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The Sarasota Ballet - A Knight of the British Ballet, New York, August 2016


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Just saw them this evening in New York. An Ashton "multi-bill". Valses nobles...Tweedledum...Paradise Garden...Friday/JazzCalendar...Sinfonietta 2nd movement...Façade. A revelation- FLOSS I think/hope you would have loved it. I did. Sinfonietta and Paradise were revelations. Although I could write a lot about camp sensibility and the whole Cecil Beaton, English, 30/40/50's feel which can both attract and alienate. I was sitting almost too close to the stage for comfort - I like a little more distance - but Façade benefitted from this intimacy. The Royal or BRB should do this more - and CG is not the right place. Small(er) is beautiful. Valses nobles etc is a tricky piece - but a Moira Shearer lookalike conjured up the right Red Shoes vibe. It is so of its time and yet so right to see. Paradise Garden threw me - the lifts and upside-down nature were MacMillan meets Bolshoi but calmed down by Ashtonian sighs. Amazing. (The figure of death was beyond camp...up to you to google search photos...) Jazz C was red hot. But OMG - Sinfonietta- he himself said he wanted to extend the dance vocabulary of Monotones ...extend/bend/dip/dive/flip over - Wayne MacGregor eat your heart out! And then it ended with Facade...fun irony and all a little mad and ever so knowing. Get the Sarasota over ASAP - crowd source fund it - but they should be at Sadlers for us to see.

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New York Times review along with some lovely photos:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/arts/dance/review-sarasota-ballet-shows-its-mastery-of-frederick-ashton-works-joyce-theater.html?_r=0

 

It makes me wonder what'll happen to the Ashton repertoire when Iain Webb is no longer at the helm of the Sarasota Ballet. As Alastair Macauley said in the review, the Royal Ballet isn't falling over itself to preserve some of Ashton's masterpieces, and the Sarasota Ballet seems to be the only company that is. These ballets don't deserve to just be lost, but there's a real danger of that happening.

Edited by Melody
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Or as someone on Twitter suggested...the Royal Ballet had an Ashton Festival.

 

…which brought to mind the RB's rather glorious Ashton 100 season of 2004/05 which included (in no special order):

 

A Wedding Bouquet

Sylvia
Scènes de ballet
Diverts: Sleeping Beauty, Awakening pdd; Thaïs; Devil’s Holiday variation; Five Brahms Waltzes; Devil’s Holiday pdd; Voices of Spring
Daphnis and Chloë
Cinderella
La Fille mal gardée
Rhapsody
Marguerite and Armand
Enigma Variations
The Dream
Ondine
Symphonic Variations
A Month in the Country
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I should love to see what the Webbs are doing in Sarasota. The point about them is that they actually respect Ashton and his works  and care about how they are performed. Their revivals are staged with love and affection while RB revivals are dutiful rather than enthusiastic. The RB manage to revive a handful of his works on a fairly frequent basis and the rest are left to rot. The company danced a lot of his ballets during the centennial year the 2004/2005 season but how many on that list have been performed since?  Having gone to the trouble of reviving Sylvia and Ondine no one has bothered with building up and maintaining a living performance tradition such as the MacMillan cash cows enjoy. We have them staged for a couple of seasons and then shelved.

 

Then there are lots of one act ballets that are only performed infrequently such as a Wedding Bouquet  a great ballet and Yanowsky is wonderful as Josephine so why is not it performed? It is difficult to get it right but that is the reason for dancing it and keeping it the company's DNA. Now here are a couple of obscure works. Capriol Suite the earliest of Ashton's surviving works it is a work of extraordinary inventiveness given the constraints he placed on himself by following a sixteenth century "how  to book";Facade which has not been seen for more than twenty years;Jazz Calendar  not a great work  but very entertaining and again a good third ballet to use to end  a mixed bill. I think the problem with them is that they are entertaining and that won't do. Now whether that is because the current crop of choreographers can't, don't or won't do comedy or even amusing is not entirely clear. But the fact is that there are not that many successful comic ballets and the creators of such ballets seemed to have died out well before the end of the last century.

