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<small>[ 20 December 2003, 05:46 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

Maurice Béjart
By Judith Mackrell for The Guardian


A choreographer who is game enough to make ballets about Charlie Chaplin, Che Guevara and the rock band Queen apparently has nothing to fear from the big subject. But with Mother Teresa and the Children of the World, Maurice Béjart has gone one historic name too far.

Even Béjart's fans had a hard time imagining how he would transform the tiny, wrinkled philanthropic legend into a dancing character, despite having 63-year-old ex-ballerina Marcia Haydée in the lead role. What we see on stage suggests less a saint than a ballet mistress. Though Haydée's first entrance is made on her knees, swabbing the floor with a towel, and at one point she dishes out rice to the hungry, she spends much of the piece watching her young cast (the titular Children of the World) drilling their bodies through a series of dance routines, when she is not showing off her own flexible limbs with some deep yoga stretches.

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Thanks to Anne Williams on ballet.co for finding this link:

Charming dancers, glib steps
Ismene Brown for The Daily Telegraph reviews Compagnie M at the Peacock Theatre

The teenagers of Compagnie M are all beautiful - white, brown and black, international youngsters from the very best gene pools, and they wear white, because they are innocent. They leap, they meditate, they laugh in the lotus position, they shout at us to live and love, while the great ballerina Marcia Haydee scrubs the floor in her role as Mother Teresa.

Yes, it's one of those very special productions of Maurice Béjart, the grandmaster of grandiosity, whom London saw last time with his Versace/ Queen affair, Ballet for Life. Nowadays he has a yen for modesty and the purity of youth, hence Compagnie M, his latest group, of 15 teenaged graduates from his dance school in Lausanne, and his new muse, Mother Teresa, whose tiny, wizened feet he wishes to kiss.

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<small>[ 07 February 2003, 06:59 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

Mother Teresa and the Children of the World
By AC Grayling for Online Review London
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Without question, Maurice Bejart's Compagnie is one of the most talented collection of dancers in the world. Wonderfully gifted and superbly trained, each member of the troupe is an absolute delight to watch; and their abilities do not stop at dance, because they can sing and act too, in some cases quite extraordinarily well.

All these brilliant talents are on display in this production, Mother Teresa and the Children of the World, which combines movement, pose, dance, the spoken word, acting and singing to convey a message of concern for the world's poor and oppressed, presumably as Mother Teresa of Calcutta did or would have voiced it.

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<small>[ 08 February 2003, 06:51 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

Enough space to swing
Mother Teresa and the Children of the World by Jann Parry for The Observer.

Maurice Béjart's student group, Compagnie M, have been sent out on tour from their base in Lausanne as Mother Teresa and the Children of the World, accompanying former ballerina Marcia Haydée as Mother Teresa. Poor teenagers: this is an irony-free production. They, and we, are exhorted by Mother T to suffer joyfully since suffering is inevitable. No scowling, no rebellion, except against the evils of Western capitalism (which subsidises the multinational students' training).

There's more than a touch of Isadora in this Mother's dances and soulful utterances. She hugs her lithe and muscular adepts while telling them to embrace hunger and poverty. They respond with acrobatic leaps as though auditioning for Le Corsaire or Fame Academy.

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If there is one choreographer guaranteed to get a bad review in the UK its Maurice Bejart. Never mind that he is greatly admired in Europe as a whole, show one of his ballets here and the critical derision that will follow is a foregone conclusion.

On this occasion the prevailing British attitude to M. Bejart is to be regretted as Compagnie M, a group of young dancers from Bejart’s Rudra School in Lausanne dance with enthusiasm, warmth and total commitment. They all possess strong personalities that project beyond the footlights and stay in the memory long after the show has finished.

Bejart is clearly fascinated by the east and India in particular and I can’t help thinking that the character of Mother Theresa simply offers him another angle from which to survey a favourite theme. A fair bit of the choreography reminded me of his ballet Bhakti, though as it’s a fair number of years since I last saw that ballet I can’t be certain if he was actually quoting from the earlier work. Surprisingly though he did quote from his Isadora Duncan ballet which I saw danced in Vienna by Maya Plisetskaya a few years ago. It was the section where Isadora plays with a group of children. They were children of the small variety when I last saw this, but Mother Theresa’s “children” here are of the teenage variety. I think a fondness for kids must have been the only thing these particular personalities could ever have had in common though.

It was wonderful to see the great Marcia Haydee back on stage again. Dressed in a sari and cardi, she doles out rice, mops the stage and conducts a ballet class. She also tells us to enjoy suffering because it is inevitable, that loneliness is the most serious disease of our times and that we should love one another. Just as I suspected: Bejart is at heart an old hippy repeating the familiar mantra “Make love not war”. Well, that’s every bit as relevant today as it was back in the 1960’s and the multi-national members of the young cast endorse the sentiment with enthusiasm.

In many ways this was a very typical Bejart production with the usual wide range of musical styles, engaging performers and original ways of making a point and rather typically I found myself responding in my usual way to Bejart’s work, admiring and deploring in fairly equal measures. What did the audience think? Well, a few walked out before the end, but the rest applauded heartily, even getting to their feet to do so and seemed to rate the evening a hit rather than a miss.

Just one last thought though, just what was the point of the cast lining up at the front of the stage and then pouring water over themselves in the manner of a wet leotard competition? Okay it gave Mother Theresa the opportunity to display her humility by mopping it up, but I don’t quite understand why they did it in the first place!

The torments of the damned
By Clement Crisp for The Financial Times


I had not expected to see Marcia Haydee come on stage on her knees, wiping the floor. That, at the Peacock Theatre, is part of the week's bad news, and it is owed to Maurice Béjart. Ever ready to take on Big Names, from Nijinsky to Che Guevara, his victim is now Mother Teresa. A life spent in the service of outcasts in an Indian slum might be difficult enough, and beatification a proper recognition. But Béjartian canonisation is the dread reward here, with an entourage of graduates from Béjart's Rudra School in Lausanne, grinning, spinning, expert in the flashy physicality that marks the Master's style, talking, singing, registering emotion rather after the fashion of Olive Oyl. Libera nos, Domine.

Mother Teresa and the Children of the World is an 80-minute-no-interval parade of pietistic tosh, pinned on to the robes and obiter dicta of the saint of the Indian poor. The piece begins with the 15 young of this new Compagnie M lying on the ground, while dismal Indian dronings fill the air. The Curse of the Prawn Curry, thought I.

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Mother Teresa
By Jenny Gilbert for The Independent

Smugly virtuous in its spoken quotations from the sainted missionary, this is ballet with a message and then some. Béjart's startlingly young, gorgeous dancers are nicely trained, but their blithe naivety suggests something missing from the neck up. I dare say this Benetton-advert tosh goes down a treat in Switzerland, where King Béjart holds his court, but British ballet audiences are not yet so desperate for new material. Bring on the villains, I say.

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