John Percival, Theatre in My Blood. A Biography of John Cranko, London, The Herbert Press, 1983, 288 pp,?10.95.

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1 Generally speaking, this is possible for music, literature and paint- ing, since the works themselves are still accessible. Furthermore, the history of an art, in so far as it deals with the art itself and not merely with the circumstances surrounding that art and its works, must also depend on the historian's and his readers' direct acquaintance with the aesthetic nature of the works. With music history, literary history, and art history such is the case. Thus Heinrich Wolfflin in his seminal Principles of Art History draws upon the readers' personal knowledge of the paintings he discusses when expounding diachronic shifts in style. For dance, certainly where dances made before the advent of recording by notation or on film are concerned, direct aesthetic acquaintance is not possible for the modern scholar. He can experience Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps and consider its relationship to other musical works. But Nijinsky's choreography is permanently lost to him. No study of social context or of reviews or any other 'residue' can recover it. How serious this is can be demonstrated by imagining what Milton's Lycidas would seem like to modern readers if, no direct quotations surviving, we had to depend on reconstructing it from the critiques of DrJohnson, Dr Leavis, and others. Yet for most dance works of the past this is the dire situation the scholar finds himself in. Does this mean that an aesthetic history of dance before the latter part of the twentieth century is impossible? Perhaps. But one would wish to see a serious book on dance history tackle this problem, and the related problems of what form dance history should take for the works that are still only imperfectly preserved (because film distorts, and changes in technique affect reconstruction). John Percival, Theatre in My Blood. A Biography of John Cranko, London, The Herbert Press, 1983, 288 pp,? AILASTAIR MACAUI.AY In 1984 London Festival Ballet took Cranko's three-act ballet Onegin into its repertory. In 1983 Scottish Ballet acquired Cranko's Romeo and Juliet. Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet showed his very popular ballet, Pineapple Poll, in ; The Taming of the Shrew has been pre- sented by Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet since 1980; and The Lady and the Fool is being revived this year. 73 Edinburgh University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research

2 DANCE RESEARCH In terms of the national and international ballet repertoire, Cranko, who died in 1973 aged 45, remains a major figure. A sub- stantial assessment of his work and career has been due for some time. John Percival's Theatre In My Blood fills a gap. But the book will probably meet a somewhat less eager demand than when its forthcoming publication was first announced, in The subject of Cranko and his work stimulated more intense curiosity six years ago than it does now. The company that he took from provincial to international standing within a decade, the Stuttgart Ballet, regularly visited the USA between 1969 and 1979, and the UK (after Cranko's death) between 1974 and 1981; however, its last season in each country was much its least successful. In the 1980s the Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet has revived neither Card Game nor Brouillards. How is Cranko's reputation surviving the passage of the years? In his introduction Percival plausibly claims: 'that nobody at all can read what follows without learning something new about him'. To many like myself the general shape of Cranko's life was known: he was born and bred in South Africa; he joined the Sadler's Wells Ballet in 1946 where he worked particularly with Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet (and later created Britain's first full-length ballet to a commissioned score (by Benjamin Britten), The Prince of the Pagodas); in 1960 he became director of the Stuttgart Ballet, creating numerous ballets for it and taking it to enthusiastic new audiences in New York and the USSR; he died suddenly on board an aircraft on the company's return from its third American season in To this factual skeleton Percival supplies much details. As the long book unfolds its material it turns out to be partly revealing, partly absorbing, partly dull: a thorough but staid survey of Cranko's life. Like Onegin and Romeo, the book is in 'three Acts': South Africa, London, Stuttgart. 'Act One' has an unprepossessing opening in its scene one, 'Origins', which discusses Cranko's family and forbears. By page 6, I was befogged enough to have started for myself a family tree spreading through five generations of Crankos, Krankos and Krankoors. If only Percival had supplied one: as things are, the Cranko genealogy is detailed but incomplete. Once Cranko himself is alive and kicking, from scene two onwards, his zest helps the book along. The closer we are brought to him, the brighter the pages seem, as in his early letters to Hanns Ebensten; Cranko wrote from a holiday in the South of France in '47: 74

