The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 6

ARTS GUARDIAN Monday, AprnvlIOT-- TOMORROW JO TELEVISION i a1 programmes like Everyman? graphy, often stemming from. the near and far east, as In Bhakti and There is no doubting, thfr sincerity of 'Ms research or i his wide but; the hectoring tone of, Ms vplu-; mdnwus programme notes. would seem to imply doubts; V- about the intelligence of bis public. His conversations and. writings are.

studded wdtJi capital letters (remarked one critic, "He can't make dances about men and'- women because he wants to make dances about and strucUons. Coliseum patrons may be, loth to accept that 14 an immense Divine Presence surrounds the theatre and wafts in from time to -time, sub- -merging actors and audience in a gust of religious Inspiration but they are warned that 44 To believe for a single moment that he (Bejart) had blasphemous intentions would be tantamount to utterly ignoring his spiritual world indeed, molt even guessing at it." Or so the translator of Bejart's essay on Notre Faust as a black mass would have it Our Faust is. so titled, Bejart says, because the dancers themselves devised sections of the choreography. 44 It is rather like producing a Renaissance painting," he explains. 44 Leonardo da Vinci, for example, would paint the main figures in an important work but ask his apprentices to fill in the landscape or some details.

YOU HAVE to prove yourself to get anything in this says Maurice Bejart, who understandably feels he lias done just that. Over a bowl of coffee in the dancers' cafeteria in Brussels he outlined the extent of his domain the 70-strong Ballet of the 20th Century, about to depart for a New York season, returning via London for two- weeks at the Coliseum; the resident Mudra school, which hopes to establish its first foreign branch in Senegal, later this year; the Yantra company, mixing students and professionals in multi-media productions like his recent described in Paris as the first French musical comedy." All these activities arc housed in a converted tramshed in the industrial part of town, modern offices and studios having been carved oilt of the vast space now used for storing the elaborate sets so essential to Bejart's spectacles. "One part of me is attracted by extreme simplicity, exposing the dancers on a bare stage with only lighting and music to help the choreography make its effect. But I also have a need to express mvself through a baroque form of theatre, what some people call 4 total-theatre," hence creations like Nijinsky and The Triumphs of Petrarch. 44 For these, members of the cast may have to act, to speak3 to sing, even to play instruments.

At the school we train our pupils in all these skills, we push their individual creativity, so now we include many Mudra graduates in the main company." This bodes well for the future of the grandiosely titled Ballet of the 20th Century (the school is sub-titled Centre for the Perfection and Research for Artists Taking Part in the Productions) but at the moment Bejart is so short of senior principals that he has been forced to invite guest stars, company alumni all, for the American and British performances. Not that anyone will complain about the inclusion of Suzanne Farrell, now back with Balanchine in New York, Luciana Savignano from La Sea la or the beautiful black modern dancer. Diane And. as always, Bejart can mount an astonishing line-up of men. With virtuosi like Jorge Donn and Daniel Lommell under contract, it has only been necessary to augment the male forces by one, Niklas Ek.

who plays Time with Two Faces in Petrarch. 44 Why are my men so strong 1 think it is because Maurice mitted go. out to infuse their ideas into the general of programmes. Put that to Peter', Armstrong, head of BBC religious television programming, and editor of and he tolls yoti that they actually took-, -the first option, rather- a. long time ago.

The range of beliefs' i probably gets towards Budd hism one way, agnosticism another, and the programme's experience takes in World' In Action and Man Alive. As for Everyman, which is. planned to run most weeks for the next Mice any other current affairs proy gramme, and more than most documentary strands, its brief is clear to look at religion as objectively as Horizon looks at science, ox Panorama at social issues. If -1 feel 'that the only thing the two programmes I saw' was the label they go so much the though-there aire some subjects where he would expect religious questions to be pressed rather harder. r' So why not take the option, drop the protective barrier and really join, the; big wide world? If what" is provided is a range of which people with specific beliefs must judge by their personal criteria, -why even appear to be operating on a more specialist level One answer, of course, Is that quite a lot of thet sub-.

-jects would not be treated at all, if no one were charged with seeking them' out. The day's moral issue take a back-seat if the educational, industrial, ones-were in the same race. Peter Armstrong would argue this would be a lossj and anyone observing the process by which programme ideas are generated must agree. There is another argument though, and it has wider im- plications. Good programmes, of any type, are made by good pro.tramme-makers in right Armstrong has a small unit, evi- dently, a lot of enthusiasm and energy, and as many skills as most.

