Ballet: Two for the Season

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Perhaps it is because the U.S. has entered a new era of romanticism that exalts esthetic feeling and the passive enjoyment of sensuous spectacle. Perhaps it is because the dance has developed artistic strength and social consciousness. Whatever the cause, the cheerful effect is clear. American audiences in recent years have been enjoying a steady boom in good ballet.

Things new, exciting and theatrical are rare in the arts at any time. At the moment, most of the theatricality seems superficial and hastily pasted on; not so in dance, which constantly erupts with interior energy and hot creativity. New companies are being born. Old companies are being rejuvenated. Ballet groups are crisscrossing the country, offering a bewildering assortment of dances, some fiery and full of meaning, some backed by rock music and psychedelic lighting, some conventional and harmonious. Two groups are currently drawing more attention and stirring more delight than any others. One is John Cranko's rollicking Stuttgart Ballet (TIME, June 20), now being seen by U.S. audiences on a 15-city cross-country tour. The other is New York's brand-new dance group, Eliot Feld's American Ballet Company, which has just presented its first season in Brooklyn.

Stars from Stuttgart. Cranko's company has chosen to concentrate on three full-length works, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet and Eugene Onegin, all richly staged and costumed and all choreographed by Cranko. He handles large groups of dancers with remarkable dramatic effect. But the Stuttgart Ballet has been devastating audiences all across the U.S. mainly because of the dancing of two new stars, Marcia Haydée and Richard Cragun.

Strong and effortless, Cragun tactfully puts a matinee idol's figure at the service of his roles, making Romeo, Petruchio and even Onegin believable and remarkably affecting. The marvel, though, is Marcia Haydée. Experts correctly point out that she is not a great dancer technically. Most would turn puce at the thought of mentioning her in the same breath with Margot Fonteyn. But few dancers within memory have projected the rangi of whims and wishes or invoked the delicate interplay of emotions that flow from the least gesture of Haydée's body, the slightest tilt of her head. Her Juliet is funny, touching and finally heartbreaking. Her Tatiana melds waif with woman so successfully that the pools of bathos beneath the surface of the Pushkin-cum-Tchaikovsky Eugene Onegin never once spill over. Her Kate is a farouche wallflower on the surface, a child within. Kate's trustful obedience, when it is finally granted to Petruchio at the end of a rough-and-tumble parody in which Cragun and Haydée hilariously demolish the pas de deux, seems an emotional accolade, a lover's gift of infinite worth.