At the Ballet
THE B.B.C. THEATRE ORCHESTRA
(Leader, S. KNEALE KELLEY )
Conductor, LESLIE WOODGATE
Introduced by JOHN WATT mCHAIKOVSKY'S Sleeping Beauty Ballet was
produced in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century; the music of La Boutique Fantasque was made into a ballet and produced in the twentieth. The difference between these two as aptly representing the old and the new conception of ballet has been well expressed by M. Fokine , in a letter to The Times in 1914. He says ' The new ballet rejects the conventions of the older ballet.... with its artificial form of dancing on the point of the toe, with the feet turned out, dressed in short bodices, with the figure tightly laced in stays and with a strictly established system of steps, gestures and attitudes. If we look at the best productions of sculptural and pictorial art from the point of view of the choreographer of the old school thorpughly versed in the rules of traditional gesticulation and of dancing with the toes turned out, we shall find that the marble gods of Greece stood in entirely wrong attitudes..... If we are to be true to the rules of the older ballet we must turn our backs on the treasures of beauty accumulated by the genius of mankind during thousands of years and declare them all to be wrong.'