Word: ballets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...haired little woman, smiling before the skirl of applause. As it drummed on, she leaped from the stage like a 20-year-old ballerina. "You can't imagine," said 71-year-old Marie Rambert, "with what fear and trembling we came here." Occasion: the U.S. debut of the Ballet Rambert, Britain's oldest dance company...
Although Britain's Royal Ballet is much better known to the public, the 33-year-old Rambert company is more revered by balletomanes as the most important modern breeding ground of British choreographers and dancers. At Jacob's Pillow, the company presented one contemporary work, Kenneth MacMillan's Laiderette, plus a full-length Giselle, long a specialty of the house. Neither as grand in its effects nor as fiery in its execution as the Royal Ballet, the Rambert version demonstrated a warmly intimate style that emphasized reality instead of fantasy, dramatic clarity instead of pyrotechnics...
...less serious but more widely ballyhooed British dance product was also on display in London last week: the first ballet of Playwright Noel Coward, titled London Morning. The 32-minute work was commissioned by Britain's Festival Ballet and was suggested to him, said Coward solemnly, by the nursery jingle, "Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?" To a tinkly, tearoom blend of Coward tunes, the curtain rose on a fantasticated façade of Buckingham Palace, at which an ice-cream-suited American was directing a battery of cameras. In quick succession, an Indian girl, a trio of tarts...
Enthusiastically applauded by a dressy first -night audience, the ballet was drubbed by the critics. "No amount of balletic license," said the Financial Times, "can really excuse this parade of cliche and low comedy." But Playwright-Composer-Actor Coward had an answer: "If I wrote for the critics, I would not be so happy-or so successful...
Died. Vittorio Podrecca, 76, creator of the Rome-based Piccoli puppet theater, a group of 800 sprightly marionettes (manipulated by 23 minutely trained humans) who parodied human behavior from bullfights to ballet, charmed European and U.S. audiences in their grand tours in the '30s; in Geneva...