa ic "Any more fighting and that's it." So you don't war: anything at all to happen to spoil your love for Juliet, yo don't want anyone banished for anything, you don't war: any more animosity, so you have to stop Mercu immediately. And there's that terrible moment when y _ have Mercutio on one side and Tybalt on the other. Yo u',e stuck in the middle and you have to persuade both of the,_ not to fight for different reasons . It's rather a hope less situation. PD. That reminds me of another good part. It's wheTybalt d iscovers you in the ballroom scene a :: denounces you to Capulet. You respond by reass uri :; Juliet, pleading with Capulet, and hurling invective a· Tybalt; you switch from one posture to another ve~ quickly and dramatically. WE. That scene works because I'm so very sure in . own mind what my responses are there, what I want eac· person to do. I don't have to think about how to d o : technically to get it across to the audience, how to sh the changes in attitude when I look at Juliet or Capu le ::· Tybalt; it just happens, it's what I'd do in that so rt • situation. PD. You sound almost like a method actor at times ; y really throw yourself into your parts! WE. That's what generally happens; in all my parts, I c: what feels natural and right for me. But the problem is h to get it across. I know exactly what I want to project, doing it is a different matter, and very difficult. I'm rel ie~e: that I seem to be doing it better than I used to do! I get eupset if people come up to me and say, "Well, you danc : all right, but you weren't really doing anything up there when after all I've been up there pouring my heart o PD. Acting has to be very big to carry in Covent Ga rde- WE. But you can learn how to do it, and I've learned fr watching what other people do - not only dancers e Anthony (Dowell) and David (Wall), I also goto the t hea··= as much as possible. It's the only way to learn . PD. There's one last thing I'd like to ask about y Romeo. After Mercutio has been killed, after Tyba lt ":c challenged you, you spend a very long time flexing y sword, deciding whether to fight or not. WE. Oh, yes, lots of time. I think I may have done a Ii . .,,. too much sword-flexing; by the time I'd flexed it for •• .,,_ fourth time, I realized it might be rather overdone. PD. I liked it; I thought you built up almost unbeara:: : tension there. WE. run over and grab it. As soon as you see the letter, it's the letter and away you go - or it should be! Of course, the music builds up very slowly the·getting much quicker just before the fight. I feel Ro me- _ in a great rage: he must fight Tybalt, he must ave-Mercutio's death, but he doesn't want to because o :consequences. PD. In the third scene, when Tybalt tries to provoke you to fight, he jabs his sword at your breast. Only after a long, poignant pause do you finally and very gently push the blade away. It's as though you were saying, "You're Juliet's brother - do what you like with me." PD. WE. I wanted that part to seem as if I was saying, "Look, we can be friends." I don't know how wel l it came across. WE. PD. And another thing: your Romeo shows real anger when Mercutio taun t s Tybalt in the fight. Tybalt falls and Mercutio vaults over him, and you lash out, as if you were saying, "You idiot!" Is that new with you? PD. But we're so seldom made to believe that the :: could change ; when you flex your sword, we have ti e think, "Please, God, just this once let it be all right!" -gesture lets us see into Romeo's mind; we know he hasquite decided this time. Eagling and Dowell in Four Schumann Pieces. Photo: Anthony Crickmay. WE. It is. I was speaking with Ray Roberts, the actor who plays my father, and then I got hold of the play and had a 10 Flexing your sword underlines the confusio n a- the agony of the decision. Naturally we all know ·Romeo will have to kill Tybalt, but that gesture _ indecision allows us to hope that just this once Ro ~ won't fight and the story will have a happy ending. It would be nice if you could change that part o ·ballet occasionally. WE. Keep that one in, then? Right! Twyla Tharp. Witty and Outrageous. Profile: Twyla Tharp ...__ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Nancy Goldner _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _... _ .. all the young American choreographers, Twyla Tharp s : e only one to have truly caught the _public's -aginat ion. Whatever one thinks of her work is, in a ~se, beside the point; people who are interested in the :-e-" r mi ng arts want to see Tharp. She is someone you :a- ead ily take sides over, and her name is "in the air." It --ea s t hat, like the movies and unlike Balanchine and ..:iam, one can see Tharp on Friday night with the a:s ran ee that on Saturday night one will have plenty to about with strangers. This is not to denigrate her, but - ggest a measure of her currency. ' ch of Tharp's popularity is connected with a dance :-e hat might also be detected in the follow ing interview. -e' dances are uniquely contemporary in that they are . , outrageous, thoughtful, wilful , proud, and yet a little on the defensive. That last point is hard to pin down; I think it has to do with the fact that her dances and dancers rarely move with a point of view that is not contradicted or shrugged off a second later. The prevailing irony of Tharp's wo rk makes one want to watch it all with a grain of salt. T hat quality is tantalizing, although ultimately it might sh ut some off from her work . Tharp's interest in virtuosity is the most straightforward aspect of her work and the one that brings her right into the mai nst ream of the ballet tradition. Most often working out of the gestures, t raditional steps and phrases of social dances and vaudeville entertainers, she dissects and intensifies those motions so that they seem vaguely recognizable baroque monuments of their prototypes. Little shimmies and shakes become miniscule. The whole 11 notion of balance and off-balance becomes a precarious experience with Tharp. Whereas most dancers at times create an illusion of relaxation or casualness, Tharp experiments with real dead weight. A favourite device is setting off contradictory modes of energy in one body simultaneously. Wh ile the torso is slumped into the pelvis, the feet are stomping or tapping at a furious speed, while one arm is executing a proper port de bras, while the other arm is hanging limp except for the middle finger which is twitching. All of this creates a razzle-dazzle, humorous tone, but at the bottom of it is sheer dance virtuosity. Tharp is also interested in recreating literally in dance the structure of polyphonic music - one reason for her use of Mozart and Haydn. Her dancers bounce off each other in canons and fugues. It is more difficu lt to see these relationships than to hear them - perhaps because no other choreographer has asked us to see them - but whether or not one is aware of the underlying structure, the effect of danced-out polyphony is buoyantly dense and full of intriguing echoes. The contrapuntal texture of Tharp's dances is probably what gives them the resilience they have, while the madcap, non-sequ itur sequence of steps gives them an improvisational feel. Still, I think that when people say of Tharp and her dancers that they're making it up as they go along , they are essentially expressing the surprise of seeing familiar things in new time zones and new landscapes. Tharp became known to a wide public in 1971 when Eight Jelly Rolls to Jelly Roll Morton rags was danced at the Delacorte Theatre as part of a free summer dance festival in New York's Central Park. Deuce Coupe, the Beach Boys ballet she made fo r the Joffrey ballet company in 1973, seemed to clinch her fame . At the time of my interview with Tharp she was choreographing a Haydn symphony for American Ballet Theatre and a new dance for her .own company. The Haydn, which ended up with the title of Push Comes to Shove , was premiered in New York January 9. The piece for her own company was first seen on March 25 , at the beginning of the Tharp company's 10-day season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Do you ever feel that people laugh too much during yo • ballets? Has your attitude toward audiences changed over the years? You've seen my ballets. It's self-exp lanatory. The older pieces were aggressive and unpleasant in the way much avant-garde art is. Say it was defensive. It's a case of people being uncertain and embarrassed by what they're doing. It changed with The Fugue (1970) . The Fugue represented five years of learning my craft. I use all that technique and craft now but I don't make a point of it. I'm no longer self-conscious. My pieces take a softer view toward the audience. Then how do you explain that speech you make in The Bix Pieces, where you tell the audience how the dance came to be made? That got people upset in England. The English are basically arrogant people and they didn't want to be talked to. Actually, I used the text as a theatre form, and I'm interested in it as I'm interested in lecturedemonstrations. I like the softness of that situation. People are relaxed. And they can see the dances wel l. I don't care how people respond , though my ballets a·e not about Red Skelton. I think humour is very importa :. too over-looked . Buster Keaton is one of the mos: profound performers I've ever seen. If you mean t "" Jaffrey audience ... they get hysterical because they'•e accustomed to seeing broad dancing. Do you think the inclusion of music makes your balle·: more accessible, gives an audience another door in~your work? I don't know. What do you mean by accessible? I a sense, all music is the same to me. I grew up with it. Mus:: can be used as a set, like decor. But there are also go c ideas in music. In the Haydn ballet, for example, !' having a problem right now with the ending, which is · 2 seconds, because Haydn understood the insign ificance " endings. An ending is only the aftermath of everythi ;;: that went before. So Haydn made his ending ridicu le :: And it's important to me to include Haydn's thinking in thinking when I end the ballet. How did you come to choreograph? What kind of audiences do you like? Very sophisticated or very unsophisticated . The Delacorte Theatre has a valuable point of view for me. I mean , I like the idea of some lady coming off the street. An unsophisticated audience has no preconceptions. 