BALLET: Stanley Peskin
THE setting in Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus (1874) is Vienna and the river is undoubtedly the Danube, but although Ronald Hynd choreographs the famous waltz, the setting and river that come to mind in the quintessentially English Rosalinda (1978) — Pact Ballet’s first production of the year — are Mayfair and the Thames.
Hynd sees Strauss’ opera in dance, and the ballet he has made is quirky, droll and sometimes bitchy as he sets the foibles and eccentricities of upper-class circles dancing. Rosalinda is clearly a work of artifice; apart from the skilful pastiche of classical ballet, the influences of pantomime and silent movies (Mack Sennett and the Keystone Cops in the two policemen and the jailer) are strongly felt.
Both Hynd’s choreography and Peter Docherty’s designs draw amusingly on the poses found in fashion magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue in the 1920s.
All these elements have been harnessed together in a work that is smooth and beguiling. John Lanchbery’s adaptation of Strauss’ melodious score for Die Fledermaus is highly effective. Whether Strauss’ score is called Die Fledermaus or Il Pipistrello (the Italians have a way with nasty bats), or Rosalinda, it is an intoxicating invitation to dance as romanzas, drinking songs, seductive waltzes, and spirited gallops follow one another in unceasing invention.
And to one of the loveliest passages in the score (the closing pages of Strauss’ second act), Hynd has set a prison pas de deux as a tender reconciliation for the temporarily estranged Rosalinda and Eisenstein.
It is tempting to view Rosalinda as a homage to and send- up of silent movies; certainly the language of dance is wittily punctuated with exaggerated gestures that define character, convey a joke and contribute to the plot. On opening night at the State Theatre, the dancers not only performed for each other but for the audience, and they did so with considerable relish.
In Tanja Graafland’s performance, the amorous adventures of the heroine become the subject for a sharp yet affectionate eye. She can summon up the necessary hauteur when she is required to do so and she can make the pointing of a finger an awesome act. She wears the elegant clothes with suberb dash and she moves most gracefully in them. In the prison pas de deux which she shares with Johnny Bovang as her Eisenstein, she taps a vein of tenderness which is most moving to watch.
Bovang as her cavalier husband is equally flirtatious and funny. In the prologue, he is a hilarious skeleton and in the love duets he is splendidly romantic. Like Graafland, he is alive to the element of artifice in the ballet, and like Graafland he can animate the stylish pictures Hynd creates and bring them to vivid life.
Rosalinda is at the Johannesburg Civic Theatre on February 21 and 23 at 8pm, and on February 25 at 3pm and 8pm