There are-quite a lot of their peers who are looking for tho same sense of their time; having come. Peter. Fiddick ting department to make such programmes? It is neutral Inspiration Inci or the Philippines leairn. their: places on the screen, like previous pieces in either vein Anno Domini; under -whose umbrella worked much the same team as now do'vEVery-mairi. But is 'precisely because such pirdjnaanimes, like those" on' Exclusive Brethren, say, Jiaye 1 wider social implications and interest that one is bound to ask the, benefits and costs of making them under the 44 religious label.

Presumably it is -therole played by the priests that enables Everyman to see a place for itself in reporting events in the Philippines. Yet torture is. torture, and were. World In Action or Panorama to take am interest, they would presumably have, to use the same sources, with much the same results. Perhaps, then, pur response has to be to thank- God that someone is doing it, regardless of label.

But the Californian programme puts a different perspective. What, I wonder, would have been the effect, not even of making it differently, but of showing it without a label, or just giving it to Man Alive, or Inside Story It is not that it was a programme without a religious position of its own there was a line of criticism In it which asked us to consider the Schuller phenomenon not just as some mass-media cult but specifically as Christianity without Christ. But a good atheist reporter might well make the same observation. Vanya Kewley, for all I know, may. be one it seems irrelevant to ask.

The point is that under the new ecumenism, it is difficult to conceive of an overtly committed religious approach to such subjects, if only because there is ne longer any way of deciding which religious approach to take. It is problem Lord Annan's inquirers faced and toyed with. Their conclusion was. as so often, two-fold: either the BBC should broaden the base of its religious programme-makers, by recruiting people with wider experience and beliefs or they should disband the whole show and let the Critics ofi Bejart, whose ballet company starts a two-week run at the Coliseum tomorrow, accuse him of sexism and vulgarity. He says they're snobs.

Jan Murray reports. JEtaafll-jmsBfll ftIaiuiiriice FIRST NIGHT A black man's search for his ancestry Testament WITH. SOME notably flashy camerawork; more than a few good jokes, and a delicately reined-in. scepticism, religious. broadcasting on BBC teJevi- sion last night bust out of the god-slot and into its new place in the real 10 p.m.

on BBC-1, the new Everyman i series is' -taking; over a slot left warm by Ms Esther, Rantzen. and Ms, Vanyai Kewley, in' "her producer-reporter role, was char- actensacaiiy unaaunieay 'The comparison on this occasion was not unreason-' able, since for the first edition Everyman went tp sunny California- to find a prime example of the American Way of one of those subjects rich in self-parody in which that state seems to abound, and which Esther too eats with relish: "Welcome to the Hour Of Power," intoned the American television voice, "with Robert Schuller, brought to you from Garden Grove Community Church, the world's first walk-in, drive-in, inspiration centre, in Garden Grove, California." And though Garden Grove it was, Forest Lawns it might have been, but for living humans, as one surveyed the. rolling velvet acres, the. multi-million dollar temple, the good Dr Schuller, whose theology of ''possible thinking" stopped short of the possibility that his ten full-time ministers should get to preach instead of him. Failing Waugh himself, Kewley did very nicely.

Everyman has got off to a dashing start. It would be a mistake, moreover, to think that either the series or even Miss Kewley wilK continue in the lighter vein. There is in preparation, for instance, what from an unfinished version promises to be a hard-hitting report on the torture of opponents of the military regime in the Philippines, with the same reporter now firmly facing its representative with the charges made against it. Many of them are made by the priests working mere, and in the clear recognition that they may land in detention But at that point we are once more right up against the central problem of the whole concept of "religious broadcasting." Why should we need a religious broadcas thes Old tion with unfortunate results) is beginning to emerge as very strong competition This year, the Carlisle. College of Art and Design caught the imagination with a fine production by one of its young lecturers, Stephen Jeffreys, of his own play Like Dolls Or Angels (he also won the award for the best new play by a non-student writer).

This two-hander- was so rich in ambience that in retrospect one would almost swear to have actually seen several of the off-stage characters. Set on the edge of a fairground, in the temporary living quarters of Hannigan, a young, ambitious chancer, boss of a travelling stunt show, it explores his relation with his principal exploitee, Zuki, a drop-out girl daredevil, at a moment of stress. The production, in its cluttered realistic set, managed to alternate successfully the sloppily casual and the explosively tense, and drew a remarkable performance from Tim Potter, as Hannigan: certainly an actor in the making. QEH Hugo Cole ECO YOU CAN play Bach's Brandenburg's Concertos in 100 different ways and be right about 97 times. The only performances to be written off are those in cathedrals and other buildings with acoustics that destroy the sense of the counterpoint, Henry Wood's 70 strings did something for the third Brandenburg which the Baroque groups can't do and Thurston Dart's perverse turning upside down of and second, using trumpets in the first and horn in the second does not take away from the music essential character, and allows us to hear conversational exchanges from a fresh angle.

