Is it time for an Ashton Festival?

[Fonty]

Goodness me, I have just checked the performance database for Cinderella, to see where I might have seen it.  The performance I saw was on the 7th January 1998 at the Festival Hall.  I didn't realise it was THAT long ago!

 

https://www.rohcollections.org.uk/performance.aspx?performance=8128&row=40

[Emeralds]

7 minutes ago, Fonty said:

Goodness me, I have just checked the performance database for Cinderella, to see where I might have seen it.  The performance I saw was on the 7th January 1998 at the Festival Hall.  I didn't realise it was THAT long ago!

 

https://www.rohcollections.org.uk/performance.aspx?performance=8128&row=40

That was during the refurbishment of the Opera House - definitely a very long time ago! Good memory! 

 

I think there are now a number of ballerinas would be great as Ondine: Hayward, Naghdi, O’Sullivan, Takada, Choe, etc. Lots of suitable Palemons too.  Ondine would be great as a Festival programme item. 

[AnneL]

10 hours ago, Emeralds said:

I liked the Walker ones, but wouldn’t mind a new designer if legal reasons prevent the use of them. 

 

I discovered (belatedly!) the clip of Anna Rose O’Sullivan and others dancing Ashton’s choreography to Glazunov’s music for Raymonda, called Raymonda Variations (or something like that). I’ve love to see that in an Ashton Festival! 

 

Also, I’d love to see Daphnis and Chloe, Birthday Offering and Les Rendezvous. 

I second that!Especially Daphnis and Chloe which has a great Ravel score. I have just been watching a clip of it featuring Bonelli and Nunez in a seductive pdd. 

[Lizbie1]

I think I read here that the reason given for Daphnis and Chloe not being staged for ages is that it's very expensive because you need to engage the RO chorus. I've never found this to be a convincing argument and would really like to know the basis for this - do the RO chorus have the right to veto other, excellent, amateur choirs singing at ROH? Does it need the full RO chorus or would a smaller subsection do the job just ass well?

 

Where there's a will, there's a way!

[Mary]

They do it just 'ass' well in The Dream after all!

[Emeralds]

Lizbie1 and Mary raise good points. After all, Nutcracker uses a non-Royal Opera chorus (in pre-Covid times) the school choir from London Oratory Junior School. Also, cost doesn’t seem to prohibit regular  stagings of MacMillan’s Requiem and Gloria, both of which require an SATB mixed chorus like Daphnis and Chloe. I fear the real reason is perceived lack of box office appeal.....yet that doesn’t stop them programming numerous shows of [insert names of ballets that produce lots of empty seats that leave you cold]. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 2, 2021 by Emeralds

[alison]

1 hour ago, Emeralds said:

Also, cost doesn’t seem to prohibit regular  stagings of MacMillan’s Requiem and Gloria, both of which require an SATB mixed chorus like Daphnis and Chloe.

 

 

I don't actually think Requiem gets that many runs: certainly we went for an incredibly long time without it, unfortunately (and it still hasn't been filmed ).  I'm not sure what size of choir it requires, either: I've certainly been surprised at how small some of the choirs performing it as a choral piece have been.

[Ian Macmillan]

I wouldn't have thought that the Fauré Requiem needs a large choir - as I recall there are split Tenor and Bass sections, but 4 voices to a part could suffice.

[Rina]

One thing a festival could do is to contrast a familiar work with an unfamiliar work made around the same time. This would highlight the greatly diverse styles in which Ashton worked. For example it's interesting to note that Daphnis and Chloe (1951) comes the year after Illuminations (1950).

 

Other unexpected pairings are The Two Pigeons  and Persephone (both 1961) or Enigma Variations and Jazz Calendar (both 1968). The Royal Ballet is sitting on archive film of Persephone (and much else besides) and Geraldine Morris has written on it, and reconstructed part.  I am very interested in Ashton's way of creating a mythic atmosphere by flattening the surface plane so to speak, and using walking and non-balletic ritualised movement, as in his opera work. 

 

Seeing Walter Gore's solo from A Day in a Southern Port (1931) in the recent Ashton Insight evening made me think of Alexander Grant in Thursday's Child - a similar jazzy, tap feeling. Wayne Sleep mentioned Ashton's revue work for Cochran in the 1930s and it's evident from the delightful Jazz Calendar that this never left him. Jarman's unitard costumes bring a full-body clarity to the movement which could not be further from the use of costume in Enigma. I love Jazz Calendar - it's Ashton in relaxed mood, playful, with a "what shall we do next" kind of feeling. Echoes in places of Nijinska's Le Train Bleu.