3 One sees at a glance all the blue period of Picasso - the wild horses of Chirico - the extraordinary landscapes of Dali - the Italian primitives- Botticelli... Colour intensifies, the sun dries out all the sogginess of the soul. The air glitters like diamonds and the night air is like warm honey. This gift for enthusiasm seems to have characterised most of Cranko's life. He was a humorous, lively, hardworking and naturally fast-working choreographer who directed the Stuttgart company from its canteen, read widely, lapped up cultural information, and collaborated with several composers by commissioning scores for his ballets. All this is brought before us, though padded out with perhaps too much incidental information. The many anecdotes that Percival retails indicate Cranko's extraordinary personal warmth. On the other hand, Cranko repeatedly threatened he would leave unless the directors of the Stuttgart theatre approved his decisions and supported his choices. However, Percival fails to place Cranko clearly in any context; his work is not examined in much depth. For instance, Percival tells us how Ashton had recommended Cranko in 1950 to Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine as the most suitable young choreographer to create a new work for New York City Ballet; but not that Cranko's excessive use of lifts prompted Ashton in Birthday Offering to make a pas de deux without one, 'to show that it was possible'. (He had asked one of Cranko's dancers to count how many times she was lifted in the course of one movement in a ballet. 'Thirty-five,' she reported.) Cranko as a director is said to have remembered the example of Ninette de Valois. Percival says little of what he learned from her; most of the time the reader is left to reflect that de Valois and Cranko were utterly unalike. (The Stuttgart company never became securely based in the nineteenth-century classics. Imagine de Valois running the Royal Ballet from the canteen, or being too scared to tell a dancer that he had failed his audition.) We are told of senior choreographers like Graham, Balanchine and Ashton whom Cranko especially admired, but Percival does not pursue the connections or relate Balanchine's anger at Cranko's cavalier use of music. We are not told much about the reception of Cranko's works. Percival quotes from just two critics, apart from himself: Clive Barnes and Horst Koegler. Even so, he does not quote their adverse 75

4 DANCE RESEARCH opinions. (Barnes called The Prince of the Pagodas 'essentially superficial' for instance.) Percival cites reviews, not for argued consideration or actual information, but just as watermarks of popular success. We read that in 1962 'the most respected, and feared, of German ballet critics, Horst Koegler, wrote in the Stuttgarter Zeitung that the company could look forward to a brilliant future if coming productions maintained the standards of Daphnis and Chloe:' That, however, is all Percival tells us of the standards of Daphnis and Chloe. He fails to include any of the helpfully descriptive reviews of Cranko's work by Richard Buckle; the sole, somewhat dismissive, review of his work by Edwin Denby; or that most thorough sequence of reviews of Cranko's choreography by Arlene Croce between 1970 and For the most part she is scathing; but she is also the most informative: Cranko's choreographic style is characteristically linear; mass is beyond him. You get a choreography of constant calligraphic squiggles. You get mass by multiplication and counterpoint by restless shifts of line and direction. The result is bulk without solidity and animation without energy... Also in her 1970 review 'Stuttgart Ballet: New York's Myth', from Ballet Review, Croce taxes Mozart Concerto ('a classical ballet in the style that has come down to us from Petipa through Balanchine'): 'with unsound structure in relation to the music. Cranko will begin a figure - say, the ballerina supported seriatim by a line of men. On she will go, lifted by each man in turn - until the musical pattern closes before Cranko has had a chance to complete his figure.' Percival does not mention this school of interpretation and criticism, and therefore offers no alternative analysis or account of the structure and purpose of Cranko's choreography. However, he does devote two pages to a discussion of Cranko's plotless choreography, prompted by his series of works to Vivaldi, Handel, Bach and Mozart. Pure-dance ballets were never his most successful works, because he lacked the deeper insight into musical structure that enabled his lifelong idol, George Balanchine, a skilled and trained musician, to develop a form of plotless classic dancing that provided what the Germans would call its own dramaturgy... John was always aware of Balanchine's outstanding gifts and took them as one of his models, with results that were highly beneficial - 76

5 but mostly in those ballets where he was tackling something different, not venturing on Balanchine's ground... But in the kind of ballet that relied only on pure dancing to outstanding music, although he was at least as proficient as any of his contemporaries, John did not reach the heights. In the place of formal analysis Percival depends on competitive rating. Elsewhere Percival praises Cranko as 'a supreme storyteller', but of what kind of stories? Onegin he reduced to sentimental melodrama, The Taming of the Shrew to knockabout would-be-farce, Pineapple Poll to vaudeville. If these are supreme, how much lower down the story-telling slope of Parnassus does Percival place the creators of A Folk Tale or The Dream? Did Cranko have theatre in his blood? Percival is more concerned with the blood than the theatre, with the man rather than the work. There are so many Romeos: what is Cranko's version like? Rather than say much about it, Percival tells us instead about the party on the first night. And Cranko the more private man is not treated so well. Cranko is not only responsible for the Stuttgart Ballet's celebrity, and the creator of varied ballets in the international repertoire, he is also a major influence upon many of current trends in ballet. The 'opera-story' ballet; the 'novel' ballet; the 'literary-critical' ballet; the 'farce' ballet; the 'symphonically-spiritual' ballet; and the 'interpretative' restagings of the classics, as practised by as varied a company of choreographers as Kenneth MacMillan, John Neumeier, Jiri Kylian, Ronald Hynd, Glen Tetley, Rudolf Nureyev and Peter Wright, all have a lineage that can be traced through or to Cranko. Cranko's work and his legacy still need to be much more thoroughly defined. Theatre in My Blood fills the 'Cranko' gap on the biography shelf, but more is needed. When a critic turns to biography, it is fair to hope that the biography will be critical, seriously so. Theatre In My Blood does too little to satisfy this hope. 77