Seaside Ballet

Birgit Cullberg is a bun-haired, 51-year-old Stockholm matron who once planned to be a librarian. But while she was studying literature at the University of Stockholm, she discovered that cataloguing was not really her game: at the remarkably late age of 25 she gave it up to become a dancer. Since then, as one of Europe's most talked-about choreographers, she has been busy constructing her own five-foot shelf of bibliophilic ballets: Medea, Romeo and Juliet, Miss Julie. Last week she was in Manhattan to witness the premiere by the American Ballet Theatre of her latest work, titled Lady from the Sea, based on a moderately successful play by Henrik Ibsen.

The play poses an odd biological question: "Why should we belong to the dry land? Why not to the sea?" The question occurs most frequently to a Norwegian lady named Ellida, who is haunted by an uneasy feeling that she is land locked. Her liberation comes in the form of a deep-sea sailor, who offers her the chance to slide down the ways and out to where "the seals lie upon the reefs and bask in the midday sun." Ellida sports it for a time with the sailor, but at play's end she chooses a terrestrial admirer. The point seems to be that both sea and sailor represent Ellida 's escape from reality; when her vision clears, she is freed of her aqueous urges.

While Ibsen required five acts to get his point across, Cullberg managed it in a few taut, well-constructed scenes. The curtain rose on a pony-tailed Ellida (Lupe Serrano), her back to the audience, her gaze fixed yearningly on a sea-green curtain. Presently the sailor (Royes Fernandez) appeared and, in a sequence of broad, sweeping movements, lured Ellida into a seductive dance that had the two of them writhing like a couple of fighting fish. The ballet's high point: a dream sequence in which the corps de ballet, got up to look like ocean creatures, came undulating and swaying across the stage like sea plants caught in a riptide. Throughout, Choreographer Cullberg brilliantly captured psychological moods in a remarkably spare vocabulary of gesture, posture, movement.

So far, Birgit Cullberg feels, she has only begun to tap the library. "Dance movement," says she, "can express things not talked, not possible to say."

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