 

Even in the 1990s there were calls on the BalletAlert website for "affirmative action" to be taken to halt the decline in Ashton performances. I haven't done an analysis (has anyone?) of Ashton performances in recent memory but it seems that the number has been shrinking even further in the last ten years - consider the repeats of Marguerite and Armand, Rhapsody, Monotones, Month in the Country, The Dream, plus occasional revivals of the full length works. I'd not use any of these shorter works for the festival but concentrate on "the missing" (Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, A Wedding Bouquet, and so on).

[alison]

Am I right in thinking that BRB were the last to do Jazz Calendar, some significant time ago now (was Kevin O'Hare in the company at the time?)?  I'm not sure when the RB last danced it, but isn't it extant and in one piece, if someone wanted to bring it back?

[Jan McNulty]

4 hours ago, alison said:

Am I right in thinking that BRB were the last to do Jazz Calendar, some significant time ago now (was Kevin O'Hare in the company at the time?)?  I'm not sure when the RB last danced it, but isn't it extant and in one piece, if someone wanted to bring it back?

 

IIRC Jazz Calendar was included in a mixed programme somewhere between 1990 and 2000 - BRB was doing one a year leading up to the millennium.  I think I saw Ravenna Tucker in it and I remember thinking it looked very dated, although that was probably the costumes rather than the choreography.

[bangorballetboy]

4 hours ago, alison said:

Am I right in thinking that BRB were the last to do Jazz Calendar, some significant time ago now (was Kevin O'Hare in the company at the time?)?  I'm not sure when the RB last danced it, but isn't it extant and in one piece, if someone wanted to bring it back?

 

Sarasota Ballet did it in 2016.

[Fonty]

Have to say I never really liked Jazz Calendar that much.  Not my favourite Ashton.  I wonder what the critics thought of it when it first came out.  Was it a huge success?

[Beryl H]

It was a huge success the few times I saw it, especially the pdd for Antoinette Sibley and Rudolf Nureyev!

[Emeralds]

9 hours ago, alison said:

 

I don't actually think Requiem gets that many runs: certainly we went for an incredibly long time without it, unfortunately (and it still hasn't been filmed ).  I'm not sure what size of choir it requires, either: I've certainly been surprised at how small some of the choirs performing it as a choral piece have been.

I feel like I see Requiem a lot- but maybe because I never have scheduling conflicts for that. 😊 So couldn’t a modest sized choir be used for Daphnis & Chloe- it’s getting so rarely seen that I don’t know if there is even a standard expectation of how large the choir should be. The Royal Opera House also has a number of very good school choirs who could help make up the numbers if the Opera chorus are busy. I enjoyed the 1994 revival with Trinidad Sevillano guesting as Chloe, Stuart Cassidy as Daphnis, Benazir Hussein as Lykanion, Adam Cooper as Dorkon, and Matthew Hart was Bryaxis (Gary Avis was a shepherd!). Looks like 1996 was the last time they danced it - Mukhamedov was Bryaxis .....opposite Yoshida as Chloe! The music is played every so often in symphony concerts but without the choir- just as a suite for orchestra. 

 

Ooh, I would love to see Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, A Wedding Bouquet and Jazz Calendar. 

[alison]

There was another run in the early 2000s - hence the references to Bonelli and Nunez, among others.

[Fonty]

1 hour ago, Beryl H said:

It was a huge success the few times I saw it, especially the pdd for Antoinette Sibley and Rudolf Nureyev!

 

I don't remember it, but I found this snippet. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFmmW_2_CPU

 

[Beryl H]

19 hours ago, Fonty said:

 

I don't remember it, but I found this snippet. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFmmW_2_CPU

 

 

Thanks for this, happy memories.

[Two Pigeons]

Great snippet but completely wrong music.

[Rina]

On 02/12/2021 at 16:07, Jan McNulty said:

IIRC Jazz Calendar was included in a mixed programme somewhere between 1990 and 2000 - BRB was doing one a year leading up to the millennium.  I think I saw Ravenna Tucker in it and I remember thinking it looked very dated, although that was probably the costumes rather than the choreography.

