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But another new work was disastrously pretentious, a complex, often embarrassing brouhaha of heavy symbolism, mythology and sex. It told the story of Greek mythology's Tiresias, who begins as a man, is transformed into a woman, then back again. Inexplicable characters dashed in and out of the ballet, including copulating snakes and a tiny girl equipped with brass breastplates, whose face is blue-black on one side, chalk-white on the other. The production's one real merit: the sensuous dancing of dark-haired Violetta Elvin as Tiresias the Woman, and especially the moment when her partner lifts the ballerina and moves her across stage as she takes huge, slow strides as if she were running in a dream landscape.
The Real Home. John Cranko's Lady and the Fool was a romantic period piece set to little-known Verdi music—the story of an imperious beauty, well danced by statuesque Beryl Grey, who spurns aristocratic lovers and goes off with a clown. If the choreography seemed unoriginal and the story flimsy, the dandies were properly elegant, the flirts suitably flouncy, the clown appealingly sad.
All in all, the Sadler's Wells foray into modernism so far has produced nothing to match the austere abstractions of the New York City Ballet, the Times Square gaieties and psychological thrillers of Ballet Theater. But Dame Ninette's charming people are truly at home and unsurpassed in the dazzling Never-Never-Land of romantic ballet.