Attitudes - Frederic Franklin honored at the Cincinnati Ballet

Dance Magazine, Feb, 2003 by Clive Barnes

There I was in Cincinnati, wondering when I was last there and why. It must have been years ago, to see a theater company, because, to my doubtless shame, I had never seen the Cincinnati Ballet before. I was in the city to assist (I love that French term for attending a performance; it sounds so positive and helpful)at the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Cincinnati Ballet's founding with a performance (see Reviews, page 50) honoring 88-year-old Frederic Franklin, a former artistic director of the company, and the troupe with which Franklin will always be associated, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

Franklin is never simply honored--he always jumps up and does something wonderful. In this case, it was to produce some hitherto forgotten fragments by Leonide Massine and Frederick Ashton from the old Ballet Russe repertoire, and also to mount Night Shadow, which was the original name for La Sonnambula. When George Balanchine created Night Shadow for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1946, the leading roles were created on Alexandra Danilova (the Sleepwalker), Franklin (the Poet), Maria Tallchief (the Coquette), and Michel Katcharoff (the Baron). Because Franklin was injured just before the first performance, his role was taken at the premiere by Nicholas Magallanes, who thus became the creator of record. Later Franklin reassumed the role.

It has been a remarkable career for Franklin, and one that clearly is far from finished. Born in 1914, in Liverpool, England, like The Beatles, Franklin was one of the early pioneers of British ballet. Unlike a slightly earlier generation--Ninette de Valois, Anton Dolin, and Alicia Markova--Franklin was not a survivor from Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, a company he never even saw. He was a young kid simply interested in dancing, from Lancashire clog dancing to Hollywood tap dancing. But he took ballet classes, first in Liverpool under the respected teacher Shelagh Elliott-Clarke, and later with even more famous pedagogues, such as Nicholas Legat, even though his professional debut was made in Paris in 1931 in a troupe supporting the French music-hall legend Mistinguette.

It was Dolin, with his impeccable eye for dance talent, who first saw the promise of young Freddie, inviting him in 1935 to join the newly founded Markova-Dolin Ballet. He stayed with Dolin until 1937, graduating to a few leading roles such as Harlequin in Fokine's Carnaval, and eventually sharing some of Dolin's own roles. Then Massine invited him to join the new company he was forming with Rend Blum, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and his real career had started. Franklin was a good dancer, a superb partner, but a wonderful ... what's the word? Something equivalent to that phrase "man of the theater," so let's try "man of dance."

When I first saw Franklin dance in 1949 he was already, with his partner, the peerless Danilova, a legend. They danced a season as guests with The Royal Ballet at Covent Garden. In the summer of that year both of them appeared, with Massine, in the excellent but short-lived Metropolitan Ballet. Here we had Massine, Danilova, and Franklin in Massine's Le Beau Danube (Franklin danced the King of the Dandies at some performances, and Massine's own role of the Hussar at others), and also saw the two stars in the Black Swan pas de deux.

Yes, Franklin was a fine dancer, very elegant and with as much dash as polish, and in demi-caractere and character roles he had this total feel for the theater that was very marked in British dancers of his generation, such as Robert Helpmann, Walter Gore, or the virtuoso Harold Turner. Even late in his career, Franklin was able to produce a marvelous portrayal of the witch Madge in Bournonville's La Sylphide. Yet Franklin's gifts were only partly those of a dancer and partner. He was a ballet master, and during the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo's greatest years, he was the spirit behind it--which is why he found himself being lauded in Cincinnati.

During its twenty-four years of gypsy touring, this company created dozens of ballets, many by Massine and Balanchine, gave work to hundreds of dancers, and perhaps more than any other company popularized the then arcane art of ballet in North America. And most of that time, and certainly for the best of that time, Franklin was the Ballet Russe's guiding light, creating such roles as the Champion Roper in Agnes de Mille's breakthrough ballet, Rodeo (what was a nice Liverpudlian like him doing in a Western?), and, of course, the Poet in that first Night Shadow, which brings us back to Cincinnati.

After he had parted company with Denham, in 1952 he formed the Slavenska/Franklin Ballet with the second of his great partners, the often underestimated Yugoslav ballerina Mia Slavenska (see Transitions, page 122). It was for this troupe that Valerie Bettis created her ballet version of A Streetcar Named Desire, with Franklin bursting through doorways as a pajama-ed Marlon Brando. Franklin moved on to direct such companies as the National Ballet of Washington and, for a time, the Cincinnati Ballet. And always he has been teaching, coaching, and mounting all those ballets stored in his prodigious kinetic memory, while also acting as advisor to such troupes as Dance Theatre of Harlem (where he staged his famous Creole Giselle) and American Ballet Theatre.