12 When I came to New York in 1961 I saw everything tha· was done but little that I wanted to return to. There :: nothing more demoralizing to me than to see a shitty piece of choreography. When I see something I like it makes e feel like going to work. First I joined Paul Taylor because lessons only as a matter of habit. In New York I was o nly upping the quality of my training. Other things I had done tended to make me nervous but dancing lessons never had that pressure because I had no professional aspirations. In a rehearsal of the new Haydn ballet, you said that a fugue for three ladies in the corner of the stage was your favourite part but that the audience won't see it. Don't you care? People might see it after a few viewings. Maybe only one or two will see it. The crass people will see only the dross, and that's okay. I think if George (Balanchine) saw my ballet he would see it, because I think he's interested in that sort of thing. Does Balanchine's use of music interest you? Actually, I'm more interested in Tudor's musicality. Balanch ine is mainly interested in melodic line. A canon is about the most complicated he gets. Still, though, when I do my fugues I think of him . Why don't you put that little fugue for three in the centre of the stage? The dance is very de! icate; it wants to be sec Iuded. Also, at that point the music is very broad. I put in a big ensemble dance as a filler to the filigree. And bes ides, I think the three girls would feel lonely by themselves in the corner of the stage. But their dance must be in the corner. There's a mystique about areas of the stage for me. I'm sorry, but it is a mystique and it's there for me all the time . Areas of the stage have specific meanings similar to dramatic structure. And I think of choreography as telling a kind of story. How did you pick Haydn for the ABT ballet? Jaffrey Ballet in Tharp's Deuce Coupe II. as a wonderful dancer. I had seen his last season with and his own Junction. I was enamoured by the ~e moved, and by the contradiction of his size, speed, :: • id ity. But I grew uncomfortable working in his _ •e graphy. Performers don't, can't disguise selves. It became clear to everyone. If performers 8'e"": sy mpathetic, it shows. Push came to shove. I was e-:: o leave. The alternatives were that I could join - "l gham - I hadn't been asked, but I think I could : , oin ed - or do my own choreography. I didn't join gham because I couldn't understand the -·er point in his work. At that time he had a wonderful ::a y because it was tilled with excel lent dancers who U!"= also intensely individualistic - like Steve Paxton, _a~a Lloyd, Viola Farber, Carolyn Brown. I modelled company on that one. The most important thing - ~: a company is to be able to see each dancer ually. But with Cunningham's I saw people in a:e spheres. I was to be dancing with other people, o uld not know how. So I began to choreograph . I was ;;i ed with a facile body ... also, I could close my eyes - g t and see patterns and shapes . c ,. ou ever think of becoming a ballet dancer and not - to college? (Tharp has an art history degree from - -- a d College in New York.) . I don't know what my mother thought she was -g , sending me to all those lessons. I continued My first idea was along an entirely different line and was puritanical. Well, I knew better than that. I listened to a lot of Mozart, about 70 records, but you see, Haydn is a better composer. Then I thought, I used him before. So what? Maybe I'll do one Haydn a year. If you distract yourself wi th novelty you never have to grow up. Umm, I think I'm lecturing to myself now. What music are you thinking about for your own company? The new piece has started in silence and I don't know what will happen. Will you pursue your retrospective of American music? Don't know. Art Tatum is the only one who interests me now. He's the last of the great piano virtuosos. Monk comes from another line, not pianistic. I mean, where can you go from Fats Waller? (Tharp used him for her most recent jazz piece, Sue's Leg.) There's a point where all the spaces on the canvas are completely filled up. There's a point where you go beyond the baroque. Where do you study dance now? You've hit a sore point. Haven't taken a class for a year or done a barre in three months. A class is no longer an educational process for me. I don't think of myself as a student anymore. Yet I have to dance with my own company pretty soon . .. . Sometimes I think I should just run four miles a day. Have you ever thought about teaching choreography? Being taught something you love is a pain in the ass. 13 From then on, men were on the defensive in ba Diaghilev's company and the legendary Nijinsky se as reminders that there was considerable roo men in dance, but only in the last 20 years has the dancer reasserted his central role, capturing aud ieenthusiasm in the process. Many factors have together to create new concern with the male im a e dance: the athletic bravura of the Bolshoi men in t Western tours; the burgeoning numbers of well-tra -ecll and talented young men eager for new roles and aud ieacclaim; the novel and sometimes extreme celebrati the dancing male in Bejart's Ballets du Vingtieme s, the Dutch National Ballet, and Nederlands Dans T hea·s Most important, perhaps, was the emergence o . contrasting male superstars, the Apollonian Erik B with his elegant style and aesthetic insistence intelligent, well-motivated acting, and the Dion Rudolf Nureyev, famed more for his startling virtu and animal exuberance than for his remarkable artis• These two versions of the male image have dom i a· ballet in general and the National Ballet of Canaca particular, a company having no clear male image • own and hence relying on close associations with B and Nureyev to bring in the crowds, and inspire its dancers. Bruhn, the Apollonian. Photo: Andrew Oxenham. When August Bournonville left Paris for his native Copenhagen in 1829, it may well have been with some disgust at the growing ascendancy of the ballerina and the consequent degeneration of the male dancer's role. Since ballet began, men had dominated the art with their brilliant batterie, their elevation, and their pirouettes. Women who made it in dance were often famous largely for their skill at "male" steps: Camargo dazzled audiences with her entrechats quatre until outshone by La Barbarina's entrechats huit. But with the rise of the Romantic Ballet, the ethereal lightness of the ballerina on pointe replaced the virtuosity of the school of Vestris, one of Bournonville's teachers and perhaps the greatest male dancer of his day. At Copenhagen's Royal Theatre , Bournonville preserved and strengthened the tradition of male supremacy as ballet master, choreographer, and dancer, transmitting the secrets of masculine dancing to St. Petersburg through his pupil Christian Johannson. But in the rest of Europe, the male dancer was on the decline, and leading male roles were often taken by women in pants. The noted critic and soon-to-be librettist of Giselle, Theophile Gautier, praised Theresa Elssler's La Voliere for "the good taste she has displayed in not giving pas in her choreographic work to male dancers," thereby permitting audiences the pleasure of her own "intelligent legs" instead of a man's "calves of a parish beadle." Everywhere the adulation of ballerinas in ever-shorter skirts and barer bodices betrayed a similar prurient fascination with female flesh as well as feminine virtuosity, if not virtue. Many nineteenth-century ballets could be seen as catering to Victorian masturbatory fantasies, their delicious heroines decorously glossed by the patina of unattainability. 14 The historical context more than justifies re concern with the male image in dance. But the fo rms-~ concern has taken are not always so easily justifiable men have regained prominence in dance, the old ru o have been revived, perhaps by the disgruntled, pa r~ business man whose wife drags him off to see Nureye Baryshnikov when he'd much rather watch Hockey ,,, in Canada: "Moon after him all you want, dear, but l'I :a a Real Man over these faggots any day." Meditatio The The nature of the attack coloured the defense. hastiest glance through comments by Igor Yous ke • Bruce Marks and Edward Villella in The Male I (Dance Perspectives 40, 1969) reveals a determinati prove that male dancers are Real Men by pre-em-· qualities like controlled power, simplicity, energy. concern with clear dramatic motivation, as characte• of the male; the female dancer need only be beautif technically competent. Attention to line is uncomfor: defined as effeminate, so men should stick to di jumps and beats, shunning the more langu id therefore "feminine") grace of adagio mo ve e Statements like these wrong both sexes in ballet, t .,.... women into dolls with elegance but no conscious ar: and men into virile and intelligent athletes constricted range of possible movements. Hoping that such defensiveness was a thing of the ::-astt. and that dancers long exposed to the influence of s ~ and Nureyev might have more enlightening things :c about the male image, I spoke with members • National Ballet- Frank Augustyn, Ann Ditch burn, a Kudelka, Gary Norman, Tomas Schramek, Ver Tennant - and with Rudi Van Dantzig, artistic di rec-: the Dutch National Ballet, here to mount his Monument for a Dead Boy. One of the foremost architects of the new male image in contemporary ballet, Van Dantzig finds part of the im portance of male and female images in dance to lie in the bas ic connection between sexuality and dance: "The sexual instinct is one of the drives of dance, I think. Birds - when they mate, they dance, no? When they court. And animals too. So dancing