Making an Evening of It.

ON THE FACE OF IT, THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME DOESN'T SOUND LIKE MUCH OF A DANCE PROJECT. A TWIRLING, GROTESQUE QUASIMODO WILL NOT BE EVERYONE'S IDEA OF A BALLET PRINCE. YET DANCE companies are desperate for themes suitable for translation into full-evening narrative ballets. And The Hunchback has that great name recognition!

So the Boston Ballet naturally jumped at the chance of offering Michael Pink's balleticization (if that's the ungainly word) of the Hugo novel, complete with its specially commissioned score by Philip Feeney and production design by Tony Award-winner Lez Brotherston. It proved visually spectacular and fiercely, sometimes violently, dramatic. Actually, Hugo's saga of a poor gypsy dancer, Esmeralda, in fifteenth-century Paris--mistreated by all except the deaf, misshapen bell-ringer, Quasimodo, who, besotted with love, seeks to save her--has always been hot news theatrically. Right now it is the basis of a big, splashy (it', in my view, meretricious) hit musical in London. The novel has had countless big- and small-screen adaptations. And, of course, there have been quite a few ballet versions over the years, notably Jules Perrot's 1844 Esmeralda and Roland Petit's Notre-Dame de Paris in 1965.

Pink's choreography seems excessively conventional stuff, but he proves strong on dramatic detail and tells his story pretty well, while Feeney's score is imaginative and finely meshed with the action. The cast appeared happily carried away by all the melodramatic excesses, taking to it like blood takes to thunder (see Iris Fanger's review on page 58).

Thus at a certain theatrical rather than balletic level, it worked: The audience appeared to like it, and the Boston Ballet has met the need for a new full-evening ballet to slot into its repertory pattern. Unfortunately, this Hunchback of Notre Dame is not going to become this century's Swan Lake or Giselle. It is unlikely to add to the tiny treasure trove of established, credible, and usable full-evening ballet classics. Works like this Pink/Feeney Hunchback, with all respect, hardly go toward solving the problem facing modern ballet repertories even if they very clearly illuminate it.

Just what is illuminated? Chiefly the difficulties involved. What ballet history is probably showing us is that the one-act ballet, largely an invention of choreographer Mikhail Fokine and impresario Serge Diaghilev at the beginning of the last century, was always an anomaly, rather like the one-act play or the one-act opera. For reasons partly artistic but perhaps even more financial, twentieth-century ballet espoused the one-act ballet as the norm. But it is becoming increasingly clear that audiences generally prefer--whether they should prefer it is not being addressed here--the full-evening work. Unless you have the services of a Balanchine and can stage a Jewels (and that, after all, is really three one-act ballets miraculously strung together like a necklace), a company is pretty much restricted to developing, or borrowing, a narrative three-acter.

SO FIRST YOU HAVE TO GET A story. Then you have to get a score. Then it helps if you have a choreographer with sufficient interest in the project and enough talent to justify that interest.

I've put the story first, which may sound cynical. It's not. Obviously you have to have a story, and that story must be readily recognizable. Years ago, the late Julian Braunsweg, an impresario and one of the founders of the English National Ballet, told me that if anyone came to him with an idea of a ballet on Oliver Twist he would give it the go-ahead. "You see," he confided, "people may not know the story, but they know the name and the idea of a little boy asking for more." Yet the number of Oliver Twists (which, incidentally, would not make a good ballet) is far from limitless--a few from Shakespeare perhaps, some pop icons such as Dracula (he's being done to death already), Tarzan, Batman, Sherlock Holmes ... Alice in Wonderland (and she's cracked a few looking glasses in her time), Winnie the Pooh ...

The important thing is to find a story that will translate into dance and be bold about the translation. Yet there is still the small matter of the music! During the whole twentieth century very few major full-length ballet scores appeared: a few by Prokofiev, one by Britten, one by Henze, perhaps a couple by Khachaturian. Composers are not standing in line to compose ballets, and, in fact, the idiom of much modern music might not be all that suitable for dance.

The solution accepted by John Cranko, Kenneth MacMillan, and Ben Stevenson, three pioneer choreographers in developing the modern full-evening work, has been to adapt suitable music from, say, the likes of Tchaikovsky or Massenet. Then with the taste and assistance of a first-rate creative orchestrator, such as John Lanchbery, they can emerge with what is virtually a new, and highly suitable, nineteenth-century ballet score. And indeed, Balanchine in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Ashton in La Fille Mal Gardee followed a similar route.

Finally, in our search for new full-evening repertoire, and having already mentioned the nineteenth century, are there any nineteenth-century classics that might still be resuscitated? The general classic repertoire in the West, once consisting only of Giselle, the Tchaikovsky classics, and Coppelia, has already been extended by Bournonville's La Sylphide (why not also his Napoli?) and Petipa's La Bayadere. The Boston Ballet has introduced, through Anna-Marie Holmes, Petipa's Le Corsaire, which also seems to be taking root. There must be a few others--not to mention a few modern full-evening classics, such as Ashton's Sylvia and The Two Pigeons--worth exploring and perhaps restoring.

Even the partial success of such works as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Three Musketeers, Dracula, and Cleopatra unquestionably point to the demand. But great care must be taken in meeting it, not just in the short-term fashion of sequential one-shot novelties, but in a way that lays the foundation of a new, permanent classic repertoire.

Senior editor-advisor Clive Barnes, who covers dance and theater for the New York Post, has contributed to Dance Magazine since 1956.