In the second concerto, I did miss the shimmering, jangling interweaving of flute, trumpet and oboe in upper regions but the experiment would have been worth trying simply to allow that superb horn player Anthony Hal-stead to have a go at the trumpet part in outer movements; a feat of virtuosity triumphantly accomplished. Some of Dart's" inspired if cranky experimentation, might have livened up Handel's Concerto Grosso Op. 6, No. 6. The English Chamber Orchestra has not at present the corporate personality to colour their interpretations, and this middle of the road version, with a desperately slow musette, was "I give an indication of what I want and company members will create a sketch to show me.

It is vitally important that we encourage choreographers the group." Now that he is 50 Bejart is inviting outsiders to mount ballets American Lar Lubo-vitch recently, completed 44 Marimba A Trance Dance," doubtless inspired by the exotic impulses around the Mudra complex and Rhapso-die by Micha van Hoecke will be included in the London repertory. But there is no question of retirement or any diminishing of Bejart's authority. Unlike many ballet directors, Bejart attends every performance, takes charge of even those tedious rehearsals concerned with polishing mass movements. He is informal and matey with his dancers, yet the strict company discipline is palpable. Above all, he has forged, singlehanded, one of the most exciting, distinctive and popular dance machines in the history of the art form.

Such a successful gadfly can afford the odd sneer at his critics. unearths the infant Kunta Kinte in Roots change mimicry rather than serious acting) this turned out to be little more than an over-extended virtuoso party piece. But the final days also offered productions, performances and moments to remember with pleasure and it is reassuring that some of them also seem to have impressed the team of judges. A wholly delightful production of Samuel BeckeU's Happy Days from the Middlesex Polytechnic (director Jayne Chard, designer Anthony Waterman) deservedly drew for first place in the RSC's Buzz Goodbody award for direction. The other first was given to Edward Bond's Bingo with Roger Michell directing the Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club, in which Alan Barker scooped the prize for best actor this I missed, unfortunately.

In Happy Days Becket was mercifullv allowed breathing space. Everything worked well the stunningly simple, heat-evoking set which played exhilarating visual tricks with space and scale the mood, the detail and the relation between the two performances (Jude Ilett as Winnie vas runner-up for best actress). I find it rather satisfying to see how the most, sensitive and creative work from institutions other than the universities, ancient and otherwise (where too much intellectua-lising often submerges intui judging my work against an ideal in which I do not believe. They say they are defending the purity of art, but who is to define art? I say all great art, like all great civilisations, comes from mixing blood, cultures, techniques. If America is a great country it is only so because it is a combination of different races and nationalities.

Those critics are the worst kind of snobs, like people who buy themselves titles. Because it is a phony title they behave even more snobbishly than real nobility would do. The future must lie in mixtures, in unlocking the treasures from great cultures all over the world. This commitment to eclecticism has resulted in a bewildering range of stylistic influences on Bejart's choreo Cicely Tyson with Jennifer Penney and Merle Park have alternated admirably as the disruptive female Park ds the more brilliant dancer, Penney the more seductive one. Julian Hosking, returning to the company after a scholastic interlude, and Wayne Eagling are the brothers both excellent Eagling, this time, comes near to matching hds exemplary dancing with the requisite dramatic sensibility.

St ANDREWS Cordelia. Oliver Drama Festival A SECOND bite at the National' Students' Drama Festival merely confirmed my first impressiu.r that major talent is at present thin on the ground. Some items came to St Andrews trailing clouds of reputed glory but, in the event, disappointed for example, Rox by Richard Mayer of Cambridge. This was a solo rock musical purporting to scan the disaffected sUties scene. In a clever but curiously uninvolv-ing performance by the energetic Jon James of Cambridge Mummers (a young man with a gift for quick- I have always fought to improve their position in the dance, even if it means creating an imbalance, sometimes.

