The biggest dance event of the 1997 spring season was the publication of a book: Julie Kavanagh’s Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton.[1] The whispering chorus of kudos began last fall, when a lucky few New Yorkers got advance copies out of England, where the book was first published. Everything about Secret Muses felt right: Kavanagh had herself been a dancer, so there was understanding; she’d had Ashton’s trust (and intimate chat) far beyond the extent he was willing to trust (and intimately chat with) any other journalist; and she’d been patient—the book was ten years in its meticulous making. It didn’t hurt that Kavanagh made no pretense for her book as critical biography. While there are many passages in which she discusses Ashton’s ballets, offering perspectives that new biographical data have brought into view, she never gets revisionist or self-righteous, sure ways to trigger the competitive instincts of critics. A tour de force of warmth, wit, and love for its subject, Kavanagh’s book is, in a word, Ashtonian.
The timing was right, too. For New York City balletomanes, watching with exhaustion and ennui as the spirit of George Balanchine wanes at the New York City Ballet, Secret Muses arrived as an absorbing break from our own ballet problem. Or rather, it was a chance to ponder somebody else’s problem, in this case, the waning spirit of Frederick Ashton at the Royal Ballet. When—as if on cue—the Royal Ballet landed at the Metropolitan Opera House for two weeks in July, comparison was in the air.[2] And not just because the Royal could boast only one true-blue ballerina, Darcey Bussell, a dancer the company sometimes shares with the New York City Ballet (guest ballerinas have become a norm at NYCB, where the top of the roster is perilously thin). And not just because the Royal brought Ashton’s La Valse, a work from 1958 that one couldn’t help measuring against Balanchine’s La Valse of 1951.
It is hard to read of Ashton’s life and achievement in Secret Muses (those muses, not so secret within the ballet world, tended to be male dancers) without feeling the invisible pressure and standard of George Balanchine just across the pond. Both Ashton and Balanchine were born in 1904. Both revered Marius Petipa, choreographer of the Russian Imperial Ballet (Petipa died in 1910), and claimed Petipa’s Sleeping Beauty as a touchstone in life and art. Both men were the founding choreographers for definitive new ballet companies: Ashton, with director Ninette de Valois, was the root of Sadler’s Wells Ballet, which became the Royal Ballet; Balanchine, with Lincoln Kirstein, was the soul of the New York City Ballet. And both men died in the 1980s, each surname symbolic of a classical style of dancing that is now in jeopardy. Their ascents through the Thirties, the Forties, the Fifties, fly side by side. If Ashton became a national hero in England sooner than Balanchine did in America, Balanchine ascended higher, died at the helm of his company, and never had to see where it would go without him. Not so lucky, Ashton was replaced by choreographer Kenneth MacMillan in 1970, and his spotty representation in Royal repertory during the Eighties and Nineties remains a blot on the company. (In New York, audiences have always hungered for Ashton, the only contemporary on Balanchine’s poetic level. It was a glorious collection of Ashton ballets that lent the Joffrey Ballet its magic in the Eighties.)
As for the differences between the two choreographers: Balanchine was Russian and heterosexual; Ashton, English and homosexual. Reviewing Secret Muses in The New Yorker, Arlene Croce writes, “the biggest difference between the two choreographers was the emphasis that Ashton gave to the female upper body and Balanchine to the lower. Balanchine thought that a woman’s expressive power was mainly in her legs and pelvis, Ashton in her head, upper back, and shoulders.” This difference, Croce deduces, “betrayed their sexual orientation.” As much as I like the neatness of Croce’s hypothesis, it does seem a tad reductive, like saying the resolution of themes in Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony proves he’s gay. Yes, Balanchine concentrated on lower body power and expression, and yes, Ashton was often caught up in the halo of épaulement. This difference, however, seems to me less one of sexual orientation (both men were, after all, unabashed romantics, serially infatuated fools-for-love) than of differing footholds on classical dance, i.e., their training.