is a very sexual thing." If so, strong sexuality might well be part of the dancer's appeal for the audience, as Tennant believes: "It's something people react to instinctively. Masculinity and femininity come out on stage much more than one is aware of, and often dancers with a high degree of masculinity or femininity are the dancers that do extremely well. The male dancers who've really succeeded have portrayed a certain virility, whatever their private lives are like. They have a marvelous strength that makes one say, 'Yes, that's masculinity.' It's hard to say what masculinity really is, but the male dancers that people flock in droves to see on stage give off that aura. Nureyev is like that - he has tremendous sex appeal." True enough; yet Nureyev is worshipped by the general public not only for his sex appeal but also for his flamboyant technical feats. The equation by audience or dancer of masculinity with athleticism and tricks is dangerous, as Norman warns: "A dancer with a flashy technique can be led into doing those tricks so much that they'll forget the other side of dance. I've seen that happen quite often ." For National dancers, Bruhn's influence is important in making them fully aware that virtuosity must always be the servant of artistry, especially in story ballets. Schramek, e Male Image · g Season the company's best Franz in Bruhn's Coppelia, doesn't believe in "steps without feeling behind them. Dancing is our way of speaking, and we should speak all the time. That's not easy with show- off variations; I'm uncomfortable with them . In the first-act variation in Coppe/ia, there's a definite purpose, impressing Swanilda, so I can speak. In the second act, it's different. One can do the steps, but it can mean nothing, it can be so dry, and I don't feel that's what dancing's all about." It's lucky, then, that National dancers aren't worried about working to seem masculine for masculinity's sake . Augustyn dismisses such defensiveness with some contempt: "I don't have to strip on stage to prove I'm male. Male dancers can be secure in what they are now, they don't have to prove anything. I'll do just what the role demands by way of masculinity or femininity." Recognition that the male image contains varying pr opo'rtions of the conventionally male and conventionally female is important. Nijinsky, still considered the epitome of excellence, was famed for his sensational technique - very "masculine" elevation, for instance; yet contemporaries found him a peculiarly Nureyev, the Dionysian. Photo: The Toronto Star. "feminine" dancer in some respects - his grace, his sensitivity, his supp le port de bras. Perhaps the precise blend of masculine and feminine in a dancer's projected sexuality matters less than the impact of strong sexuality per se, whether it's chiefly male, chiefly female , or completely androgynous - highly charged with both masculine and feminine potentiality. Probably Kudelka, a very promising choreographer, was thinking on similar lines when he said, "For an Albrecht or a Siegfried, you want a very sexual dancer - a very masculine person who's also very feminine. A prince should have that quality because it's so very attractive." There is, then, no single male image in dance or among dancers, and there's no set masculine model to which a developing dancer must conform. "Ballet isn't only sexuality. Masculinity, femininity. If you prefer a hardcore dancer like Nureyev, a very heavy dancer, very much into the floor - but he gets off it as well! - you can have that preference. Or you might like Anthony Dowell - he's a lighter type of dancer, technically brilliant. But which is more masculine or feminine? It's up to you." For Nureyev and Dowell, mentioned above by Augustyn, read Nureyev and Bruhn, the guest artists most intimately connected with the National Ballet in recent years; both ultimately tracing their artistic ancestry to Vestris and Bournonville, but vastly different in stage presence. Their legacy to the National Ballet is an insistence on strong male dancing, but they themselves exemplify various means to that end. From Nureyev, the dancers have learned what Schramek calls "the level of energy you need to have on stage to be exciting to the audience"; from Bruhn, the passion for thoughtful and convincing acting. It's to the credit of the National dancers that they can absorb these lessons while insisting that 15 ethereal tulle, straining gravely to float through bourrees or earth-bound arabesques . For better or worse, choreographers generally have definite ideas about the distinction between male and female balletic style. In Van Dantzig's works, "The woman's style is more detailed, more fluid, with many changes of colour of movement. A greater range of dynamics, more shades. The man, even though he should still have shades, has a much broader scope of movement. I'd have effort and energy show more for the man." Delicacy for the woman, strength for the man; traditional sex-linked characteristics in dance at least since the sixteenth century, when Sir Thomas Elyot allegorized a dancing couple by making the woman represent the deficiency of any quality, the man its excess, and the couple together the Golden Mean. And such contrasts of qualities may be comparatively inescapable so long as men tend to wear soft slippers and women pointe shoes. Augustyn and Rothwell in van Dantzig's Monument. Photo: Andrew Oxenham. they themselves must develop their own styles rather than becoming Neo-Nureyevs or baby Bruhns. If there are no pre-ordained male images for a dancer to emulate, is there any difference between male and female on stage? I think there is, in that we still have men - male bodies - physically present, embodying slightly different qualities and employing a somewhat d ifferent movement vocabulary than most women in most ballets. Men usually have a bulkier musculature than women, they seem heavier, more into the floor. When men have spectacular elevation, it's impressive partly because one senses the great effort needed to displace a more massive body. And if a major grace of classical ballet is the lightness it conveys, that effect is achieved differently by men and women, as Augustyn noted: " It's all a question of creat ing the illusion of being above the ground, and women can do that by going on pointe, but men can only do it by jumping." It's still men who generally do steps of grande batterie, who perform double t_ ours. In fact, if there weren't ad ifference between the sexes in classical ballet, drag companies l ike the Ballet Trockadero de Monte Carlo, recently in Toronto, wouldn't be funny. It was mildly amusing when a man would parody conventional male style by an elaborate preparation, a very tottery single pirouette, and a flourished finish, but the hilarious bits involved clumpy bod ies, swathed in 16 Yet there are other possibilities as well; if dancers can be androgynous, relatively speaking, so can dance. Much contemporary ballet, influenced by modern dance with its marked overlapping of male and female movement, uses similar steps for men and women - Van Manen's Grosse Fuge, for instance, or Jiri Kylian's recent ballets. And playing against traditional conceptions of male and female style can help a choreographer invent new steps and effects. The National Ballet's impressive young choreographer Ann Ditch burn often needs to create conventional images of masculinity and femininity in ballets examining relationships (Kisses, for example). But at the same time, she can be more adventurous: "I love to have men do sensitive things, and that's harder for them than doing energetic things. And sometimes I may want to make a woman look masculine. When you're trying to establish a relationship, or when you have a woman dance more like a man, you develop new choreographic ideas. Any new angle like that inspires me to create different and unusual kinds of movement." Youskevitch and Villella might disapprove, but I'd agree that choreographic crossings of sexual boundaries can engender abso rbing ballets and more versatile dancers. Yet despite the encouraging presence of budding Canadian choreographers like Ditchburn, Kudelka, and Constantin Patsalas, who stretch their fellow dancers' minds and bodies by offering new roles and movements, at least in choreographic workshops, the ballets in the National's repertory are usually nineteenth-century classics, so dearly loved by the audience. The classics, of course, are necessary and invaluable from a dancer's point of view; they demand and exploit brilliant technique and challenge dramatic capabilities. A dancer can grow in them; he can learn to make sense of a character's emotions and motivations and to project them effectively. But, the great classics - Giselle, La Sy/phide, Swan Lake, and so on and on - tend to challenge the ballerina far more than they do the premier danseur; where is there a male mad scene comparable to Giselle's, until you get to De Valois' Rake's Progress? And even in the Bruhn and Nureyev productions of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty, where the man's role is expanded almost beyond recognition, dramatic as opposed to choreographic demands on the prince are slight. Two potentially strong roles for men - a rethought Von Rothbart, a Carabosse as chilling and dominating as Alexander Grant's in the Royal Ballet Sleeping Beauty - are turned over to women who, in the Toronto season this year, couldn't do much at all with them. Bruhn and Nureyev may have earned their reputations in classic roles, but they became exceptional artists in modern dramatic parts. Not surprisingly, the men of the National feel they need more than the classics if they're to approach the achievement of their two great mentors in a company traditionally dominated by its women. Hence, perhaps, the dancers' unanimous enthusiasm for Van Dantzig's Monument, a ballet that excited and extended its two casts, thereby more than justifying its acquisition by the company whatever one might think of its merits as ballet. In general , the Toronto