 

The other problem is that the people who matter in the small and incestuous world of ballet in this country want it to be taken seriously and recognised as a serious art form. So, apart from the Concert and works that can be excused as children's ballets they don't stage amusing one act works let alone commission them. If only Ashton had created angst ridden ballets about sexual obsession we would not be able to move for their revivals,but of course that sort of ballet was created by his successor. It would be great to see Les Illuminations again it is a fascinating work but it does not really fit into any category of ballet that Kevin is likely to want to stage nor does Daphnis and Chloe which is expensive to stage because of the choir  or Enigma Variations  which must take ages to coach.

 

Here is something that may interest you about the company's current style or lack of it.I came across a short section of an interview that Jeanetta Lawrence gave when the RB were last in the US. She was asked about the RB's style and whether it had one. I found her answer rather depressing but it goes some way to explain why the company is as stylistically obtuse as it now appears to be. She said that in the old days it was Ashton and MacMillan but particularly Ashton who was the architect of the company and its style.She then went on to refer to the challenges that Ashton presents to dancers from outside Britain and referred to its stacatto footwork which is not exactly how I would describe his choreography.The essence of the company's style now is that everyone on stage believes in what they are doing which must come as a relief. to all of us.

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Absolutely agree with both general thrust and most points - you've nailed the problem. Why I was so impressed with my Sarasota experience was the fact that it revealed a particular Ashtonian "Angst". It's not that he didn't do it, he just did it his way. (That's why I was so surprised by Illuminations when I saw it yonks ago - Ashley Page danced the poet.) The lifts in Paradise ( particularly the almost disturbing ending upside down one) and wraparounds almost prefigured the Mayerling pdd; and the manipulations in Sinfonietta and the 6 o'clock extensions prefigured MacGregor. For me it was reassuring that Ashton seemed stronger and part of a continuum which stretches through MacMillan surprisingly to MacGregor. I don't want to think that a certain world ends with Ashton. Elements of his world do end, but others continue and I can see in these late works his desire to extend his own vocabulary and pitch against the new. I see this as a quiet, questioning, courageous move to question and to progress. It wasn't safe territory for him and I admire him even more. I think there's mileage in looking at the Unashton Ashton pieces, there was for me the perfect Verfremdungseffekt - not alienation, but showing something and someone in a different light.

Edited by Vanartus
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The problem is that a very small group of people have decided what Ashton is and what he is not. Basically he is soft, sweet and unthreatening. This view was certainly the one that they had in Munich where if I recall some people were disconcerted by his intellectually rigorous and distant Scenes de Ballet. It was not at all what they had been led to expect. By the way i thought that the revival of Les Illuminations was quite as extraordinary as his La Valse can be. Perhaps it was the fact that he was working away from the home team which gave him the freedom. When La Valse is danced in the right style, where they just go "Whoosh" as Elizabeth McGorian put it the ballet seems slightly mad and dangerous and I can understand why Poulenc thought so highly of Ashton's ballet which he said was the best he had seen using the Ravel score. The most recent revival somehow managed to domesticate it but then none of the dancers seemed at home in it and as a result they were all far too careful and nice.

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Agree. Too "nice" is plain "nasty" ???? I saw Scènes in Munich. it was good to see it outside of London, it was on with Song of the Earth and a Mallophant - a good night. Interesting the reaction you mentioned.

 

You see where I have a problem (and it's my problem I know) is that the prettification of his work is ultimately detrimental. And I think one has to see through "stuff" to get to it. The stuff is sometimes the decor and/or costumes. Symphonic for me is the apotheosis of design content dance music...Scenes is nearly as good. It's when the irony stops and the daintiness of design takes over...Valses nobles et sentimentales suffered a little from this. Which of course takes me to the dangerous waters of camp sensibilities and so I'll stop here...

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