 

Jan uses "dated" in relation to Derek Jarman's costumes rather than Ashton's choreography but the word has been used by some critics of his ballets, including Ashton himself and several trustees of his Foundation, as a reason for not performing them. This is likely to come up in the context of a festival and it may be useful to try and unpack some of its various connotations and see how valid they are. Questions arise: What is happening when "dated" is used as a put-down? it feels defensive. Is it a distancing technique, a move against an aesthetic which is felt to be too challenging? 

 

Ashton had what we might call a posterity complex - we can speculate about this but we don't have to be caught up in it. In the recent Ashton Foundation documentary, Henry Danton recalls how Ashton accused him of spoiling Symphonic Variations by leaving the company, and Ashton was well known for leaving it to de Valois to think about  second casts. Perhaps he was so identified with his ballets that he didn't want to remember his own past by reviving them. He was also concerned that so much of a ballet's details, nuances and spirit would have been lost that people would ask themselves what all the fuss had been about. In Julie Kavanagh's biography of Ashton, she expresses the view that, on its revival in the mid-1980s, Apparitions looked dated - although her reasons seem to reflect more on the production than the condition of the ballet. One can only speculate how close the notated version is to the original.

 

"Dated" carries a number of meanings. Out of date - such as information which is no longer correct - would be one. Another might be "evocative of a particular era". But "old-fashioned" seems the one that Ashton's critics have in mind - in a sense akin to the vendors in Flog It! who no longer have a place for granny's brown furniture in their modern homes. Taken literally, this argument seems a fallacy - Austen's novels are set in the Regency, Wilde's plays reek of the 1890s, but are not alien to our sensibility, far from it. We are attached to them not because they are modern but because they are timeless. We have recently been seeing Giselle - a quintessential product of 1840s Paris - because its Romanticism is archetypal, an eternally-recurring pattern in the psyche. Judged against this criterion, many if not most works are "dated" as soon as they are made. (Others may have once have had a timeless quality they have since lost. This could have been through neglect, non-performance, dancers (such as Makarova in Apparitions) substituting their own steps, and so on. It's not so much that the ballet looks its era as that its daimon - its unique creative spirit - has fled, leaving it marooned in a dead past.) 

 

Crowds flock to see an exhibition of Mary Quant's fashion, even though only a few actually wear it. I'd say that Jazz Calendar has really interesting designs - the best that Jarman made for the stage according to a recent exhibition of his work. The score was composed during a golden period of British jazz. Ashton made over 30 minutes of dance (a long work for him) which draw on both music and design in interesting ways to make a composite work in the tradition of the Ballets Russes. The fact it was performed for over 30 years is sufficient proof that his work had a lasting quality. It does not need to be a masterpiece (another tricky word) to justify revival. It evokes the actual sixties but also the sixties of the imagination - a sense of freedom and experiment, a Marty Feldman-like strangeness, and fun.

 

I agree that Ondine would be ideal for the festival. A great composition - a challenging modernist score which has gained stature over time, an intelligent working in a 19th century design aesthetic, and choreography inspired by the element of water - embodied in a myth which takes us back to an early 19th century fairy tale, through 16th-century Paracelsian alchemy, to the animate world of of the nymphs in ancient Greece - timelessness. Is "dated" being used to create a false sense of separation from the past in order to bolster a shaky artistic vision of the present? Are many works being created today - in the semi-dark, to ugly, industrialised sound, with manic and extreme movements - actually more "dated" than Ashton's works of the thirties and forties?

 

 

[Two Pigeons]

I remember when LFB/ENB mounted Apparitions in the late 80s with Peter Schaufuss and Natalya Makarova.  Despite being a huge Ashtonphile I distinctly remember being underwhelmed by it and thinking it very long.  Despite all the best intentions the revival was not regarded as a success, especially by the critics.

 

I do remember hearing Jean Bedells saying that she had been involved in the revival but was so unhappy with the result that she demanded her name was removed from the credits.  She was mounting Job for BRB at the time.  Job went very much better.

Edited December 5, 2021 by Two Pigeons
Wrong word

[Rina]

 

45 minutes ago, Two Pigeons said:

I do remember hearing Jean Bedells saying that she had been involved in the revival but was so unhappy with the result that she demanded her name was removed from the credits.