season did little to foster male dancers' artistic growth by challenging their dramatic intelligence. Many male roles fell into pitifully few (and rather dated) conventional stereotypes: the earnest young lover, be he prince (Siegfried, Florimund) or peasant (La Sylphide's James and Gurn, Batricio in Don Juan, Franz in Coppelia - despite his unusually high spirits) ; the decadent roue (Don Juan and his servant Catalinon, the Grand Duke in Offenbach in the Underworld) ; the mad scientist (Dr. Coppelius); the evil witch en travesti (Madge in La Sylphide). There were also the virtuoso roles, providing for splendid dancing but denying extensive dramatic possibilities - Bluebird, the Neapolitan dancer, the men's parts in Offenbach (where there's too little dancing to permit a fully developed character to emerge) and in Kettentanz (a delight as the National does it, but relying too heavily on the traditional bounding, energetic male and delicate, graceful female styles) . On paper, if not always in performance, that's an awfully limited list. The contemporary ballets new to the National repertory proved more fertile. Monument for a Dead Boy is a powerfully theatrical ballet, heavy on content and somewhat monotonous in movement (it's based choreographically and conceptually on alternations between attraction and repulsion, extension and contraction, reaching towards and recoiling from) . The male (and female) roles are familiar from contemporary film and theatre, media Van Dantzig finds very influential in his work. There's the young man in anguish at his inability to form a stable relationship with either sex, fascinated and repelled by those he meets, yearning for his lost innocence; the monstrous father, domineering and puritanical yet also a grotesque victim to his wife's taunting sexuality; the impassive Older Boy who may or may not be the young man's intermittently indifferent and protective lover; the sadistic beach boys who torment the young man with beatings or rapes, whichever you prefer ( the ballet is open throughout to alternate interpretations). Many people think Monument is a ballet " about" homosexuality, a fashionable subject that's certainly relevant to the male image, but I d isagree, as do the dancers. The ballet has much more to do with indecision and insecurity, the need for love and the horror of discovering that what one loves is in some way frightening and repulsive. If there are homosexual episodes - and it's an open question -they're simply one aspect of adolescent sexuality, not the main point of the work. As for the male roles, they demand (and get) strong dramatic presence rather than virtuosity from the two casts: Augustyn and Kudelka as the young man in crisis, Hazaros Surmeyan and Charles Kirby as the authoritarian and boorish father, Clinton Rothwell and Luc Amyot as the Older Boy, David Allen and David Roxander as the puzzled personification of the young man 's childhood. Needless to say, you don't find roles like these in the classics, and the company could do with more works that analyze the conflicts and emotions of contemporary men, that furnish more varied male images for dancers to interpret. was a more lighthearted exploration of stereotypes as stereotypes; in the male roles, Schramek was ab le to embody and simultaneously comment on f our contemporary images of man ingeniously choreographed in appropriately varied styles . First, he's a punk kid in love with his cap-pistol, twirling and aiming it with transpa ren t self-absorption whi le warding off the ingratiating advances of a feather-boa'd siren. Schramek mugs his way through this section with twelve-ish intensity, improvising a consummately comic look of humiliated astonishment when the would-be vamp manages to kiss him. The exaggeratedly macho movements of the boy in transit to his frontier-inspired ideal of manhood give way in the next section to the sinuous contractions and ardently off-balance yearnings of a young Romeo. Next Schramek becomes a cool young man on the make, seductive in his alternately angular and swivel-hipped movements, who forces a brutal rape-kiss and wanders off satisfied and indifferent, having added another notch to his belt. In the last section, Schramek gets in some fine dancing - sudden manic leaps, discotheque shimmies, acrobatic lifts - as a man turned on by his own athleticism more than by his partner. Stereotypes, yes, but important in that they exemplify cultural male images adopted by most young men at one point or another, and Schramek presents them with droll tongue-in-cheek wit and a strong sense of style. Di tch burn demands versatile dance-acting, and she gets it. Few other ballets in the repertory ask as Schramek in Kisses . I / l /Ip . ' Ann Ditchburn's Kisses, given only two performances, 17 much; I hope Ditchburn's projected Mad Shadows will be as challenging as Kisses. The classics (and I admit to loving most of them as a spectator) are a different story. Even in their more maleoriented National versions, they don't have inherently strong dramatic roles for men, and it takes a great artista Bruhn, for instance - to make something out of them. This year, the National had such an artist, Gary Norman, dancing his first-ever Siegfried and his already acclaimed Florimund at Saturday matinees. I'd wondered whether even he could do much with the roles: Bruhn's Siegfried, mother-fixated or not (Norman thinks not, Augustyn thinks so), is somehow even more confusing and thankless a role than in the more traditional productions I prefer, and Nureyev's Florimund is still the story-book prince. But Norman was intoxicating. Intense, thoughtful , profoundly secure on stage (an illusion, he assures me), even - dare I say it? - charismatic, he gave the most moving performances of those unpromising princes I've ever seen. When he dances, Swan Lake really is about Siegfried, and Sleeping Beauty about Florimund. What delicious and audacious art, to transform those timehonoured vehicles for the ballerina into examinations of a young man's maturation through love! I've written elsewhere of the individual touches Norman creates - some spontaneously, some through careful forethought - to make those roles his own: the way he projects his compelling conviction that the fiancees at the ball in Swan Lake are really swans, that he's still at the lake searching for Odette among them; the poignant despair that motivates those chaine turns linking the ballroom and lakeside scenes, culminating in an agonizingly urgent gaze at the hand that pledged his love to Odile, a gaze reminding us that the ballet is really about truth in love and the misery of losing it; the impassioned phrasing that makes that often sketchy long solo before the Vision Scene in Beauty a mirror of Florimund's mental hesitations, changes of mood, and longings. Through such inspired dance-acting, Norman redeems those impossible princes from their rather banal beauty and makes them vital , introspective human beings whom we Gary Norman. A vital introspective prince. care about desperately. His Siegfried moved from playboy boredom with known court delights to unimaginable loneliness to a consuming and destructive love for the ideal that blinds him to reality - a truly tragic hero. And his Florimund was wonderfully different, an underdog prince mature in his unhappiness, a man whose lack of expectations and sense of personal unworthiness are the very qualities that convince us he deserves the princess. How awful for the National that Norman is leaving the company! He'd have done much to spark the male image in the classics, and in a straight dramatic role (Romeo?) he'd be sensational in his marvellously controlled intensity and intelligence. Norman's may have been the kind of performance Bruhn and Nureyev were looking for when they revised Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty for the company, but I've not seen anyone else triumph as Norman did, so I feel the credit must go to the dancer rather than to the choreographers. There was some stunning dancing from other casts, but little that was dramatically powerful. Guest artist Peter Martins is physically a danseur noble incarnate (as Norman is not); but although his usual strength, elegance, and control were there, he gave a curiously polite and uninvolved Siegfried, interested in the spectacles before him but somehow not quite believing in them . And Frank Augustyn glowed with boyish charm at some moments but was almost Don Juanish at others - arrogant, even bored. Is this a case of the Nureyev image imposing itself? If so, I trust that Augustyn , intelligent and perceptive as he is, will find his own style before long. Princes may be hell to dance, but even they can come alive, as Norman showed. La Sylphide, a Bournonville ballet with strong male roles but surprisingly little dancing, can become almost an exercise in sexual politics, pitting the passionate James against two versions of supernatural women; he's enticed by the beauty only to be destroyed by the beast. The various castings of the ballet this season offered contrasting male images of the peasant lover, the romantic dreamer and the forthright young man, and these images weren't linked to James and Gurn respectively, as one might expect. Guest artist Fernando Bujones was a gentle, erotic soul , more titillated by his pursuit of the elusive Sylphide than eager for hasty consummation. His James was paired illuminatingly with Schramek's Gurn, a Scots Hilarion , dour and forceful, sure to get Effie since he wants her so much. The " moral" in this casting is that the more determined man will get the girl. In the other cast, Augustyn's James was violently moody, a passionate youth intent on physical possession of his enchantress, while Kudelka's Gurn was softly vulnerable, more overwhelmingly in love with the mortal Effie than James could possibly be with the Sylphide. It's not surprising that Patsalas' Madge, a dirty old lady on a power trip, would choose to help this docile Gurn rather than Augustyn's imperiously demanding James. When she forces