Parade's End

...When the Met set out to stage its new Parade, it first turned to none other than Nureyev to mount and star in it He took the offer, but eventually withdrew amid vague rumblings of artistic incompatibility The job was parceled out to Veredon as choreographer, and the Joffrey's Gary Chryst as a Harlequin given greater prominence than in Massine Chryst is an inspired and highly original dancer, especially remarkable for leaps that billow to fullness at their peak and hold their perfect shape through a sailing descent His beauty is no less evident in the simple act of walking, as his pointed feet articulate the precise form of each step Veredon's use of Chryst's talents made for Parade's most (indeed, only) memorable moments...

...The bill came full circle in the final bars of the Ravel, when Chryst's Harlequin materialized from the lurid shades of Hockney's nocturnal garden to lead Hilda Harris as the Child back toward the safety of home and mama, Harris, who acted with conviction and keen insight and sang with unfaltering assurance, was the double of the little boy from the opening bars of Parade The closure was too dearly bought, however The Poulenc Tiresias and especially the enchanted Ravel had left the ballet's witticisms light years behind...

...The company must keep a small stable of dancers, yet they rarely have much to do For job enrichment-or simply to prevent the dancers from dying of boredom-the Metropolitan Opera Ballet has developed a program involving occasional guest appearances, although never on the overwhelming homestage In Parade, for the first time that I can recall, the Met dancers had a section of the program to themselves-and then, what with a guest m the single featured role and the low-candlepower choreography, they were denied any true opportunity for display...

...Poor Parade* For all the luster of its pedigree, audiences nowadays treat it as a stepchild When the Joffrey Ballet mounted its 1979 "Homage to Diaghilev" program on Broadway, Parade warmed up an indifferent house that did not spring to life for Rudolf Nureyev until his three Nijinsky numbers...

...The real losers were the Met's dancers, for whom Parade could have been something of a homecoming With new dance ensembles mushrooming in every loft and warehouse, and the major companies gaining ever-increasing visibility, the status of a service troupe like the Metropolitan Opera Ballet is bound to decline Dyed-m-the-wool balletomanes don't waste their time at the opera, and more serious opera buffs can do without infusions of ballet (Even when the 19th-century spectaculars for the Paris Opera are revived virtually uncut, the ballets written for them are routinely dropped despite their serving a clear dramatic function, as in Verdi's Don Carlos...

...Satie's score, opening with a sombre chorale, was conducted at the Met with a magisterial command of the idiom by Frenchman Manuel Rosenthal Harlequin advanced from the dark depths of the stage, guiding a little boy through a desolation illuminated by klieg lights, a tattered Tricolor flapped from an encircling barbed wire fence in a gusty wind At a wave of the clown's hand a crimson curtain descended...

...In its Pans premiere, Parade brought together the elegant musical clowning of Erik Satie and the cheeky dance inventions of Leonide Massine in Cubist decor by Pablo Picasso, the Met's version boasted designs by our widely admired British contemporary David Hockney and fresh choreography by Gray Veredon It quickly became apparent that this adaptation of the multimedia collage-one of the seminal events in the history of Modernism-was not born of a nagging artistic need to cast its bright, disorienting impact in more current terms, but of the wish to integrate it into a larger, more harmonious whole Director John Dexter supplied the governing esthetic Peopled with figures from the Pans version, the other two panels of the triptych and from Dexter's own imagination, the Parade at the Met was a curtain raiser No one could walk away from it imagining it complete unto itself, and lest the dullest miss the point, there was a direct segue (no curtain calls, no intermission) into Tiresias...

...These disadvantages notwithstanding, they fell to their assignment with high energy and polish Still, they were all too clearly the back-up for the main attractions There was more striking dancing to be seen m the two little operas that followed Catherine Malfitano, her radiant soprano soaring, ripped off a patch of torrid flamenco, and Hockney's Grandfather Clock, Teapot and Chinese Cup bobbed merrily through the nursery of the spellbound child These not so "incidental" dances (designated as such in the program) were the work of Stuart Sebastian, who deserves a significant share of the credit for making the entire evening light-footed and nimble...

...at no point in the shenanigans at the Met did the director lay himself open to the charge of going haywire...

...Next season, Dexter returns to the Met to superintend an all-Stravinsky triple bill that will include the groundbreaking ballet Le sacre du printemps Perhaps the dancers will be given more challenging feats to perform Whoever is brought in to choreograph can hope to have a somewhat freer hand than Veredon had with Parade...