Having been involved in classical ballet for many years, I came to resent the decadent tradition that always saw the ballerina centre stage, propped up by a man. It is not surprising that parents did not want their sons to play such a role in public. So when I founded this company, with Maurice Huisman (director of the Belgian National Opera) in 1960, I immediately asked for 20 women and 20 men, and I began to make works for the men. I have been criticised for this, but when I look at an artist like Donn, who has been with me for many years, I think that my principle has been justified." WEMBLEY Robin Denselow Country Music LOOKING LIKE a cross be-twevn an American political convention and a mysterious tribal gathering in which Britain's white suburbanites don cowboy hats, the Country Music Festival returned to Wembley for its annual three-day run. The growing popularity of Country is reflected by a new and welcome slickness in the show, and expensive promotional efforts by all th record companies who have built shops and hospitality suites round the arena to show that they now regard this music as mainstream big business, no longer a curiosity.

On the elaborate red-white-and-blue stage Dennis Weaver, the gangling star of television's McCloud, introduces a constant flow of performers, some of whose names he remembers before they come on. Saturday is traditionally 44 pure country day a chance to see the Nashville originals, as opposed to those who have followed the recent fashion for country There were tough-sounding men in cowboy suits and tougher-looking women in long gowns singing ultra-feminine songs about how tough their men were. Loretta Lynn, at the top of the bill, was typical. 44 A grandmother at 32. I'd have swum the Atlantic to be on this stage with her," said Weaver.

And the lady in question replied with some pleasant but identical songs with titles like They Don't Make Them Like My Daddy Any More and You Ain't Woman Enough To Take My Man. Country music is fine, in small doses, but after three or four hours the same chord changes and wafting steel guitar became a little monotonous. It made a welcome change when someone broke away from the format. Don Gibson, pop star of the late fiftios and mow looking like a portly attorney, managed it with a stfing of his own com-posi' ions from Sea Of Heartbreak to his classic I Can't Loving You. So did that great early rocker Carl Perkins, placed a long way dr.vn the bill.

Backed by two of his sons he squeezed a Hank Williams lune. a rock-a id-roll mcc'lvy and of course his own rousing Blue Suede Shoes into a sadly short set. Bejart has, of course, been criticised for more than the dominance of men in his productions, although this aspect has drawn accusations of virulent sexism in America. He has also been savaged for his banal use of monumental music like Beethoven's Ninth, or its mis-use, as in Notre Faust (to be shown at the Coliseum) where he combines sections of Bach's Minor Mass with Argentinian tangos and Broadway show tunes. "Vulgar," "hollow" and 44 pretentious are adjectives regularly applied to Bejart's work, and even after years of sold-out performances and frenzied adulation he is not able to feign indifference to his detractors.

"The main fight I have with my critics, particularly in New York, is that they are His disappointed followers will be pleased to hear that he starts a British tour at the end of the week. COVENT GARDEN James Kennedy- Triad TRIAD, which makes a triple bill with the old, short exquisite Petipia-Minkus Bayadere and a new, long, meandering Neumeier-Mahler Fourth Symphony, is one of Kenneth MacMillan's near misses. To see it again this sad choreographic account of the disruptive effect of one sensual female on the idyllic (or is it just a bit incestuous relationship between two brothers is to be reminded that only a genuine choregra-pher could have made it its over-all neoclassicism looks distinctive and unborrowed and its later sequences flow Easily and expressively. But much of it looks strained a rather tedious demonstration, it seems, of ingenuity for ingenuity's sake. The trouble, I think, was in the choice of music, Prokofiev's violin concerto No 1 when Prokofiev is helpfully lyrical MacMlillan becomes persuasively eloquent, but too often a rather scratching musical virtuosity suggests no affinity with choreography and finds none.

tarded than disturbed." he conceives the character in a jerky sing-song form of artificial speech which sometimes has the effect, of sending up the lines. Given that his parents play with old fashioned reserve as if nothing ghastly had happened the impetus has guite lost. Redirection needed and quickly. RAINBOW Robin Denselow Fleetwood Mac FLEETWOOD Mac's history has been like a bad film-script. Starting in Britain ten years ago as a blues offshoot from John Mayall's band, they had survived losing their two leading members, continual personnel changes, under-recognised fine recordings and a gradual downhill struggle before, the three British remains joined forces with a Californian group two years ago.

