Dancing Ashton

Dance Magazine, July, 2004 by David Vaughan

ROMANTIC, PASSIONATE, AND funny, Frederick Ashton's choreography captures the best and worst of what it means to be human. The erotic playfulness of the pas de deux for Oberon and Titania in The Dream, for instance, reflects the underlying relief of harmony restored. The charm of his Cinderella owes as much to the comic preening of his stepsisters-in-drag as it does to the yearning of his wistful heroine.

IT'S A SWEET, SANE WORLD AS Ashton sees it. Skaters may slip and fall, but they get up. The golden age may be lost, but the joys of a country farm remain undiminished. Even a doomed courtesan's heartbreak has its own glamour. While symmetry and form have a place, they don't undermine Ashton's essential warmth and gallantry. As true an heir to Petipa's classicism as Balanchine, Ashton's choreography is the architecture of the human heart. Our look at Ashton includes a guide to the ballets appearing in the upcoming centenary as well as interviews with dancers who perform them.

GUIDE TO ASHTON BALLETS

Fans of the great English choreographer Frederick Ashton can look forward to a feast this month, when the Lincoln Center Festival celebrates his centennial. (He was the exact contemporary of George Balanchine.) Below is a decade-by-decade guide to some of his ballets.

The 1930s: Ashton joined Sadler's Wells Ballet (later The Royal Ballet) in 1935 as dancer and resident choreographer. His earlier ballets had included Les Rendezvous, the first full-fledged statement of his own personal form of classicism--and thus the basis of the British style: lyrical, precise, yet robust. Ashton at once cast the company's young ballerina, Margot Fonteyn, in his version of Stravinsky's Le Baiser de la fee. With her innate musicality and flawless line, she was to become his muse.

Les Patineurs portrays various types to be found on the ice-rink: showoffs, lovers, beginners. The choreography displays the growing virtuosity of English dancers and demonstrates Ashton's increasing mastery of choreographic structure.

A Wedding Bouquet, with text by Gertrude Stein, depicts a provincial wedding in early twentieth-century France--one of those occasions when everything goes wrong: one guest is a little crazy; another gets drunk and has to be removed. The bride and groom perform a pas de deux that parodies the climactic duet of any classic ballet, turning upside down the conventions of the genre (and the ballerina herself).

The 1940s: Ashton served in the Royal Air Force during World War II, and his first wartime ballet was Dante Sonata. Lost for many years, it reflects his response to the tragic events of the time, to a turbulent fantasia by Liszt.

In 1946 the Sadler's Wells Ballet moved from its own small theater to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Ashton's first new ballet there was the serenely neo-classic Symphonic Variations (revived last fall by American Ballet Theatre). In 1948, it was followed by Scenes de Ballet. With a rhythmically complex Stravinsky score, it is at once purely classic and uncompromisingly modernist.

At the end of the same year Ashton choreographed his first full-length ballet in the tradition of Petipa: Cinderella, to the score by Serge Prokofiev. In putting the Ugly Stepsisters in hilarious drag--originally Ashton himself and choreographer Robert Helpmann--he drew on the traditions of the English Christmas pantomime.

The 1960s: Perhaps Ashton's most beloved ballet is La Fille mal gardee. First performed by The Royal Ballet in 1960, it has been presented by many companies, including ABT and the Joffrey Ballet. It was followed by another two-act ballet: The Two Pigeons was choreographed for the RB touring section, forerunner of today's Birmingham Royal Ballet. The final reconciliation between the two lovers shows Ashton at his most poetic.

Two years later he again created a new work for Fonteyn, enshrining her legendary partnership with Rudolf Nureyev. In Marguerite and Armand a courtesan on her deathbed, relives a tragic love affair in a series of pas de deux.

In 1965/1966, Ashton returned to his classic mode in a pair of trios set to music by Erik Satie, Monotones I and II. With their sculptural groupings of precisely calibrated arabesques, these dances distilled Ashton's personal classicism to pure essence. Two years later Enigma Variations, a gallery of portraits of the composer Edward Elgar and his wife and friends, became the clearest example of the way Ashton extended the vocabulary of ballet as a poetic language.

The 1970s: As a young man Ashton had seen Isadora Duncan dance, and he retained vivid memories of her as a force of nature. Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan, originally danced by Lynn Seymour, evoke Duncan's passion and physicality. The Thais pas de deux, created for Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell, is a vision scene with an Orientalist flavor, and a tiny masterpiece.

The 1980s: Ashton, who had retired as director of RB in 1970, created Rhapsody for Mikhail Baryshnikov, a guest artist with the RB that year. The ballet included one of Ashton's typically tender and lyrical pas de deux.