...On Dance PARADE'S END BY M ANATOLE GUREWITSCH Jean Cocteau's scenario for the 1917 ballet Parade mentions that often the passersby applauding free sidewalk previews of circus attractions do not realize the real show, the one the managers want them to buy a ticket for, is on view inside the tent It is unlikely that those who attended the Metropolitan Opera's recent triple bill of 20th-century works under the umbrella title, Parade, made the same mistake The evening's entertainment began with a new staging of Cocteau's ballet itself, followed by Francis Poulenc's setting of Guillaume Apolliaire's absurdist farce Les mamelles de Tiresias and Maurice Ravel's miraculous fantasy L 'enfant et les sortileges, to a text by Colette...

...In another anticipation, a black cat hopped out of a man-sized top hat, evoking both the cartoons of B Kliban and the felines to come in Ravel's Enfant Where Massine had a lyric pair of Acrobats, Veredon had four tumblers (Marcus Bugler, Ricardo Costa, Virgil Pearson-Smith, and Joey Reginald) hurl themselves through heart-stopping aerial flips with terrific abandon For reasons unknown, soldiers in gas masks infiltrated the crowd amid the commotion, dispersing as unobtrusively as they came...

...A Fat Ballerina in drag (Roberto Medina) was carted on stage, 1 f memory serves, in a wheelbarrow He popped into view with glossy red and blue breasts, prefiguring Therese in Tiresias, who would revolt against male domination by opening her blouse to let fly the red and blue balloons in her cleavage, bursting them with a cigarette lighter, and assuming the identity of a sporty young man about town (All this is spelled out in Apollinaire's farce...

...the atmosphere livened with sounds of typewriters, sirens and ragtime, and the stage began to swarm with circus folk and onlookers, some familiar, some not...

...That wrong move was nevertheless a trifling tactical error The triple bill as a whole achieved, thanks to Dexter, a flow that the selection of materials in itself would by no means have guaranteed To that extent, the adaptation of Cocteau's little ballet was a complete success, but on its own merits it was very thin, perhaps inevitably There was little room for a choreographer of distinction to shine m a venture so prepatterned by the director in every critical detail Nureyev, God knows, is hardly the most distinguished of choreographers, and the imposition of Dexter's ideas was too inhibiting even for him The task facing Veredon, who is a more or less unknown quantity, was simply to orchestrate entrances and exits, with a few little turns in between...

...Kermit Love pulled off the trickier task of building Picasso's semianthropomorphic architectural cartoons for the Manager in Evening Dress and the Manager from New York in three dimensions His pieces rightly received the signal honor of being placed on exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art's colossal Picasso exhibition...

...Unlike Parade, though, there may be a jinx on Sacre It was the Big Bang ,and Stravinsky's score retains its power to dumbfound Nijinsky's 1913 original treatment of it for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, on the other hand, vanished practically overnight, and none of the many who have tried to recapture in dance Stravinsky s savagerv have had a day's luck with it since The possessed Nijinsky actually did unleash the thunderclap of scandal that the originators of Parade set out to duplicate four y ears later with a spark of wit and a few firecrackers Their jeud esprit may well have fallen short of Nijinsky's more grandiose ambitions, but the fact remains that Parade was well crafted and has survived...

...The Chinese Conjurer (Dave Roeger) bounded out in a costume copied from Picasso to do a routine reminiscent of Massine's For the dishy Little American Girl, the Met had Twins (Naomi Marritt and Antoinette Peloso), who registered solely for the oddity of their doubleness, not at all for their dancing An Elegant Woman (Pauline Andrey) worked the footlights like a model on a runway...

...The excision was unfortunate, because on Broadway the self-styled ballet realiste had been the single piece genuinely worth seeing Although the incisive Massine steps were not performed with uniform excellence, visually that production was the evening's one unqualified success Edward Burbridge contributed a sharp, vibrant realization of Picasso's curtain and scenery Willa Kim brilliantly recreated the costumes for the paper-cutout Chinese Conjuror (whose vaulting stride, in Gary Chryst's portrayal, was not matched by sufficient aplomb par terre), for the enskied Acrobats (Starr Danias and Russell Sultzbach), and for the Proustian Little American Girl (Donna Cowen, who dished up apple-pie innocence with a-la-mode depravity a natural-born Lolita...

...Producers can take a hint The show was taped for TV (it aired on PBS' Great Performances last March ? and is surely destined for countless repeats) without Parade, and viewers coast to coast only saw Nureyev as Petrouchka, the Spectre of the Rose, and Debussy's postmeridian Faun...

...Apart from brief interludes by Chryst, Veredon's three-part evening scored its chief points not through movement but through illustration and the announcement of visual themes...