"Vi Suddenly they became' the most successful, band, in America, as the hew lineup's first album sold nearly 4 million copies. But (as in all truly bad movies) the success had its ironic side as the two couples in the band split up but decided to keep working together. For the first time since their new success Fleetwood Mac were back in London with a slick, effortlessly successful show that went i at least some of the way towards explaining their massive American popularity. Partly it was the sheer variety in the lineup two excellent, good-looking- girl singers, Christipe Perfect and Stevie together with vocalist Witarist Lindsey Buckingham, md a rhvthm section-of John MoVie and Mick who plnyed with the cmdence of ten years together. Combined, they produced the hippiest easy-listening going, a mixture of strong pop melodies dressed up with good harmonies and always': an rhythmic backing.

Stevie Nicks drifted across the stage in black, like a trainee vampire, singing; her hits like Rlilannon. Whenever it seemed the band wire not adventurous enough, Christine Perfect threw in a reminder of her blues roots. All of this very nearly added up to a faultless performance. All that was lacking in clever, noisy commercial combination tas a sense of spontaneity and real enthusiasm. more like Christmas pudding than Handel's music should CV634 )m Jose-Luis Garcia and Josef Frohlich led a stylish per-formamce of Vivaldi's two-violin concerto in A minor; Mr Garcia, quite rightly won much: applause for his lively and intelligent major violin concerto, though perhaps more as violinist than as Bach interpreter.

The third Brandenburg, the most vigorous and straightforward of the set, went well too, as it always will with highly skilled and intelligent players in each of the 10 parts, and when the speeds are right ALBERY Nicholas de Jongh Equus EQUUS HAS been running intermittently since July 1973 and the production is now showing signs of age. I went to see how Michael Jayston plays the part of the psychiatrist investigating the mind and spirit of a boy (David Dixon) who blinds a troop of horses. The play seems more than ever a very clever psychological thriller whose final thesis is exciting, provocative and doubtful. But its form and characterisation (the psychiatrist excepted) is elementary and flawed. John Dexter's production, with its distracting tier of seats at the back of the stage, and its bare boxing arena of a set with all the characters sitting on the sidelines, seems more than ever all show and glitter.

The play depends on the playing of the principals. The two originals, Alec McCowen and Peter Firth, were marvellous. Firth made the boy someone brimming with a terrible emotional incoherence his terror inhabited the completely. McCowen at the close made the psychiatrist tragic. You realised with a shock of recognition that he was someone who had never lived and.

found his successfully treated patients were all or often reduced to a numbered conformity, their passions, heights and depths of character extinguished. Michael Jayston seems too young, too content, too calm to suggest all this. His final aria of hatred delivered against himself and his world comes as a mere, quiet apu-logy. Thi3 man, with his Scots dentist wife and low sperm count lievable. And since the play is totally unconcerned with psychiatric methods there is little left on which to depend.

David Dixon as the boy at first seems more mentally re TELEVISION Nancy Banks-Smith Roots IX SUCH a biblical weekend. I offer a story from the Apocrypha of Lord Grade and therefore, possibly, apocryphal. CBS. the American television station, complained that they had shown his J.Ioses Tiie Lawgiver but he had given Jesus of Nazareth to NBC. Very much the complaint of the elder son when he saw the Prodigal with his feet under the table getting seconds of fatted calf.

44 You," said Lord Grade with one of those confiding embraces make me l'eel sharper than a serpent's isoili, You have the Better Man." The BBC with a fosiness you would not suspect it of if you hid not seen the feathers round its mouth, is countering ATV's Jesus of Nazareth with ABC's Koots. There is not an inch of ballyhoo to choose between them. Roots, a black mans search lor his anceslrv and identity, is the Old Testament story. The great primitive parable in it: the loss of Eden, the sale into bondage, the redemption from captivity make it the story of Man rather than one man's story. Part one was an African paradise of benevolence and nobility never is heard a mosquito n-jr a discouraging word unless you count 41 If it is certain you are not a man, it is even more certain you are not a nhilosopher." This from the village wrestler to an adolescent boy, Kunta Kinte, the supposed ancestor of the author.

The whale village maintains a heightened utterance which would have raised eyebrows on the Areopagus. Aristotle might have managed it on a gi.od ni'4it but not always and not for long. So heaven lies about K'inia in his infancy unlil with a little Eve, Fanta, he is captured and shades of tiie prison house begin to close upon the growing boy. It is a dream and in its fairytale way the first episode was very effective. The second, which turned on the loss of his name, less so.

As Kunta. LeVair Burton, a new n-me to me and I could hardly have forgotten it, is a formidable young actor. There seems however, to be a po'kv of popping in one television plum name per the flavour of the Edward Asner from Rich Man Poor Man Greene "from Bonanza. This insurance is not. as it happens, effective.

If Roots were braver it would be better..