 

 

 

That's interesting Two Pigeons. Julie Kavanagh credits Jean Bedells as providing the "bare bones" of the choreography, which suggests there were problems in recalling sufficient of it to make a viable reconstruction. I do recall it mainly as a vehicle for Makarova, who was very charismatic in that ballroom dress. However otherwise all I remember is the purple robes of the monks' procession. It has been performed by Sarasota recently, and I'd certainly like to see it again. There are 3 minutes of clips from Apparitions as mounted by Sarasota Ballet beginning at at 6.10 on this link: Sir Frederick Ashton - Performances by The Sarasota Ballet on Vimeo

 

[maryrosesatonapin]

5 hours ago, Rina said:

Are many works being created today - in the semi-dark, to ugly, industrialised sound, with manic and extreme movements - actually more "dated" than Ashton's works of the thirties and forties?

 

 

My answer to this question is a resounding yes!

[Don Q Fan]

I would love to see an Ashton Festival. So many pieces that I haven't seen. 

[Jeannette]

16 hours ago, Two Pigeons said:

I remember when LFB/ENB mounted Apparitions in the late 80s with Peter Schaufuss and Natalya Makarova.  Despite being a huge Ashtonphile I distinctly remember being underwhelmed by it and thinking it very long.  Despite all the best intentions the revival was not regarded as a success, especially by the critics.

 

I do remember hearing Jean Bedells saying that she had been involved in the revival but was so unhappy with the result that she demanded her name was removed from the credits.  She was mounting Job for BRB at the time.  Job went very much better.

The revival of Apparitions in Sarasota three years ago was better regarded than the ‘80s LFB one. It didn’t seem long to me. Gomes was fantastic as the poet.

[Two Pigeons]

This rather confirms the view that the only place where Ashton's work is really safe is Sarasota.  As has been said previously they dance Ashton from and with love, the Royal Ballet more from duty.  Regrettably BRB appear to have abandoned it entirely.

[Jeannette]

14 hours ago, Two Pigeons said:

This rather confirms the view that the only place where Ashton's work is really safe is Sarasota.  As has been said previously they dance Ashton from and with love, the Royal Ballet more from duty.  Regrettably BRB appear to have abandoned it entirely.

Ashton ballets are safe in Sarasota only when they are programmed. Alas, there are none this season. Maybe in 2022/2023?

[bangorballetboy]

6 hours ago, Jeannette said:

Ashton ballets are safe in Sarasota only when they are programmed. Alas, there are none this season. Maybe in 2022/2023?

I thought Valses nobles et sentimentales was programmed next month?

[FLOSS]

Ballet is an ephemeral art form and while it is true that ballets wither and die through neglect because of the damage neglect does to a company's collective memory of them and their specific style and the way it disrupts the chain of transmission, there is one thing worse than neglect and that is staging the revival of a long neglected work with a stellar cast who, for one reason or another, are ill suited to their allotted roles. Miscasting manifests itself in any number of ways, the most obvious of which in the context of the Ashton repertory is giving a role created on Helpmann,a dance actor, to a dancer who is more of a bravura technician than an actor. Casting leading dancers in the revival of a neglected work may help sell tickets but it does not guarantee that they will be effective in the roles they are required to dance. Indeed with some dancers  the more eminent they become the less able or less willing they seem to be to enter the stylistic and imaginative world of unfamiliar works, even when their choreographers are on hand to coach them. It can be difficult to know whether a lack of interpretative malleability reflects an innate rigidity and lack of creative imagination and adaptability on a dancer's part or whether, in the case of a dancer who is well established as an outstanding exponent of the art form, it arises from an attachment to the interpretative style which  propelled them to the top in the first place and which they can see no reason to change.

 

It is over thirty years since the London revival of Apparitions failed to stir its audience.That night in the Coliseum audience there were some, including critics, who remembered the ballet and were disappointed by the revival. Today it may be difficult to understand why a revival of a work with a cast headed by Markarova  and Schaufuss could possibly have failed unless the the problem lay with the ballet or its designs. My recollection is that the critics engaged in lengthy discussions about whether it was the designs or the choreography which were at fault. I don't recall that there was much discussion about whether the Coliseum was the right venue or whether the leading dancers were well suited to their roles but I think that would have been a good place to start. I think the real problem with the revival was a combination of the cast and the venue.The point here is that because of their star status no one, not even the critics, seemed able to bring themselves to ask whether two such eminent performers, who were at the time leading figures in the world of dance,  might themselves have been the reason why the revival  caused such disappointment if not its out and out failure. It was not as if there was no clue to the types of dancers needed in the leading roles or its suitability for performance in a large theatre.

