Instant Festival

By John T. Elson

Leave it to the New York City Ballet to come up with something novel in the way of dance spectaculars: instant festivals of new works inspired by the music of a single composer. In one heady, hectic week of June 1972, the company presented 21 original ballets, all shaped by Igor Stravinsky compositions. Last week, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Maurice Ravel's birth, City Ballet offered a unique "Homage" to that composer, with the first of three programs that will provide New York City audiences with 16 brand-new pieces of choreography (plus one untarnished oldie, La Valse).

No other company in the world would even dare this kind of paroxysm of creativity. The main reason, of course, is that no other dance troupe has resident choreographers with the inventiveness of George Balanchine or the fluency of Jerome Robbins, who will be responsible for 13 of the Homage productions. If audience reaction at a celebrity-laden gala preview can be trusted, the Homage to Ravel could well be a popular and commercial success. Whether it will have as lasting an aesthetic impact as the Stravinsky festival is another matter. That orgy of new dance is an evergreen memory to many balletomanes, and ten of the works created for it are still in the company's repertory.

Dreamy Look. Judging by the first program, the Ravel Homage may be a mixed blessing. The opening ballet was Balanchine's Sonatine, set to a Ravel piano piece of 1906. It is the sort of evanescent pas de deux that Mr. B. has created countless times in the past. As performed by Violette Verdy and Jean-Pierre Bonnefous, it has the dreamy, offhand look of an advanced studio exercise--lovely to look at but nothing substantial to remember.

Reviewing any work by Jerome Robbins these days is something of a risk. He fusses and tinkers with his choreography so much that two performances of a work are seldom the same. Robbins might want to make changes in the first and third sections of Concerto in G; the movements for soloists and the corps are marred by the too-easy theatricality that is at once his gift and curse. It is to be hoped that he will leave untouched Concerto's second section, an extended adagio pas de deux for Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins that ranks with Robbins' loveliest creations. The best of his pas de deux have a sense of intertwined intimacy. They constitute a kind of visual poetry in suggesting, through gesture and motion, the moods and mystery of the relation between man and woman. This achingly tender dance duet is greatly enhanced by the supple, lyric grace of Farrell, who has returned to the company after five years in exile, as it were, with Maurice Bejart's Ballet of the 20th Century. There is a mature queenliness now in the style of this quintessential Balanchine ballerina, and she has never danced better.

Mr. B. has a nostalgic love for the fairy-tale side of romantic Imperial ballet. That fondness has produced masterpieces -- The Nutcracker, for example -- but it can also lead to muddled fables like L'Enfant et les Sortileges (The Boy and the Sorceries). Described as a "lyric fantasy" and based on a story by Colette, L'Enfant is as much an operetta as a ballet. It requires a chorus, a quintet of singing narrators and a boy soprano. He plays a naughty child who escapes from his studies into a fantasy world of cavorting armchairs, dancing teapots, and a veritable zoo of cats, bats, frogs, squirrels and dragonflies.

Balanchine first choreographed this mixed-media event for Te`atre de Mon te Carlo in 1925, shortly after he first met Ravel. Perhaps it would have been better to let the work retreat into decent obscurity. This new production is sumptuous by City Ballet standards, but the singers are nearly incomprehensible, the Daliesque sets poorly lit and the comic effects too often unfunny.

One faltering first program does not add up to failure. After all, there are still 13 more ballets to go. Moreover, even if invention flags, there is still the delight of seeing the marvelous City Ballet dancers in fresh choreography. They respond to it with palpable zest.

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