Ashton said this much himself in 1964 when, in a review of Bernard Taper’s book Balanchine, he wrote:
Balanchine has had all the necessary environment and background for the making of the great choreographer that he is. Unlike myself, who had to make all my opportunities from the beginning, and fight my way against every kind of prejudice in order to be allowed to dance… . all the Russian fairies must have gathered at his christening to bestow on him all his great gifts.Balanchine was practically born to ballet, taken into the Imperial School at age nine, whereas Ashton, having at thirteen seen Anna Pavlova perform (“She injected me with her poison and from the end of that evening I wanted to dance”), had to wait until he was twenty to take his first lesson. As anyone who has ever studied ballet knows, legs and feet are hardest and must be learned young. You can finesse the arms, but you can never fake legs. Ballet legs are conceptually complex—an energy flow that must move fast and free between hip and toe, a flow that is fired in the torque of turnout, which is born in the pelvic bowl. Ashton didn’t have ballet in his body the way Balanchine did—a consummation as metaphysical as it is muscular (a consummation Ashton devoutly wished). He compensated with imagination, with stylish port de bras, and with ballets that were often heavily scripted, their clever, edgy librettos written by Edith Sitwell and Gertrude Stein.
Indeed, Ashton’s ballets are often quite pointed, full of elaborate punctuation and exclamation. While Balanchine, from the beginning, understood the pointe as a form of divination, a key into ether (in the first bars of Serenade, when the stage of seventeen women snap their toes open into first position, you feel as if the lock on eternity has sprung), an Ashton pointe was an end in itself, a still point of perfection (in Ashton’s Cinderella, Act Two ends with a rich, Leonardo-esque web of stage perspectives, lines and eyes of dancers all aimed toward Cinderella’s empty pink-satin pointe shoe, symbol of la danse). Balanchine knew ballet from the inside out. Ashton was working from the outside in, trying to fill that shoe.
Look to 1946, a breakthrough year for both choreographers—but what different breakthroughs! Balanchine created The Four Temperaments, a ballet to Hindemith that seemed to burst out of nowhere, unprecedented in Balanchine’s canon and in all of ballet. It begins with a man and woman standing side by side like Adam and Eve. They present their pointed toes, then, in a spasm of knowledge, they flex them. Those fierce feet lead them into maelstroms, into a syntactical hall of mirrors, into modernism, pelvis following in thrusts and swoons and sidlings. The 4Ts is a ballet of sandstorms and scientific weights and measures (even its abbreviation sounds like a mathematical formula). Its dancers are outside ballet’s Eden, searching among the sphinxes.
Meanwhile, over in England, Ashton premiered Symphonic Variations, and then staged his heraldic Sleeping Beauty. These ballets did not dive into chaos, they were acts of conservation, containment. It helps to remember that America, where Balanchine was, had dropped the atom bomb in 1945. England, meantime, was living with unexploded shells in London gardens. While Balanchine was splitting anatomical atoms, Ashton was writing his first great couplets with the kind of classical transparency he’d longed for. He was entering the enchanted circle. (Those two versions of La Valse suggest this difference. Both men hear Ravel driving toward oblivion, both ballets are costumed in doomy chic. But Ashton refuses to break out of his ballroom. He gives us Ravel’s “whirling crowd” in ravishing washes, while Balanchine pierces the darkness, plunges into horror.)
In other words, in 1946 Balanchine was actively breaking rules and making his own—opening the hip, moving weight off the heel—while Ashton was only just attaining the rules, which he adored as only an outsider can. He loved the planes of classicism: the fixed directions of the body on stage (there are eight), the well-anchored fifth position, the very square attitude, the golden mean of the low arabesque. It is this continuing eye contact with classical proportion that imbues Ashton ballets with their delicate equilibrium, their secret moral imperative, as if ballet was worth dying for. “Choreography is my whole being, my whole life, my reason for living,” Ashton once told writer David Vaughan. Living for, dying for—it is the same thing. And so English. This is what Ashton’s postwar ballets of 1946—Symphonic Variations and The Sleeping Beauty—so achingly express.
The Royal Ballet came to New York as part of the summer’s Lincoln Center Festival, and presented a sort of bookends approach to English ballet. It opened with the late Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s final full-length work, The Prince of the Pagodas (1989), proceeded to the first full-length classical ballet ever staged by a British choreographer, Ashton’s Cinderella of 1948, and dropped in an all-Ravel evening of repertory, works by Ashton, MacMillan, and budding choreographer Christopher Wheeldon.
Cinderella was a revelation. A few years ago, there was a rash of Cinderellas in town—feminist versions, Nureyev’s Hollywood production, Pretty Woman—the usual attempts to make it Relevant. Instinct sent me in search of Ashton, and I found a very old, black-and-white tape of the ballet with Ashton and Robert Helpmann as the stepsisters, and Margot Fonteyn as Cinderella. I’ve never forgotten the hopefulness of Ashton’s shy sister, her long horse face and Sun King wig, the jiggly precision of her big-bosomed, pebble-sized steps. Nor had I forgotten the unadorned fantasy of Cinderella’s solos. Where other productions layer on the cuteness, undermining Cinderella’s moments alone by casting dancers as her cat or broom-come-to-life or you name it, Ashton has her tie a rag to the broom and dance lovingly with it (the rag is the arms) until she throws it down in frustration and self-pity—returning to it minutes later, hopeful once more.