James to kneel to her to get the magical scarf, she embodies the triumph of a despised ancient crone over the village sex-object she craves, and later her lascivious caresses of the unconscious James' hair betray the lecherous motive that guides her. The moral of this version is that only devotion to Woman can render a man safe from evil female powers; the strong, hotblooded James must be put in his place, while the worshipful Gurn is already the avowed servant of women. The ballet thus permits intrigu ing variations on its male images, as these performances showed. And still more interesting was the androgynous sexuality of Bujones, to pick up a theme touched on earlier: while Augustyn was quintessentially male in the role, Bujones fused strong masculine qualities (his startling elevation and batterie, possibly too amply virile for Bournonville style) with strong feminine ones supremely elegant hands and arms, a sweetly dazed expression, a generalized sensuali ty as opposed to Augustyn's more masculine sexiness. Two very sexy dancers, but remarkably different (though equally valid) ways of expressing sexuality. La Sylphide has st rong and varied male images built in to it, thanks to Bournonville and Bruhn, but historically Coppelia was a different matter. Originally Franz was a pants-part for a woman , so neither the music nor the character was particularly masculine in conception . Modern producers like Bruhn have to beef the role up a lot to suit it to the men who normally dance it now, yet there remain problems in the libretto. Possibly a woman could get away with killing butterflies, fli rting somewhat indiscriminately with Coppelia and the Csardas Girl, and provoking attacks on Dr. Coppelius, but when men do those things today, they're likely to look fairly nasty or, at best, thoughtless. The National's Franzes - Sch ramek, Augustyn, and Norman - have to give a lot of thought to creating a viable male image here, and it's to thei r credit that they all succeeded in different ways. Norman played up all the callousness inherent in the roles, and the result was an unlikeable but fasc inating Franz, a village Lothario whose marriage to Swanilda might last a week or so . Augustyn's Franz was so enthusiastically in love with Swanilda and so proud of his love that the questionable actions in the part can be easily overlooked; boisterously good-humoured boys will be boys, and can get away with murder. Schramek's Franz was still more engaging. A young kid who pretends to nonchalant independence and who teases Swanilda continually (as she does him) to prove he's his own man, this Franz wins us utterly every t ime the love he tries so hard to conceal breaks th rough to the surface. When Schramek and Tennant dance Coppelia, their crescendoing skirmishes can 't completely hide th ei r deep love, and when they finally admit their last ing affect ion and are married , we realize that they've grown up during the ballet. There's not much of a male image t o start with in this ballet, but the dancers did so well at inventing convincing ones t hat I'd like to see them get their teeth into intrinsically strong material. What they need are the roles - not only the classics, but also newer ballets t hat would bring a greater variety of male images into t he repertory. Roles for older dancers, to coun teract ballet's counterproductive preoccupation with male (and female) images of youth; roles to test the company's com ic and dramatic talents; roles that deal sensi tively wi t h the problems of contemporary sexuality (since sexuality is a natural and suitable subject for dance to explore). When the very notion of sexual roles, of male and female images and realities, is undergoing urgent reevaluat ion, that concern should be part of ballet as well. And that brings me to a fina l plea. Van Dantzig, proponent of the male in dance, now thinks, "Maybe we've done too much for the male image. When I see the repertoire of Toer Van Schayk, Hans Van Manen, and myse lf, I have the feeling we should think more about the fema le dancers, because so many of our ballets were creat ed most ly for the men." Canada's National Ballet hasn 't begun to pay enough attention to the men, and I hope t hat A lexander Grant will remedy that lack. But ballerinas don't live by Giselle alone, and it's time ballets were made to explore the full range of the National's superb const ellation of women. Here as elsewhere, history cautions us to avoid past mistakes: unbalanced attent ion to either sex is cripp ling in dance as in life. Bujones ' androgynous sexuality. Photo: Barry W. Gray. "Pierre was a man of great intensity and of profound impatience. He was very demanding of himself and of others. These were qualities that shaped the first important television programs of Radio-Canada. It was in rising to his challenge that Les Grands Ballets Canadiens was born. Thank you Pierre." Ludmilla Chiriaeff Thank you Pierre. Those three words summed it up, really, expressing what Hommage a Pierre Mercure was all about: the wish of a group of dance artists to acknowledge their debt to a musician who enabled them to dance. And if this seems reminiscent of the New York City Ballet's Stravinsky Festival of a few years back, there is a reason. What took place in Montreal's Salle Wilfrid Pelletier on March 19 owed its inspirational seed to what took place in the New York State Theatre in 1972. In both instances a major ballet company had decided, at great professional risk, to honour a seminal influence on its development, not by the conventional exhibition of photographs but by mounting new works. The scale of celebration was different. The Stravinsky Festival embraced more works by more choreographers. But measured against its resources, what Les Grands Ballets Canadiens attempted - a program of five ballets, all new productions and four of them premieres - has to be numbered among the most daring dance enterprises in recent Canad ian history. 20 Chiriaeff's Artere . Pierre Mercure's impact on Les Grands Ballets Canadiens differed considerably from Stravinsky's on the New York City Ballet, of course. Though both men were composers, the Russian-·American far more than his Canadian colleague influenced the dance through the notes he wrote. In Mercure's case, the man mattered more than the musician. The man happened to be the first producer of music broadcasts for the CBC French television network and through such programs as /'Heure du Concert he provided the exposure and experience necessary to transform Ludmilla Chiriaeff's fledgling company, Les Ballets Ch iriaeff, into Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. That the man was also a musician is nevertheless critical to understanding both the nature of his influence and the source of his personal tragedy. As Ludmilla Chiriaeff's commemorative words suggest, Mercure had a way of making things happen , of bringing the right people together and exciting them to do their best. The film that introduced Hommage a Pierre Mercure recalled some of these people. There was Brian Macdonald, who did his first ballet for Mercure, Jean Gascon, who acted for him, Louis Quilico, who sang for him. And as snippet after snippet of black and white videotape alternated with names of artists and dates of productions, one could appreciate what a rema rkable catalyst th is native Montrealer had been. What the Evocation , as it was called , did not show was the tension al l this catalyt ic activity produced with in the agent. Every time he opened a creative door for others, he closed one for himself. A passionate modernist, he is said to have fe_lt creative initiative slipping away. And so, in January of 1966, on the ve rge of completing a television production of R. Murray Schafer's opera Loving, he slipped away himself, flew to France , headed south on the Paris-Lyon autoroute and died when his Renault 16 crashed between Auxerre and Avallon. He was 39. In dying this way, with his c reative potential only partially rea lized , Mercure became a figure of mythic importance to the arts in French Canada. At least three of the works in Les Grands Ballets' Hommage have now added to this mythic role. Artere, Ludmilla Chi riaeff's first original work in a decade, might almost be called a spiritual biography of the composer, using a poem by his close friend and collaborator, Gabriel Charpentier, as its aural spine. The poem seems to evoke Mercure's thoughts during that last mad dash against time on the road between Auxerre and Avallon . The towns themselves are mentioned , together with images suggesting the urgency of the voyage to freedom. But Artere attempts more than a straightforward dance to a poem . It involves two figures, baritone Roland Richard, who half-sings, half-chants the words as. he moves around the stage, and dancerVincentWarren , who moves around with him , as the embodiment of his words. It is as if the creative artist were looking back on his younger self in a series of flashbac ks, his words conjuring up images in movement. If only Madame Ch iriaeff had been more successful in making he r formal ballet vocabulary bear the expressive burden of Charpentie r' s sensually charged verses! Brian Macdonald encountered a similar problem in Cantate pour une Joie , though in this case he has Mercure's music to offer some rhythmic support and his own freer approach to ballet vocabulary to enhance an idiomatic response. Wh ile less specifically biographical than Artere, Cantate pour une Joie also has about it the quality of a spiritual journey, with a central character (Alexandre Belin) , a combination Death and Father figure (John Stanzel), a temptress (Jerilyn Doucette) and an athletic male corps marshalled to vivify Charpentier's verbal imagery. Mercure might have applauded Macdonald's attempt to make a ballet of his score. Bring ing together the arts was one of his joys. The cantata itself is a musical synthesis remin iscent at various times of composers as diverse as Stravinsky, Honegger and Orff. By the night of the premiere, though , the many elements including Louis Archambault's white , columnar sculptures, Jean Perreauld's ambulatory declamation of Charpentier's texts and the singing of soprano Sylvia Saurette and the choi r - had yet to come together into a cohesive entity. Perhaps unwittingly, Macdonald wound up mirroring Mercure's own frustration in bringing balance to his life. The quest for freedom, another of the liturg ical strains in Mercure's life, is the one Fernand Nault picked up in the appropriately titled Liberte temperee, set to the composer's Divertissement. In his alternation loose g roup ings Nault resorts to exp licit comment upon the restraints imposed on action . Luc kily, the score he uses al most dancing. of tig and image ry to freedom of an ti cipates Lignes et Pointes, one of Mercure's last an d most expe rimental scores , doesn 't seem to anticipate dancing, however.