 

I know that it is fashionable to ignore dancer types and emploi because they are thought to place too many restrictions on dancers' careers but there are occasions when such details matter.  The fact is that neither dancer involved in the revival was an ideal physical match for their allocated roles. Schaufuss, a stocky dancer, had an uphill struggle to convince the audience that he was Ashton's Poet, a role which calls for expressive dancing and acting rather than a bravura technique while Markarova failed to establish her character's mystery and allure and danced the choreography in her own idiosyncratic way rather than something approaching an Ashtonian style. It may well be that it was this lack of malleability and adaptability which caused Bedells and, I believe, Ashton himself to try to disassociate themselves from the revival. The hint that the work might not have been suited to a large theatre comes from the fact that after 1953 it disappeared from the repertory at Covent Garden.

 

One thing that is certain is that bad and approximately cast revivals can do more harm to a choreographer's reputation than mere neglect can ever achieve. The works which are most vulnerable are those created by choreographers whose works have been neglected for ages with the result that audiences are not entirely familiar with their style while the dancers are not all entirely comfortable with reproducing it idiomatically. if you add to this the current state of the choreographer's reputation which in Ashton's case, it became fashionable to question or even denigrate as "camp" and "old fashioned" from the late 1980's when compared with the works of rebellious younger dance makers then you have yet another barrier to be surmounted before successful rehabilitation and restoration to the repertory can be achieved. Ashton's reputation has suffered far too often from casting decisions apparently made in order to give seemingly under used dancers something to do rather than based on their suitability for the roles they are to dance.

 

Having said all that I would be happy to see another attempt to stage Apparitions at Covent Garden with a carefully selected cast. I suspect that it is another one of those Ashton ballets, like Ondine and Daphnis and Chloe, which are not workaday ballets which can be staged using a range of dancers more or less suited to their roles but one that needs the right cast to make it work. At present  I think the company would probably find the Poet easier to cast than the Woman in a Ball Dress.The work is a narrative one in which a poet sees a woman in a ball dress, becomes obsessed with her( perhaps she represents his muse),loses her and kills himself. At the time of its premiere the ballet was judged by local critics to be a far more effective evocation of the Romanticism of the 1830's than Massine's Symphonie Fantasque. Today, it is mainly of interest it is because the Woman in a Ball Dress was the first major role Ashton created for Fonteyn. The only benefit to come from the  revival of the late eighties is that it was recorded. I don't think that anyone who saw that revival in the late eighties can really claim to have seen a performance of Ashton's Apparitions,

 

I think that in order to have a festival you need something to celebrate, such as several year's hard work restoring a range of Ashton ballets to the stage and developing  a company capable of dancing his choreography idiomatically rather than one where that is the preserve of a few specialists. Regardless of what Kevin says about the company's dancers having Ashton in their DNA I would consider it a great advance if the company was once again full of dancers who don't baulk every time they are confronted with one of Ashton's tricky combinations of steps like horses at a show jumping event faced by a particularly troubling gate. Slowing down to get things right is not how Ashton was danced in the past and it should not be how it is danced today, as it simply draws attention to the dancer's difficulties. In addition I think we need to remember that contrary to the current popular view of Ashton he favoured fearless dancers not demure, cautious ones. While it is true that his works can seem small scale, demure and more than a little anaemic in performance that has more to do with the fact that he suffers from a lot of compromise and tone deaf casting. Sadly remarkably few of the company's dancers seem equipped to use their bodies in the way his choreography demands while many lack the capacity to enter the interpretative world of his choreographic imagination which is rarely, if ever, simply about the steps or the position of the hands, arms or head.

