Word: ballets
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Once meals are completed, the average evening on the town tends to turn into an early snooze. Chinese opera and ballet are available, but themes are heavily propagandized. Atop the Tung Fang is a club boasting a small orchestra. The tunes run to Peking hit-parade items or swingy outdated Western numbers. The wall decor consists mostly of choice quotations from the Chairman-in Chinese, of course. Bar girls and prostitutes, once a feature of nightclubs in China, are no longer in evidence...
Dame Margot Fonteyn is indisputably a prima ballerina assoluta. The Stuttgart Ballet now ranks among Europe's best dance companies. Its director and chief choreographer, John Cranko, is possibly the reigning master of story ballet. Put them all together and what do you get? What you get, sad to say, is a campy, overripe, overdecorated disaster called Poème de I'Extase, which was given its American première last week at the Metropolitan Opera House...
...dancing is easier to learn than even basic ballet or ballroom dancing. For one thing, it is usually a solo affair, unlike ballroom dancing where a performance depends on one's partner. "It's really very much like learning to play the castanets," says former Tap Star Betty Bruce. "Once you've got the basics, there's nothing to it. If you don't have much talent and want to do some dancing, tap's the best thing...
...stories would have been filmed as animated cartoons. That would have been an error. The pale palette, the twinkling brevity could never have been duplicated, even by Disney. Fortunately a British gentleman of Potterian sympathy has found an ideal method of adaptation-the dance. Using members of the Royal Ballet, Choreographer Frederick Ashton has literally given Peter Rabbit and Tales of Beatrix Potter a new dimension. Jeremy Fisher the Frog, Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle-Duck, Mr. Fox and Co. spring and caper like Steiff toys given the spark of life. Around them spreads England's green and pleasant Lake...
...dialogue is heard in the film; ballet, as always, speaks for itself. From time to time the camera leaves the animals to visit their creator, a young and pretty child who rebels against her antifeminist era with quill pen and paintbox. Here, too, all is pantomime; the ticking of the clock, the stern, wordless parents, the rustle of mice in a cage all express volumes...