Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

CLOSE UP two of the scenes three projectors threw abstract designs onto parts of the wings and backcloth. Since it was the ballet doing it, the abstract designs were rather better than the use of that adjective would lead one to expect. But Ode was not what we have been waiting to see, a cinema ballet. The projections were only part of the main theme, which was a Pirandellian concern with ultimate reality, and were not used to interpret that theme. Lifar, asking Nature to show him her secrets, was rewarded by a display that included a lot of noisy clicking on and off of electric torches, to represent her constellations, a quite beautiful dance of creatures under a fishing net, who were a river, and finally, a still more beautiful dance, against a background of the corps de ballet in sequined grey satin who diminished into similarly dressed Venetian dolls, of Massine and Nikitina behind two veils that hung down from a pole they held before them. Ode was, as the catchphrase goes, a Getting Down to Essentials, which was very evident in the first dance of Lifar when a white rope filled out geometrically the movements of his legs. Here, was said at once, is no business with characters, but with the patterns they make, the space they fill as they move, and so the dancers wore skin-tights that made them resemble the wooden figures in artists' shops and the corps de ballet, interesting for their shape, diminished into dolls of the same shape. Thus also the cinema was called in to represent flowers. One had a slight feeling that it was called in to prevent the designer having to evolve some other way of avoiding dressing his dancers as flowers, which would, of course, have been too vieux jeu for words. But cinema as a social cocktail is itself equally vieux jeu, and one had hoped 70