Les Noces close up

 



Che-soo, po-che-soo, Nas-tasee-noo, che-s00 po-che-soo Ti-mo-fye-yev-ne roo-soo....

I don't think I ever expected that Nastasya's tresses would brush right against my wrist. This was Les Noces in close-up. It was Stephanie's Sound Moves conference at Roehampton and dancers from the Royal Ballet (not the group here, rather Christina Arestis as the bride) who were dancing phrases at a session on Sunday. It was rather thrilling to hear the Consecration of the Bride broken down in this way: to hear phrases danced without piano, and then with. "Can you do it more slowly?", asked Stephanie. "No - we can only do it, if we do it fast". The unaccompanied stabbing pointe has a mesmeric quality.

It was a terrific weekend - it ended with a launch of Maria Ratanova's new edition of the Les Noces score, drawing on the evidence of a thousand handwritten pages of sketches which Stravinsky had later autographed and given to friends around the world, many of whom didn't realise their significance.

I'm writing about the weekend for Dancing Times, so not much I can say here. But there were fascinating moments: video of Christophers Wheeldon and Hampson in a Dalcroze class when they were both aged 12; a video of a reconstruction of Pas d'Acier; a paper by my old classmate Kyoko Murakami on changing piano accompaniment styles in the ballet class.

It was essentially a musician's conference: when I interviewed him, Simon Morrison of Princeton used the word choreomusicology to describe an emerging subdiscipline. But I came away with the impression that ballet is more resistant than theatre or opera to the fruits of scholarly insight.

It's a shame. I know from Deborah Bull and Bruce Sansom just how helped they have been by Millicent Hodson: how insight into a work's cultural context has transformed the energy they bring to performance. I've been told that the Royal Ballet's most recent performances of Enigma Variations were taught from a choreology score simpliciter, with dancers being left to guess the context for themselves.

Here's a thought: use one cast as an experimental group, and the other as control group. Give one cast a full sense of background, and teach the other cast the work without telling them abouut its context. And let's see if there's a difference.....

Roehampton University Stravinsky date base