New Stravinsky Ballet

One way of approaching Igor Stravinsky's new ballet Agon, in premiere at the New York City Center last week, is through a kind of game. The game: listening to the score alone (on an excellent new Columbia disk) and trying to imagine what a choreographer could possibly make of it. Here and there the music suggests images of human activity. Fanfares sound: Are they bugle calls for some grand but ragged army? A truncated funeral march is heard: Is a man or an age being mourned? A troubadour's mandolin sounds a little sour: Is love being mocked? A saraband starts up, accompanied by a simulated harpsichord: Are the ghosts of vanished dancers being recalled?

After a while, Stravinsky's intention--the intention of writing purely abstract music--wins out, and the images vanish. What remains is a sense of irony or of elegy. The listener's mind wanders, but a foot begins to tap, a hand to twitch in time to the music. Rhythm alone, motion for its own sake, take over. And that is the clue to what George Balanchine has done by way of choreography. Unlike his previous "neoclassic" collaborations with Stravinsky (Apollo, Orpheus), this work is abstract dance: there are no costumes or scenery and the Greek title, Agon (contest), does not denote a conflict of plot but simply a sort of dancers' free-for-all.

The free-for-all takes place on a bare stage, as twelve dancers in practice costumes bounce in and out with classic grace, fitting into seemingly insoluble patterns. But their movements have none of the solemnity of the classic ballet, are free and relaxed, like those of children racing in and out of games. The dancers tie themselves up in little knots and delight in getting out of them gracefully. As the music mocks itself--in a trumpet jeer or a pizzicato poke--the dancers mock the music with a hop, skip or bump. Most dramatic bits: Canadian-born Melissa Hayden's stunning solo variation and a languorous, sensual pas de deux exquisitely danced by Virginia-born Diana Adams and Arthur Mitchell, a talented Negro member of the company. The whole work takes less than 25 minutes, but it unmistakably shows Composer Stravinsky, 75, and Choreographer Balanchine, 53, at the top of their formidable form.

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