Setting the scene.

Dance audiences have grown accustomed to stages as bare as Mother Hubbard's cupboard, though looking back I cannot remember with certainty the first time I saw a ballet without scenery! It must have been in the summer of 1948, when Le Grand Ballet de Marquis de Cuevas first came to Covent Garden, bringing with it Lifar's Noir et Blanc (a recoloring of his Suite en Blanc and using only black curtains and rostra) and Balanchine's Concerto Barocco. Later, in September of that same year, I saw the premiere of David Lichine's La Creation, which not only lacked a decor, but even had no music.

Before that, so far as I can recall, decor and costumes were always an integral part of the ballet experience, not least in works such as Fokine's Les Sylphides or Ashton's Symphonic Variations, where there was no self-evident narrative. Even Balanchine's Symphony in C, when I first saw it at the Paris Opera in its initial incarnation as Le Palais de Cristal, had elaborate scenery and costumes by Leonor Fini. Even when New York City Ballet first came to London in 1950 it brought with it custom-designed stagings of Concerto Barocco (Eugene Berman) and The Four Temperaments (Kurt Seligmann).

Yet now, City Ballet can stage its entire Diamond Project for new ballets without the full participation of a designer, and the involvement of painters and sculptors in the art of the dance is in danger of becoming a remote memory. How did all this come about--especially, how did it come about in American dance, where, as it were, the absence of decor makes its presence most strongly felt?

Before trying to answer that, it may be well to look at the role the designer took in the past. Traditionally a ballet had a setting. Let me take you back to a writer, Arnold Haskell, who was one of the great popularizers of classic ballet in the English-speaking world during the thirties and forties. In a small, best-selling book called simply Ballet he laid down basic aesthetic ground rules which helped demystify the arcane world of classic dance.

Haskell offered a simple, all-inclusive definition of ballet: "Ballet," he wrote, "is a form of theatrical entertainment that tells a story, develops a theme, or suggests an atmosphere through the orchestration of a group of costumed dancers trained according to strict rules and guided in tempo and spirit by the music against a decorative background; music, movement, and decoration being parallel in thought."

This is not unlike the earlier thinking of the choreographer Michel Fokine, who in his famous Five Points, a manifesto sent to The Times of London in 1914, called for a return to the strict aesthetic principles of Noverre. Fokine placed great importance on decoration and, for that matter music, writing that his new concept of ballet recognized "the alliance of the arts only on the condition of complete equality," allowing "perfect freedom both to the scenic artist and to the musician."

"Complete equality" and "alliance of the arts" are unlikely to be the first phrases that come to mind in any contemporary discussion of theatrical dance. In the United States, at any rate, we have, I think justifiably, virtually abandoned any idea of "equality." And, much less justifiably, we scorn the idea of theatrical dance as a mixed medium, rejecting the very concept of an "alliance" of the arts.

In part this rejection originated with modern dance which, despite the efforts of Graham, has tended to depend solely on lighting rather than decor to set its scene. Often, as with classic ballet, this apparent austerity was as much a matter of thrift as of choice.

Ballets without decor were cheaper to produce than ballets with, and as the crafts costs rose (and they rose more steeply in America than in Europe) the advantages of dancers on a bare stage became increasingly evident. The American (and later European) emphasis on "pure" dance inevitably led to the downgrading of scenery. Try Petrouchka without scenery or costumes and you have a problem; with Concerto Barocco or Diversion of Angels, scenery becomes merely a decorative choice.

Now I am beginning to wonder if we have not gone--at least in America--a little too far. From my earliest days of writing about dance I have never subscribed to the idea that all the arts contributing to ballet were equal--always maintaining that dance itself was the proper business of dancing. However, today's frequent elimination of design from ballet's theatrical equation, even more perhaps than the rarer and rarer commissioned excursions from composers into the dance arena, is diminishing not just the appeal of dance but also its potential value. Okay, Concerto Barocco actually does look better in practice clothes, and you couldn't even see Four Temperaments properly until they abandoned those weird costumes. Yet, yet, yet...

A case can be made for a new look at design. On the whole, New York City Ballet is among the worst-designed companies in the world, and one of the perhaps minor but significant changes Peter Martins has instituted is in a direction of amelioration. Gounod Symphony, Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet, Liebeslieder Walzer, and the second act of Midsummer Night's Dream have all been redesigned, and to their advantage.

Britain's Royal Ballet, as we have just seen during its latest U.S. tour, has never stinted on decoration. Sometimes, as with Mayerling, the sheer magnificence of the spectacle, accompanied by judicious acting, dominated the dance, but surely the effective setting and costumes provided for David Bintley's moderately unmemorable plotless ballet, Tombeaux, gave it an enormous advantage over, for example, the Spartan-style productions of the Diamond Project.

Diaghilev without his designers would have been even more unthinkable than Diaghilev without his choreographers. And although I would welcome painters and sculptors back to the ballet stage, I would not grant them the dominance they had in the days of Diaghilev. However, the tyranny of the bare stage is also something of which the dance world must be wary. A plank, a passion, and a toe shoe may be all Swan Lake really needs--but a little dramatic beautification has yet to hurt anyone.