· Its electronically co lou red textures sound almost too comp lex. And yet , Brydon Paige and Brian Macdonald used the sco re as a vehicle for two alternat ing pas de deux (Sonia Vartanian with David La Hay and Maniya Barredo with Mannie Rowe). They wanted , evident ly, to make their Hommage representative of Mercure's growth as a composer. It's a pity, for their sake, that Mercure wasn 't really so o riented toward dance rhythm as Stravinsky, in spite of his work in televising bal let. Herein probably lies one of the reasons why the Hommage was more successful as a commemorative event than as pure dance. As dance, it suffered as much from the limited choreographic pot entia l of Mercure's (and Charpentier's) music as from the evident haste involved in its p reparat ion . The presence on the program of Balanch ine's Concerto Barocco , set to Bach 's danceable D minor Double Concerto, made this all the more apparent. As a commemoration of Mercure's importance, on the other hand , and of the collective pe rsonality of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens (dancers, founders and students all pa rtic ipated in a final choreographic parade), Hommage a Pierre Mercure lived up to its mandate. A page of history was indeed exam ined while another was being written . Lignes et pointes to music by Pierre Me rcure. NoticebQa1d Sheri Cook in the Royal Winnipeg's Rite of Spring. Spring Seasons • • • • A burst of spring activity by local companies added to Vancouver's growing reputation as a major dance centre. On May 7 and 8, the Paula Ross Dancers presented two new works by her, Reflections of a Day and an untitled piece, at the Queen Elizabeth Playhouse. The program was repeated twice in Victoria • • • • The Queen Elizabeth Playhouse will also host the Mountain Dance Theatre and the Pacific Ballet Theatre in mid-May • • • • Prism Dance Theatre gave new pieces by Larry McKinnon and Karen Rimmer in its April performances at the North Vancouver Centennial Theatre. Savannah Walling was guest artist. Co-artistic director Gisa Cole left in mid-May for six weeks of study in New York on a Canada Council grant • • • • After their coast-to-coast Canadian tour, Tournesol (Ernst and Carol Eder) wi ll perform from June 23 to 26 at the Woodward Auditorium in Vancouver. The Eders also will partic ipate in the Surrey Arts Festival in June • • • • Between its appearances in New York in early June and the performances scheduled for London, Eng land in mid-July, The Anna Wyman Dance Theatre will be p remiering a new work at the Queen El izabeth Playhouse Theatre to a John Mills-Cockrell score (commissioned through the aid of the Canada Council) and a neon set by Michael Hayden, a Canadian artist k nown for his kinetic sculptures • • • • In addition to the activity of the professional companies on the West Coast, the University of British Co lumbia's Con temporary Dance Club presented two evening concerts of modern dance works in early April (7 and 8). • • • • After completing an ambitious touring program of concerts , lect ure-demonstrations and workshops, the Alberta Contemporary Dancers wind up thei r most successful season ever in May. The company is beginning to find its feet financially as well with memberships and donations increasing rapidly this year • • • • The Alberta Ballet Company faced economic collapse early this spring bu t was saved by an offer from the Banff Centre to act as artists-inresidence in return for free room and board , rehea rsal and performing facil ities. This gave the company time to mount a fund-raising campaign and repay a loan guaranteed by the Alberta Ministry of Culture. During its Banff residency, the company toured southern Alberta, and since then has appeared in Edmonton , Calgary, a number of commun ities in northern Alberta and in B.C. • • • • The Roya l Wi nnipeg 22 Ballet made its final Winnipeg appearance of the season at the end of April, showing off new repertoire additions: Paquita and Family Scenes ( by Oscar Araiz, whose version of Le Sacre du Printemps, was premiered by the company earlier this year). Three days at Ottawa's Nat ional Arts Centre brought its year to a close. • • • • Toronto dance has been livelier of late . A new company has emerged , the Pavlychenko Dance Company which gave its premiere performances April 17 and 18. The 12-member company performed eight original works all based on founder Nadia Pavlychenko's technique designed to use energy in a new way and to break away from Western dance tradit ions • • • • Rinmon performed four original works by company members Margaret Atkinson , Melodie Senger and Sal ly Lyons-Geddes at the Fifteen Dance Lab (March 2628) . From May 16 to 18 at the 5 , 6, 7 Gallery, Rinmon presents Pauses, a human sculpture piece also by Melodie Senger. Then the company heads for the West Coast for two weeks of performances in Vancouver, Victoria and Nanaimo • • • • Dancemakers, now in its second year, presented several new works by young Canadian choreographers - Anna Blewchamp, No'mi Doovdivani and Richard Bowen during their spring season at the Hart House Theatre, April 28 to May 1. The founding members of the company have returned and two new dancers have been added to the roster, Richard Bowen (formerly with the National Ballet) and Patricia Miner (ex- member of the Toronto Dance Theatre) • • • • Young choreographers who tried out some ideas at the National Ballet's annual Choreographic Workshop, held at St. Paul's Centre (April 9 to 14) , included John Aubrey, Ann Ditchburn , James Kudelka and Constantin Patsalas , all company members. Long-range plans for the National Ballet include New York performances with guest artist Nureyev (July 20 to August 8) , Ontario Place appearances (August 16 to 21 ), and an Eastern tou r starting in September • • • • Travel is also on the boards for the Toronto Regional Ballet. On May 13 they attend the Northeast Regional Ballet Festival in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • • • • In its final program for this season , presented at the MacMillan Theatre Apr il 27 to May 1, the Toronto Dance Theatre premiered two new works: Peter Randazzo's Nighthawks , and David Earle's Quartet • • • • Fiftee n Dance Laboratorium in May hosts a wide variety of performances featuring Johanna Householder, Louise Garfield, Caroloyn Schaffer, and Nikki Cole. • • • • Les Grands Ballets Canadiens was recently in Toronto to resent two programs completely unknown to the audiences there. hen it returns to Montreal, the company will be learning a new piece y Laverne Meyer, who , until recently , was director of England 's orthern Dance Theatre. Since leaving that position , he has been gu est teaching and choreographing for, among others, the Royal Sh akespeare Company. • • • • On the East Coast, the Halifax Dance Co-op played host in arch to the Tournesol Dance Company and to Missing Associates. he Co-op continues to generate interest in dance through its - o utreach Workshops," master classes and the "C hance to Dance" su mmer program of classes and workshops . The Community Confers • • • • Plans are well underway for the 4th annual Dance in Canada Conference. Halifax, the major centre of dance activity in the Atlantic reg ion, is hosting Conference '76 at the Dalhousie A rts Centre. Acti vities include classes , workshops and seminars as well as performances by a number of Canada's professional companies. The o ur-day conference (August 6-10) will begin in true Gaelic fashion it h a giant ceilidh and promises to be exciting and productive for all involved. For information , phone (902) 422-1749; or write the Dance in C anada '76 office at P.O. Box 2372, Halifax, N.S. • • • • Fifteen Dance Laboratorium will be holding a conference (June 7-12) to " acquaint the general public with new dance and to stimulate communications among dance artists." The conference, called " dance adventures new Canadian extravagation" (D .A.N.C.E .. , for sh ort) will include workshops, forums, television talk shows, performances and environmental events. Different theatre and studio spaces will be used to remove the museum atmosphere that often haunts such gatherings. For information, phone (416) 8691589 • • • • Other meetings Canada has seen included a three-day Dance Conference '76 organized by, among others, the Ontario CAHPER Dance Committee at the University of Waterloo. It attracted 200 dance enthusiasts (March5-7). Then a big two-day seminar (May 1 an d 2) at B.C .'s Burnaby Lake Pavilion discussed management , press, an d business problems in dance. That seminar was called An Introduction to Dancers to the Professional World of Dance. Dance at the Olympics • • • • COJO , code-name for the Arts and Culture Committee of the 76 Olympics, has planned dance performances in and around M ontreal in July. No less than 18 companies will participate in the m onth-long program designed to show the variety and quality of C anadian dance companies to the Olympic visitors expected from aro und the world . Everyone from the National Ballet to modern soloists like Katherine Brown will be performing . How to Spend Your Lunch Hour • • • • Throughout March and April, Montrealers were treated to a se ries of noon-hour concerts at Place des Arts , called Les Midis de la Place. Nine lecture-demonstrations surveyed the four centuries of th eatrical dancing . Members of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens were in th e first of these programs which traced the development of classical ballet from the reign of Louis XIV to the time of Serge de Diaghilev and danced again in the final concert which was devoted to contemporary ba llet. Other members of the dance, theatre and even sports co mmunities involved in this innovative, wide-ranging series included: M ontreal mime artist, Elie Oren ; the Groupe d'expression corporelle M ichel Conte; champion ballroom dancers Frank and Vicky Regan ; the folk dance troupe Kinokisos; the modern dance company Le Groupe Nouvelle-Aire; the jazz-oriented group, Les Ballets Jazz; and , in the most unusual of these lunch-hour dance concerts, five ch ampion Canadian gymnasts. 