© BBC RB 'Firebird' reviews 'Les Noces' reviews Last year of RB reviews Our RB page 'Stravinsky Staged' broadcast on BBC2, 26th January 2002, will be available on videocassette and DVD from early April. In addition to the TV programme, the cassette will include an eight-minute film about the Royal Ballet in rehearsal; an extended interview with David Drew about working with Nijinska; and from the archives a concert performance of The Firebird conducted by Igor Stravinsky.

A Royal Ballet mixed bill is a rarity on television. While programme controllers are not averse to the occasional full-length classic, they tend to recoil from anything more adventurous. 'Stravinsky Staged' was broadcast on a Saturday afternoon, an unusual slot for dance, neither in peak time, nor completely at the margins of the schedule. Filmed at the Royal Opera House last summer, it comprised Fokine's The Firebird and Nijinska's Les Noces. The Balanchine Trust refused broadcast rights for the third ballet, Agon.

The Firebird and Les Noces are appropriate companion pieces, because of the Royal Ballet's crucial part in ensuring their preservation. De Valois invited Serge Grigoriev, Diaghilev's regisseur, to mount a production of The Firebird at the 1954 Edinburgh Festival. Using Natalia Gontcharova's 1926 designs it has a fair claim to being the definitive surviving form of the work. In 1966 Frederick Ashton, De Valois' successor as artistic director, invited Bronislava Nijinska to stage Les Noces for the Royal Ballet. It had not been performed since the 1930s.

It is not hard to see why. The ballet is stripped down to its barest essentials. Natalia Gontcharova's designs are grimly functional, monochrome almost. Nijinska's architecture, pyramids and phalanxes of bodies forming one geometric shape after another, is irresistible to the camera. The images are simple, direct and unmissable. Nijinska was accused by one of her critics of creating a 'Marxist' work "that swallowed the dancer". Ross Mac Gibbon, the director, made eloquent use of close up to underscore some of Nijinska's meanings - in particular the helplessness of bride and groom in the face of their impending fate. MacGibbon knows the work closely. He should. He himself danced in Les Noces while with the Royal Ballet, and, as it happens, in an earlier version filmed by the BBC.

The Firebird poses more obvious problems for television. The stage production is dimly lit, as much of the action is by night. Television and stage have quite different lighting needs. In this production, movement away from the centre of the stage was too shadowy and long shots from the back of the Opera House lacked satisfactory detail. These compromises are inevitable, and any TV director has to live with them. The close-ups underscored what a fine dancer-actress is Leanne Benjamin as the Firebird, as indeed is Genesia Rosato, the Tsarevna. The part of Ivan, (Jonathan Cope), is more problematic. It is essentially a non-dancing role, and performed in the theatre does not transfer easily to television. He simply has too little to do. In a studio a director might find ways around this problem.

One of the strong merits of the BBC's Stravinsky Staged was its own packaging, and, in particular, the interval documentary directed by Francesca Kemp. The production device was a rather pleasant interval conversation in the Floral Hall between the co-hosts Deborah Bull and Michael Berkeley. This acted as a skeleton for quite a skilful documentary that began with a discussion of the music, costumes and choreography for The Firebird. It then touched briefly on Bull's performance in Millicent Hodson's reconstruction of Nijinsky's The Rite of Spring, before moving finally to Nijinska's staging for the Royal Ballet of Les Noces.

The convention of the interval documentary meant that many points of interest from The Firebird were flagged up after the event. The director made good use of short replay sequences, a device more usually associated with television sport. However Firebird is not a straightforward work. An audience that does not know it might flounder without some help.

The Executive Producer of 'Stravinsky Staged' was Bob Lockyer, who is retiring from the BBC after a distinguished career running the Corporation's dance output. The first major dance film he directed was Les Noces in a production for the Royal Ballet in the 1970s. That he should end, where he began, with Les Noces is a fitting farewell.