MOTHER OF BRITISH BALLET

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33095, 9 December 1972, Page 10

MOTHER OF BRITISH BALLET

Quicksilver. An autobiography by Marie Rambert. Macmillan. 231 pp. (Reviewed by T.T.)

Dame Marie Rambert, now 84, is undoubtedly the mother of British ballet. Its subtle wit, imagination and invigorating freshness came to life in the tiny Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill Gate, under her direction. The stamp of Marie Rambert spread to bigger, more affluent companies, in England and the West through her young choreographers. Frederick Ashton took it to the Royal Ballet (then the Sadlers Wells Ballet); Antony Tudor to the United States, and Celia Franca to Canada. The best of her dancers and designers from the 1930 s onwards graduated

from her workshop-school and company to other ballets. Marie Rambert was always short of funds and.she had to watch her most promising artists go, with a mixture of pride and sadness, when she could not provide them with the advanced opportunities or pay they needed to progress. Looking back, she says she wonders how her company survived. But it must be very satisfying to know that some of the best choreographers and teachers in the West owe their success to herself. “Mim,” as her pupils called her affectionately, was a hard-driving teacher and a great one who could bring out talent where others failed.

Her witty and warm-hearted autobiography goes back much farther than her efforts in helping to establish ballet in Britain in the 19205. It begins with her childhood in Poland and her obsession with movement, perpetual movement, which prompted her nurse to call her "Quicksilver.” She was bom for a career in dancing and it began when she became a disciple of Isadora Duncan in Paris. Her next move was even more important. She went to Switzerland to study eurythmics under its inventor, Jacques Dalcroze, and from his school she was engaged by Diaghilev to teach rhythm and to help the great Nijinsky with some of his extremely complicated ballets. Marie Rambert fell hopelessly in love with Vaslav Nijinsky and seriously considered drowning herself when he announced his engagement to another dancer in the company, Romola de Pulska. But a happier fate was in store for "Quicksilver” than marriage to the tragic Nijinsky. In 1914, she fled from Paris to England, where she met and married Ashley Dukes, playwright, critic and man of the theatre. Together, they eventually took over the Mercury Theatre, where the Ballet Rambert produced its miracles of art on a minute stage. Here many new plays were also performed.

The Ballet Rambert travelled extensively, sometimes in state, more often on a tightly-stretched budget but always in triumph. Marie Rambert, the director, brought her company to New Zealand in 1948 and gave a brilliant season of new and exciting ballets as well as the classics at the old St James Theatre in Christchurch.

Marie Rambert will never forget Christchurch, for it was here she met Helen Keller. Recalling the incident in her book she says: “When she (Helen Keller) came over to me she slid her hands over my face, brow, eyes and cheeks. And then she said to me (Miss Sullivan translating) something so wonderfully comforting that I burst into tears and kissed her hands.... She was the greatest woman I ever met.” This reviewer will always remember Marie Rambert’s visit to Christchurch for the privilege of standing in the wings with her for an evening’s performance. One of the ballets was her pride and joy, “Lady into Fox.” In her succinct way Madame Rambert made every shade of meaning in every movement of the woman-tuming-vixen come vividly and unforgettably alive. When the curtain came down she asked: “Got all you want? Well, now I go home to eat three dozen oysters,” and she ripped off a string of cartwheels across

be stage with hardly a rustle from her toblack silk skirt. nn t or ia Rambert was famous (she says whirledmJ 01- doin « cartwheels. She Berlin in /can autobahn into liberated Sted"a«be’-. 1945. She cartat Government 3 ? endless passage” when the guest of S#? s ?* ,y e i . n^., n ’ Freyberg. Some years a " d La fy visited them at Windsor"? when she Freyberg asked her jokingly‘ft l6 ? , rd did them, she says. When she s? st ? did, he became quite alarmea ® n s begged her to desist. After all, she v?£ well into her sixties then. After a long life-time in ballet, Marie Rambert feels that dancing has not yet become the equal, as an art form, to music and poetry. "Only when writing movement has become a matte? of course for the choreographer, just as the writing of music is to the composer, will he be able to say all he longs to express in pure movement—resultife from his own experience of life, <X happiness and misery, of depression and elatipn, of matter and spirit. And only then will my muse, Terpsichore, be the equal of her noble sisters,” she says. The vivacious “Mim” was made a p.B.E. in 1962 for her work for ballet in Britain. She refers to her honour as "The Darning of the Shrew.” The book is full of witticisms and wisdom, the joys and disappointments recalled from a richly varied life. Marie Rambert "talks” her story and she is a fascinating raconteur. The book is fully illustrated with photographs of varying quality, but all add interest and nostalgia to the text.