100,000 Reasons to Dance •• • • 100 of Quebec's best known artists poets, actors, sc ulptors, film makers, singers and authors - have joined to support Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in a unique fund-raising effort. Each has contributed a short text in his own handwriting. They have all been collected in a numbered, signed edition of 100,000 copies. Yves Du pre who organ ized this project says: " All sectors of our artistic co mmunity have come together to support ballet. I don't think you wo uld find this anywhere else in the world. " Royal Entertainment • • • • From April 20 to 24, the Vancouver Ballet Society coop erated with the National Ballet of Canada to present Ballet Top right, Tourneso/. Right, Alberta Ballet Company in Phallos Fable. · Rinmon in Walkabout. Photo: Bruce K ir kland. Alberta Contemporary Dance Theatre. Spectrum, dance performances which demonstrate t he evolution of ballet from the age of Louis· XIV to the present. Winthrop Corey and Mary Jago were featured in these concerts while Charles K irby provided the narration. Students Perform • • • • York University's Sprin g Dance Concert, (April 8 to 10) included choreography by students Julie Lichtblau and Jane Beach ; by faculty members Sandra Neels and Daniel G rossman; and by guest teachers Helen McGehee and Donald Hewitt. One piece, Lichtblau 's Criehaven , was performed to an original score by York student, Billie Winant • • • • An Evening of Ballet, the National Ballet School's annual spri ng concert was held May 13 to 15 this year. An original work by teacher and fo rmer National dancer, Glen Gilmour, w as included in the program. The students also performed Balanchine's Concerto Barocco. Need a Job? • • • • Le Groupe de la Place Royale will begin holding auditions May 17 for male and female dancers with backgrounds in both modern dance and ballet. For information, phone Peter Boneham or Jean Pierre Perrault at (514) 861-5821 • • • • The Marie Marchowsky New Dance Company needs male dancers, 16 or over, with training in modern (but not necessarily Graham) technique. To audition , phone (416) 924-6013, or write Ms. Marchowsky at 619 Huron Street, Toronto • • • • There are also openings for male and female dancers with experience in classical and contemporary dance in t he An na Wyman Dance T heatre. Phone (604) 926-8181; or send your resume to the General Manager, Anna Wyman Dance Theat re , 656 15th Street, West Vancouver. Council Extends Grant- Giving • • • • The Canada Council has extended th e range of its g rantgiving to schools: The Barrett School of Dancing in Newfoundland received $350 towards the cost of a dance workshop directed by a National Ballet School teacher; the professional students' programs of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens received $10,000 each. Another new departure for Counci l was giving Fifteen Dance Laboratorium a project cost grant of $3 ,000 to enable young choreog raphers to present their work . Two more companies received first grants: Entre-Six was awarded $10,000 for new ballets presented in May, and the Paula Ross Dancers $7,500 for a piece premiered in March. Grants of $15 ,000 for new cho reography went to Le Theatre de Danse Contemporaine and Le Groupe Nouvelle-Aire and the A lberta Ballet Company was awarded $20,000 to continue it s school lecture-demonstration program. Letters from the Field -o the Editor: was with much surprise and some conste rnation that I learned in your last edition f Dance Canada of a statement made y t he Canada Council claiming that I had app roved Mr. Brinson's report and that I did so even before it had been presented to the Can ada Council's members. W hen I was a member of the Council's con sultation committee, Mrs. Michaud sub mitted to the Dance sub-committee one co py of the Brinson Report which was shared a ong Mrs. Anna Wyman, Mr. Richard utherford and myself. As I was expecting a com plete text of the document to be given to Ba ch of us sometime later for in-depth study, I did not immediately object to the partial -ep ort that I had at my disposal. However, sometime later when I still had ot been given a copy of the complete report, protested to Mrs. Michaud in a letter in which o utlined my disagreement with certain oi nts on the document that had been given ·o me to read. M rs. Michaud informed me that it was too ai e to object. N ot only had I not approved the Brinson =!eport before it had been submitted to the ::::an ada Council, but I don't approve this :- ick manner of finding solutions to serious : ob lems which involve the future of dance in :anada and even the future of Canadian : lture. Fernand Nault School Director Les Grands Ballets Canadiens Montreal he Editor: as most impressed with the last issue of ::: a- c e in Canada and wish to congratulate ~u for your fine work. ' I may, I would like to correct an important r in Michael Crabb's article on page 3 of : r last issue: ='' avi ng decided that there were :· _bl ems' with the Department of Cultural .:i.-- ·rs, Ludmilla Chiriaeff decided to work •ou gh the Ministry of Education. In :- -ci ple she gained recognition for dance as :-B f t he varied options Quebec high school . _:Jents are entitled to select to complete the -~=-~isite number of credits for their diploma. - roug h this avenue she has found a way to ; - - g her teaching into one Montreal school : y ear and has hopes of seeing the -a gem ent extended to other high schools -: even into CEGEPs." 5 ce I am in disagreement with some who a-: the National Ballet School to have a -:-opoly on the teaching of ballet in : a-a a, it is evident that I would not want to -a•e he same mistake in Quebec. Rather e " cultural imperialism" that Michael :·;;. o mentions , Les Grands Ballets - a-a iens is always frying to involve others in the achievement of mutual aims. Many Quebec companies will testify to this. innate sense of dance, we have something to be proud of. For us, to wish that ballet courses were offered by all school boards (or even several) would be both unrealistic and self-defeating. There would be in Quebec neither enough qualified teachers nor enough outlets for graduates. This is why, despite requests from other school boards, we have refused to develop this program beyond the Ecole secondaire Pierre Laporte. It is true that we have the obligation and the duty to proceed with the course (when the students graduate from high school) at one CEGEP, because academic and professional education requires its development be a natural progression of the student's educational pattern . The challenge we face in this age of radical development in the dance from modernism and jazz and the quest in Canada to discover our authentic expression and the desired stylistic reflections would only be smothered by the institution of a national school at this time. One other correction: I do not have "problems" with the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. I have tried for a long time to find a method to accelerate the development of professional dancers, and since traditionally such development takes place through a residential school associated with a ballet company, it was with the assistance of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs that I sought to find a solution. But the many problems of language, cost, distance, and religion, among others, made it an impossible goal to achieve within the necessary time span. And, one day, came the opportunity to include professional ballet instruction in a totally different framework, and this through the channel of the Ministry of Education. Such an opportunity I could not refuse. Ludmilla Chiriaeff Founder and Director Les Grands Ballets Canadiens Montreal To the Editor: If the Canada Council desires to manufacture uniform dancers and training instructors, this is definitely not a blessing! It is, rather, a c'o stly -way of bringing the current development of dance in this country to a standstill. As wonderfully knowledgeable as Mr. Brinson's report may sound, it hardly relates to the pedagogical thinking of this continent at this time. Unfortunately, the report does not consider Canada's or any other country's aesthetic concerns or development in the dance. It is typical of centralization plans to be preoccupied with the financial and institutional rather than with the more delicate issues of the discipline. As much as we respect the National Ballet School in Toronto, no school in Canada is prepared to be the absolute centre of diffusion of the dance for Canadians. It is universally acknowledged that the National Ballet School, now in its third decade, is an excellent satellite to the United Kingdom's classical schools, which as such, we do admire. It is a valuable and appropriate training for those who desire it, but ought not to be considered as the Canadian school. As long as the three companies, their affiliated schools and other schools in Canada remain true to their original purpose of developing autonomous princ iples of dance, training dancers in their own tradition and searching for proper expression of their There is no reason for North America to follow