Ashton has taken the episodic, even abrupt, Prokofiev score and given it a sensation of glide, perhaps by answering its moody shifts with such sure theatricality. The scurrying, squabbling Abbott-and-Costello act of the stepsisters—a pair portrayed as grotesquely lewd or vicious in almost every other Cinderella I’ve seen—are here slapstick of a celestial order, all the more hilarious (and poignant) because we like them so much. Whenever Cinderella’s theme steals into the score, the ballet moves forward on a current of calm and longing. “To keep in a three-act ballet such a tone,” Edwin Denby wrote in his review, “to sustain it without affectation or banality, shows Ashton’s power, and he shows this in doing it as simply as possible, by keeping the dancing sweet.” Still, sweetness does not come at the expense of invention. Corps work in Cinderella—the Seasons, the Hours, the Stars—is quick and brilliant, so quick and light you don’t register its intricacy until a second viewing.
In his book Frederick Ashton and His Ballets, David Vaughan notes that at the time of its premiere, there were complaints about Cinderella’s finale, a pas de deux for the Prince and Cinderella that struck some as too short and not grand enough. Ashton explained that there wasn’t music for a big pas de deux (as opposed to the Wedding Pas in The Sleeping Beauty, a ballet which clearly influenced this Cinderella), and, in fact, one of the immense pleasures of Ashton’s ballet is that melting finale—a lingering dance back among the castle columns, which seems to occur on borrowed time. The last moments see Cinderella lifted high above the Prince’s head, her leg in attitude, as he carries her up some stairs, slowly turning all the while. Beyond the stairs is an arch, and beyond the arch a midnight-blue sky, against which Cinderella’s airborne attitude—the position of Mercury—spirals. It’s as if she is passing from message to messenger to medium. Ashton’s Cinderella hadn’t been presented in New York in over twenty years. To see it on stage for the first time, as late as July 1997, was déjà vu: it reminded me why I love ballet.
At intermission during the company’s last performance of Cinderella, I joined a group of critics outside. They were silent--sunstruck I thought (it was a hot, high sun)— but it turned out that they were feeling as I was, struck speechless by this luminous ballet. I wondered aloud about Royal dancing under Ashton, which I had never seen: how different did today’s dancers look in Cinderella? The consensus: there is far less chiaroscuro today. The Ashton instrument was multi-articulated—head, shoulders, waist, hips, feet—each properly placed and planed in relation to the rest, like one of those wooden artist’s models made up of spools threaded with elastic. Indeed, the “placement”—a ballet word referring to the alignment of the solar plexus over the pelvis—of Margot Fonteyn, Moira Shearer, and Antoinette Sibley (seen on tape) has always made me think of teacups in saucers being offered to the queen; the torso is a fraction forward and up. Of course, it doesn’t take much eye to see that the “international style” toward which all the world’s ballet companies are tending (courtesy of the global village)—a sort of fusion of Bolshoi bigness, Balanchine speed, Forsythe androgyny—is hostile to Ashton. The Ashton articulation, the Cecchetti tick-tock that lies under its pillowy aplomb, has been swept up and lost in the larger torrents of our time, in our freer, less finicky and more phenomenal approach to technique.
You can see it happening in the work of Ashton’s successor, Sir Kenneth MacMillan, who maintained the Ashton footwork and quirky épaulement (the gold coins of English classicism), yet deeply distrusted the romance, the illusions, and instead created historically sweeping works that were the doomed and decadent flip side of fairy tales: Romeo and Juliet, Manon, Mayerling, Anastasia. By the time MacMillan got to The Prince of the Pagodas, which he fashioned as homage to The Sleeping Beauty, he had no love left. This fairy tale is formless and faithless, Aurora in the rubble, trapped in an undanceable score by Benjamin Britten (it’s a ballet that wants to be an experimental opera). Pagodas is at its best when most Ashtonian: in the pointillist, personalized solos for Darcey Bussell, meditations that knit her steep scale to sewing-sampler footwork.
