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APPRECIATING ASHTON
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Of course, it didn't happen overnight. There were little companies: The Camargo Society, The Ballet Club, and the one with the engine -- that is, with Ninette de Valois at the wheel -- the Vic-Wells Ballet. Inching and penny-pinching to greatness, the Vic-Wells became the Sadler's Wells Ballet, which in 1956 became The Royal Ballet. For those numberless of us who've tried to learn ballet in our bedrooms, a book of technique open on the desk, the achievement of the English hits home: not just a company in one generation, but the look of a classical tradition, i.e., a soigné company style cut to fit. Again, Ashton. Not surprisingly, his first ballet, "A Tragedy of Fashion" or "The Scarlet Scissors," was about a couturier. One could say that Ashton's early efforts were themselves Bright Young Things -- witty, stylish, wistfully poetic, yearning toward grace. Everyone saw it: he too had gifts.
And he had de Valois to run the show. And he had Margot Fonteyn, her heart in her deep dark eyes, and a technique more pearl than diamond. Indeed, curves, glows, and enclosures are implicit in Ashton's choreographic sensibility. The foundation of Ashton's style is the Cecchetti school, a very correct, tick-tock classical coordination, every part of the body in place and in balance. But from this clocklike precision Ashton grew roses and moonstones and mirrors. He could be arch and stylishly ironic, as in "Scènes de ballet" or "Illuminations," but his temperament went toward the luminous, the intangible good poised in its moment, balanced like "The Sleeping Beauty"'s Aurora during her Rose Adagio, surrounded by friends. In "Symphonic Variations," we could be on a manor house green at dawn, where truth plays with light, or in a cemetery, white stones dancing a transcendent round, enigma variations. For Ashton, ballet was a matter of life and death. Both these works were premiered in 1946, immediately after the war, and everyone understood what they meant.
Britain is an island, vulnerable on all sides, but protected too. That's how I see Ashton. Where Balanchine, his fellow choreographer comparable in breadth and stylistic empire building, can be seen as increasingly effacé (open), Ashton is croisée (crossed). Where Balanchine développés into the cosmos, hips open and spirit hungry for heightened states, Ashton seeks his poetry within the closed circle of the stage, the tension between public and private expressed in the torsion of the body -- croisée. The blush, the smile, the glowing ideal is protected by a crossed leg or a framing port de bras the dancer looks over like a sill, the moment of contentment secured. Balanchine came of age in ballet and felt free in it. Ashton came of age in society. Even his characters in "The Dream" are touched by the Gielguds, Guinnesses, and Gertrude Lawrences of his background -- the London thea-tah, another closed circle. Ballet is an art without words, but Ashton's ballets gossip and whisper, declaim and sigh, in a language of attitudes, tendus, pirouettes, and swoons. It is a royal language and always, forever, about love of country. And love of ballet. And love.
Top banner photos: Herman Cornejo as Puck; Ethan Stiefel as Oberon and Alessandra Ferri as Titania; Julio Bragado-Young as Bottom with Alessandra Ferri as Titania (all photos by Marty Sohl -- Thirteen/WNET). |
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ABT premiered the ballet in 2002 with Ethan Stiefel as Oberon (photo by Marty Sohl -- Thirteen/WNET). |
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Alessandra Ferri dances the role of Titania (photo by Marty Sohl -- Thirteen/WNET). |
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This program is available on VHS and DVD. |
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