the mistakes or successes of the European systems. The problem is to allow the source of creativity to flow. We need only look to our neighbours in the United States . New York is a mecca for the dance. Aesthetic identity has been achieved for different individuals and different companies without any super-structure of regimentation. It has been achieved by the sensitivity of creative geniuses. This is the problem for the dance in Canada or anywhere. So what is this centralization about? Seda Zare, Director The Montreal Professional Dance Centre To the Editor: Congratulations for presenting a wellrounded picture of the different points of view on where Canada Council , the National Ballet, Royal Winnipeg Ballet and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Grant Strate and other respected members of the national dance community stand on dance for Canadians. Congratulations to Canada Council for leaving itself open to criticism. In my mind, growth only emerges from debate and confrontation of all factions, placing agreements and disagreements in open view. As a dancer and choreographer, I am not as Mr. Haskell says in the Brinson Report "only interesting as a branch of the theatre." I am a visual artist working in visual poetry with performing as a by-product. Important yes, but none the less a by-product of my work. Canada is a young country; our artists and artistry will grow naturally. To try and become established by making the training of our children too uniform is against my principleip. The training of good teachers is a problem~ not only for ballet. The money good teachers make is ludicrous, but then good teachers are easy to take advantage of because their reward is more than money and success. We all have a lot of soul searching to do and must spend years developing dance and dance artists to the best of our ability, reaffirming the right to choreogra,ph for ourselves. Let us not make strong, hard rules for the creative ones of the future . Our children are strong but not all the same. Bringing European standards of dance (ballet) td this country gift-wrapped as the only vehicl~ for creative choreographic expression is a mistake. We have time: the Brinson Report should be filed under "Opinion" in the archives and be read aloud 75 years from now. Paula Ross Director, Paula Ross Dancers Vancouver 25 Academia et Ecole Superieure de Danse des ~nr1r II SToronto5 h I u~er coo 1n once BRANKSOME HALL JULY 5 - JULY 31 Professional Faculty - Kirov Method: Diana Jablokova-Vorps, Artistic Director, Mari Aslamazova, Marcia Crossley, lolanda Pascaluta-Giurgiu, Bernd Juche, Jon Rodriguez, Elena Zhuravleva, Dorothy Carter - National Dances, James Colistro - Jazz Ballet COURS D'ETE Dance Curriculum Includes: Classical Ballet Technique, Pointe, Variations, Partnering , Character, National Dances, Jazz Ballet, Workshops And Adult Body Placement Classes for Elementary, Intermediate, Advance Students and Professionals. Teachers Seminar: In Internationally Acclaimed Kirov Method Residence Accommodations For Students 10 Years Old And Up For Brochure Write To: Carl D. Vorps , General Manager, Toronto Summer School In Dance 15 Armour Blvd., Toronto, Ont. M5M 389 Tel.: (416) 489-7597 Irr The 5022 Colbrook, Montreal Telephone: 489-4959 ~ D.A.N.C.E. Dance Adventurers New Canadian Extravagation Workshops, T. V. Interview Lunches, Forums, Grid Performances, Evening Performances I.= ONUP And find that item you've looked for everywhere else. Or just browse yourself silly in our brand new inventory of books that are all about the same things. Theatre and Dance! Toronto, June 7-12/76 15 Dance Laboratorium - 155a George St. A space - 85 St. Nicholas St. St. Paul's Centre - 121 Avenue Rd. Information 869-1589 Ballet classique, Danse moderne et Espagnole, Jazz Inscription, Registration August 2 to 28 / 2 au 28 aout 10 A.M. to/a 8 P.M. =-I Upstairs at 659 Yonge St. Toronto M4Y 1Z9 (416) 922-7175 FACULTY OF FINE ARTS DEPARTMENT OF DANCE Summer Session '76 - July 5 to August 13 SPECIAL DANCE STUDIO Vancouver Season FA/DA 105/205/305/405 July 7 - 10 Queen Elizabeth Playhouse (Not limited to University Applicants) Studio class in modern dance technique; ballet technique; pas de deux and variations ; improvisation and composition; modern and ballet repertory; yoga; mime; Spanish dance;jazz ; character. Students with no dance background will not be accepted except in very special cases. Instructors: Carol Anderson, Yves Cousineau, Terrill Maguire, Diane Mimura, Paula Moreno, Mme. Ludmila Moskvina, Sandra Neels, Frau Thiele, Anne Wooten. DANCE AND MUSIC Guest Artists at the Montreal Olympics July 21 - 25 656 15th Street, FA/DA 210 West An investigation of vanguard music in the twentieth century as it might apply to dance composition. Vancouver, B.C. V7T 2S7 (604) 926-8181 NON-WESTERN CLASSIC & FOLK DANCE FORMS FA/DA 212 The course will concentrate on a survey of dances of selected non-western regions using both theoretical and studio approaches. Guest lectures , films, recordings. INTRODUCTION TO MOVEMENT EXPLORATION: THE YOUNG CHILD FA/DA 217 (Not limited to University Applicants) The course is designed for teachers and therapists who seek to increase children's creative powers. Intensive full credit courses are also offered in the Departments of Film, Music, Theatre and Visual Arts. For further information and applications, please write or phone: Director of Summer Studies Faculty of Fine Arts York University 4 700 Keele Street Downsview, Ontario M3J 1P3 (416) 667-3636 Contemporary Dancers, Winnipeg Summer School '76 August 9 - 27 Three-week course in Modern Dance Faculty under the direction of Rachel Browne, artistic director Course also includes classes in repertoire, ballet and jazz. P.O. Box 1764, Winnipeg, Monitobo RJC 229 (204)943-4597 THE KINGSTON COMMUNITY BALLET ASSOCIATION BOX 1481 - KINGSTON, ONTARIO K7L 5C7 926-6645 Director: Leonard Stepanick • Summer Olympic School 5 to 30 July • Teachers: F. Lojekova Arab, B. Scott, J. Shietz, D. Di Franco • Comprehensive Ballet Classes • Special Work Shops from visiting Dance companies. ANNA PAVLOVA Oleg Kerensky/$8.95 The first big objective study of Pavlova ever attempted in English. Kerensky draws upon prime sources to present his fascinating picture of Pavlova the artist and woman . Black & white photographs A DICTIONARY OF BALLET TERMS Leo Kersley & Janet Sinclalr/$5.95 This popular reference has been thoroughly revised and up-dated. "Everything any ballet goer will ever want to know about basic ballet technique is here . ... An admirable book" DANCE AND DANCERS 108 pages/over 100 drawings/index Thomas Nelson & Sons (Canada) Limited 81 Curlew Drive Don Mills, Ontario • ~IS Smith School of - Programme of the George Brown College of Applied Arts and Technology nee Front Street East ronto, Canada M5E 1 B8 • 6) 363-9945 SUMMER SCHOOL IN TORONTO June 28 - August 14, 1976 LOIS SMITH DAVID ADAMS DONALD HIMES KENNETH LIPITZ LUCY KENT-HARRISON The school will offer an opportunity for Junior and Senior students, age 9 years and over, to improve their techniques during the summer months. Classes will be held in large, airy studios and the programme includes Ballet, Pointe, Character, National, Modern, Spanish, Jazz and Repertoire. Performances of Coppelia will be given by senior students at Blue Mountain. (e)The ~t. National t Ballet f School Betty Oliphant Director and Principal ANNUAL TEACHERS' COURSE Extended to two-week period JUNE 21 to JULY 2, 1976 Programme includes: Basic training Advanced teaching techniques Children's work Cecchetti Syllabi Pointe work Variations Pas de Deux Character dancing The National Ballet Of Canada GUEST TEACHERS: Montreal July 11, 13, 14 Salle Wilfrid Pelletier Place des Arts New York July 20 - August 8 Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center Toronto August 16 - 21 Ontario Place St. John's, Newfoundland September 22 - 25 The Newfoundland Arts and Culture Centre Halifax, Nova Scotia September 29 - October 2 Rebecca Cohn Auditorium Dalhousie Arts Centre Charlottetown, P.E.1. October 5 & 6 Confederation Centre of the Arts Fredericton, New Brunswick October 8 & 9 The Playhouse Sherbrooke, Quebec October 12 & 13 Salle Maurice O'Bready Cultural Centre University of Sherbrooke 157 King Street East, Toronto, Ontario MSC 1G9 (416) 362-1041 Margaret Saul, Fellow and Examiner, I.S.T.D. (C.S.B.) Lynn Wallis, Ballet Mistress of The Royal Ballet School (for last week of course only) Tuition Accommodation & Meals $280.00 $220.00 APPLICATION MUST BE RECEIVED BY: JUNE 4, 1976 For further information write: The Registrar, The National Ballet School, 111 Maitland Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4Y 1E4 DANCE INTO SUMMER 7" at the Elliot Lake Centre d'Elliot Lake TELEPHONE 255-5343 Eleventh Annual Summer School of the Arts Summer School of Dance 28 June - 13 August an interdisciplinary approach to MUSIC, DANCE, and the ARTS Our dance program is designed for the serious student and includes: Ballet (including R.A.D. syllabus) Modern Character Jazz Variations Music BARBARA COOK, A.R.A.D. , A.T.C. and staff For Detailed Information Write: The Director, Elliot Lake Centre 180 Mississauga, Elliot Lake,Ontario Two Sessions: J un e 14 - 26. 1976. August 9 - 2 , 1976 Director: Flore nce Skinner Featuring as instructors : David M oroni, Royal Winn ipeg Ba llet Raymond Goulet, ~ orth Dakota Ballet Company Andre Lucas, Les Ballets J azz Patricia Crail, I. S.T. D. Examiner, England A comprehensive su mmer study in Advanced , Intermediate and Elementa ry levels of Ballet, J azz, Modern Dance and National. For information write: Century II Dancers, Summer Scho ol of Dance, #304, 615-57 Avenue S.W. , Calgary, Al berta, T 2V OHS DANSKINS ARE NOT JUST FOR DANCINC DOUBLY DELIGHTFUL LEOTARDS. MADE FOR DANCERS YET IMPECCABLY STYLED TO GO WITH ANYTHING FROM DEN IMS TO EVEN ING CLOT H ES AND LOOK POSITIVE LY SMASHING. AT FINE STORES OR WRITE FOR BROC H URE DC. DANSKIN INC, 1114 AVE . OF THE AMER ICAS, N.Y., N.Y. 10036. DANSJ<IN®

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