Ashton was no stranger to the decadent or nihilistic undertone. His Les Illuminations, choreographed for the New York City Ballet in 1950, tells the story of randy Rimbaud through sly subversions of classical clichés (corps groupings straight out of Swan Lake, etc.) But Ashton’s sensibility was essentially positive and pastoral and communal, in the vein of Jane Austen. “It was a sweet view,” writes Austen of the countryside in Emma, “sweet to the eye and mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright without being oppressive.” She could be writing about Ashton’s ballets. That landscape, that light, that enduring surround—these are as true of the abstract Symphonic Variations as they are of the storybook La Fille mal gardée. Ashton, like Austen, projects a sense of spirited enclosure. As always in great choreography, such intonations can be traced to technical mechanisms.
Ashton and Balanchine embody opposing states of grace. In ballet language, you might call these states effacé (shaded or open) and croisée (crossed). These terms do not denote steps but how the body is angled on its axis and in relation to the audience. To over-simplify, effacé is more loosely fixed and unbound, the step more open to the audience; in croisée, the body is at an oblique angle, with one leg barring our view to the other, a sort of fence between audience and dancer. Balanchine’s vision as a choreographer was toward large-scale legibility, an omniscient openness, a sense of repertory as cosmos. Steps presented in effacé may be shaded—and Balanchine was a master of glancing shadows—but they are also freer of limb, the hips less weighted, thus allowing more height and momentum into the step, more release and flow. Croisée is at the heart of Ashton, his cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die dedication to ballet. Croisée pins the dancer to the stage, creates instant tension between the hips and the upper body. It is exquisitely precise and protected. And modest. Croisée is Ashton’s poetic temperament, the pasture gate upon which his heroine muses, the Highbury hedge that secures the dancer within the dance. Balanchine chased his ideals (and ideal woman) into opalescent atmospheres. Ashton created idylls—that state, in the words of Schiller, “to which civilization aspires.”[3]
The third choreographer represented during the Royal’s Met engagement was Christopher Wheeldon, whose Pavane pour une infante défunte was on the all-Ravel program. Wheeldon’s pedigree is interesting; it includes training at the Royal Ballet School, a brief stint with the Royal Ballet, and since 1993, membership at the New York City Ballet. In June, NYCB presented a new ballet by Wheeldon as part of its third Diamond Project, a mini-festival showcasing the work of young choreographers. Of the six premieres in the Project, it was Wheeldon’s Slavonic Dances that brimmed with promise, that looked as if its choreographer was working from the ground up, attempting to build a ballet with interior allusions, not riding empty and amorphous trends. The music was Dvorak, and Wheeldon had still photographs by Josef Sudek projected on the cyclorama, a hint of the haunted, Old World atmosphere he was trying to conjure.
His ballet was too complicated and unfocused, however, filled with big moments that didn’t satisfy. So many choreographers mistakenly equate the outlandish stunt with an event, forgetting that the kind of events we remember in ballets are those the choreographer directs our eye to—those shoots through space to sudden clarity. When Ashton’s Cinderella, partnered by her prince, moves into an arabesque facing the back right corner of the stage, and then turns her face over her shoulder to smile at the audience, it is crushingly inclusive and happy. When Balanchine’s Clara Schumann (in Robert Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze”) walks in her husband’s arm, looks down to see his hand on her hip and secures it there with her own hand, as if feeling for a sword, he has shown us her love in a locket. Wheeldon’s Slavonic Dances was both imaginative and uneventful, an odd mix.
Pavane pour une infante défunte, a pas de deux from 1996, is another story: powerful beyond its means, events blossoming one after the other. Pavane breathes somewhere between Ashton and Balanchine. In Wheeldon’s choreography for the man there is something of Balanchine’s airy expansion, his watchful, waiting male. In Wheeldon’s choreography for the woman—pure pulses of Ashton. She first appears to us posed like Sargent’s Madame X, her torsioned stance a stay against intimacy. Her next move —bourrées across the stage—are instantly emotional. They emerge, escape, from that pose. A giant calla lily that is the only decor murmurs overhead of death (the child of the title?). And this man, is he her lover, her brother? She runs from him, leaves the stage; but always returns for his support. Pavane is an enigma variation, a ballet of containment and flight, at once Edwardian and modern. It is the best new ballet I’ve seen in long while: a full circle, a pact between effacé and croisée.
Notes
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Laura Jacobss most recent novel is The Bird Catcher (St
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 16 October 1997, on page 54
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