Ballet Rambert Meanwhile the little Ballet Club Theatre continued its steady output of new ballets and dancers. Antony Tudor, who has since the war made his name in the U.S.A. and so been lost to the English scene, followed up Jardin aux Lilas (1936) with Dark Elegies (1937), an interesting realisation of Mahler's in which every aspect of sorrow is treated choreographically with great restraint and beauty. Andree Howard produced half a dozen charming ballets intimcs, herself designing and sometimes dancing in them, and one masterpiece, Lady into Fox (1939). This dramatisation of David Garnett's beautifully written story is an example of the translation of the written word into ballet. The opening, with the young couple at home, is delightful and recreates the authentic atmosphere of the novel. The metamorphosis is treated realistically, for we are told that the 'sudden changing of Mrs. Tebrick into a vixen is an established fact which we may attempt to account for as we will'. When the story was first published it aroused widespread admiration and some criticism. Andree Howard, with the help of Honegger's music and Nadia Benois's designs, has achieved something of the curious quality of the original story. It is strange, it is beautiful, it is infinitely pathetic. We feel in the frenzied dancing of the lady-turned-fox the pathos of the wild creature who wishes to escape to the moors, to whom home is home no longer but a prison-house. We feel also the tenderness and despair of the distraught young husband and his sorrow at her desire to escape. The hunting people are personified by stylised Victorian figures and the whole ballet is oddly successful in invoking the feeling of the original; but its real strength lies in the miming and dancing of Silvia, the Fox, before and after her transformation, a subtle and beautiful piece of characterisation by the young English dancer Sally Gilmour. The production of this ballet, worthy of the highest traditions of the Diaghileff company, showed that the Rambert Ballet Company was, in spite of the constant losses sustained by the departure of many of the best dancers to Sadler's Wells, still in a state of creative evolution on the eve of the war. Since then Frank Staff, a gifted young South African dancer with a distinct talent for choreography, before departing to the wars broke new ground with Peter and the Wolf, a Russian folk-tale told in a new way. Greatly daring, he added mimed action to Prokofiev's symphonic tale for children and produced something highly original and amusing, which was seen in London at the height of the bombing. It is to the credit of the ballet movement in England that when the Battle of Britain raged in October 1940, these two ballets, a miniature Sylphides and many other new ballets and old favourites were to be seen in the heart of London at the Arts Theatre Club, the dancers giving two, three, or even four performances a day in spite of the constant air-raid warnings, and the public forming long queues to see them; and that in spite of bombs and black-out, whether in London or the bomb-shattered provinces, the Vic-Wells Ballet has never missed a date. Article Ballet Rambert was readed 484 times.