Ballet on Ice

TOM--E. E. Cummings--Arrow Editions ($3). The practice of bringing a sentimental classic up-to-date usually opens the door tor a display of easy superiority over antique quaintness. The distinction of E. E. Cummmgs' ballet based on Uncle Tom's Cabin is that the poet has accepted completely the elemental seriousness and flowery melodrama of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's masterpiece. Ingeniously impressed into four episodes, the first ending with Eliza's escape as she starts across the ice, the last with Tom's magnificent entry into Heaven, the ballet gives a free play to E. E. Cummings' intricate imagination, does not suggest the savage wit usually characteristic of his work. In the dance of Crossing The Icechoked River, the scene is set as follows: the entire stage floor is a drifting continuously pattern of irregularly squirming brightnesses: elsewhere lives black silence filled with perpetual falling of invisible snow. . Through the dance of Heavenly Longing, when little Eva dies, and the dance of The Rival Bidders, when Tom is sold to the ''bloodily luminous'' Legree, the movement of the poetic ballet is increasingly accelerated until Tom joins Eva in the dance of The Eternal Peace, "weightlessly uplifted within textures beneath knowledge. "Legree disappears, trumpets sound and Tom is carried away by an angel: blackness vanishes. Appeartwo mighty golden doors upon which blazes LIGHT outward goldenly slowly the huge doors open--revealing an immeasurable radiance and which, prodigiously forthpouring upon a stage drowned in glory, becomes angels in white robes with harps of gold and crowns.

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