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Music: Royal Eggs

3 minute read
William Bender

For the past 23 years, visits to Manhattan by London’s Royal Ballet have become a springtime ritual. In most cases, the company’s programming has become ritualistic too: 19th century warhorses like Swan Lake and Giselle, plus a generous dash of contemporary works like The Dream and The Two Pigeons by the Royal’s longtime director Sir Frederick Ashton.

The company’s current six-week stand at Lincoln Center, however, has a special point of interest. It is its first under the directorship of Kenneth MacMillan, 42, an Ashton disciple who is best known for his full-length Romeo and Juliet, and who succeeded his mentor in the fall of 1970. For the occasion, the company is sporting two new MacMillan pieces. Alas, together they lay two of the biggest eggs of the New York ballet season.

> Triad seems to be about a triangular love relationship in which a girl (Antoinette Sibley) breaks up an affair between two male homosexuals (Anthony Dowell and Wayne Eagling). The program reveals, however, that the boys are brothers. Fraternal love is admittedly difficult to convey these days, but in this short work MacMillan has compounded the problem by his cramped and largely uninteresting choreography.

> Anastasia is an admirably ambitious but ultimately unconvincing full-length ballet about Tsar Nicholas II’s youngest daughter Lynn Seymour who, by some accounts, escaped execution at the hands of the Bolsheviks and as Anna Anderson spent years unsuccessfully trying to prove that she was indeed the Grand Duchess Anastasia. The first two acts, using music by Tchaikovsky, pro vide a touching but repetitive romantic-ballet picture of Anastasia’s life prior to the October revolution. The final act is a jarring change to a heavily psycho logical modern-dance style (set to a dreary electronic introduction and Martinu’s sweet and sour Fantaisies Symphoniques). A distraught Anna, apparently living in a mental ward, relives the past as she imagines or remembers it. As to whether Anna was an impostor, no one knows for sure, including, unfortunately, MacMillan.

The disappointment of these new ballets is somewhat redeemed by such familiar delights as Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev in Romeo and Juliet. But generally the work of the company betrays a certain unease. It may be that MacMillan and his dancers have not yet struck the right working relationship. If so, MacMillan did not improve matters by staying in London, leaving esprit, not to mention foot work, to others.

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