 

I know most people like to think that their favourite dancers can do everything but the sad fact is that few,if any, dancers have the ability to encompass the full range of Ashton's ballets or the styles in which he worked. Compromise and approximate casting can reduce Ashton's ballets to pale imitations of what they should be in performance. Those who saw the last revival of Two Pigeons but did not see Morera as the Gypsy Girl will have no idea what a full blooded account of the role looks like or how exciting it can be. The point is that the Gypsy is a character and not simply a set of tricky combinations and yet that is all most of the Gypsy Girls managed to deliver in the last revival of the ballet. As far as the Young Girl is concerned only those who saw Stix-Brunell in the role saw Ashton's character as he intended her to be encountered in the theatre. Then there is the last revival of Birthday Offering which , although it was performed by dancers from the top two ranks of the company, was at best an anaemic version of what this celebratory work should look like in performance. Both casts seemed full of cautious dancers who had either been allocated the wrong solo or should not have been in it at all, with most of those cast doing the steps, rather than dancing the ballet.

 

While I think that an Ashton Festival might appeal to the current management as a way to deflect criticism about its sustained neglect of the Ashton repertory, I don't think there would be any long term benefits from holding a festival at this time. It would simply enable the powers that be to tick the box marked "Ashton repertory" and then ignore it for another five years or so until they had to start thinking about the company's centenary celebrations. Even Kevin,if he is still in charge then, is unlikely to overlook that significant anniversary.  What I think is needed at the moment is a cadre of dancers who can actually dance his choreography idiomatically and an expansion of the Ashton repertory to include his surviving prewar works.At present he is served by the revival of a small selection of his works performed over  six to eight evenings towards the end of most seasons as a sort of consolatory afterthought once the company has got the serious business of the season, performing the core repertory, out of the way. This is not the way to preserve the Ashton repertory or sustain a healthy chain  of transmission from one generation to the next. It is a programming policy which will result in the bulk of this important  repertory dying through neglect.  A policy designed to ensure that the Ashton repertory really is in the dancers' DNA and survives as part of the company's living artistic tradition for future audiences and dancers  requires considerably more than a festival or the occasional revival of a long neglected work or works. Even guaranteeing the revival of three Ashton ballets each season isn't going to help if they are to be chosen from a shortlist of five or six titles at most.

 

Securing the future of the Ashton repertory calls for a long term commitment to the task and a steady and consistent approach to getting Ashton's ballets back on stage as part of the company's active repertory. Putting it bluntly the company  needs to revise its programming policy so that it includes regular revivals of Ashton's two and three act works and guarantees regular revivals of his one act ballets so that they are part of the regular turnover of repertory. While I am tempted to say that the company should begin the process by staging revivals of Ondine and Daphnis and Chloe as the company has at least one dancer in the form of Hayward who I think would be ideal in both works I think that as a first step management ought to set out to identify its demi-character dancers and those with potential to tackle demi- character roles among the ranks of the company. It could do this without doing any damage to Ashton's reputation by staging Facade which provides ample opportunities for potential demi-character dancers to reveal themselves. Ashton used the rules of emploi in modified form in many of his narrative ballets and at the very least roles created, or inherited by Alexander Grant need to be cast with demi -character dancers if they are to work in the theatre.

 

In an ideal world management would commit to abandoning compromise casting when staging rarely seen works like Daphnis and Chloe, Ondins and Apparitions. It would put together exemplary casts at least in the initial season to ensure that audiences and dancers alike have a firm grasp on what these works should look like in performance. My recollection is that during Ashton's lifetime Daphnis and Chloe  was only revived when a suitable cast was available, getting the casting right with a work like that meant that management could only have one cast and it accepted that fact. As the London revival of Apparitions and the recent main stage revival of Birthday Offering show there is only one thing worse than neglecting the Ashton repertory and that is reviving his ballets with ill chosen casts. Strangely unsuccessful revivals of Ashton's ballets rarely result in criticism of casting decisions,the dancers or their coaches. The most popular panacea for such disappointments is to suggest that all that is needed are fresh designs. Many of us have experienced the effect of ill-judged new designs on Ashton's ballets. In the case of Les Rendezvous the new designs c. 2004 failed to establish the ballet's mood with a confusing mixture of periods in the costume designs while making nonsense of Ashton's floor plan by removing the gates and railings which define the area available to the dancers. In the case of Daphnis and Chloe the new designs first seen in 1994 significantly reduced the impact of the dancers' movements as well as destroying the original idea behind the Ashton, Craxton creation which was to set the action of the ballet in modern Greece c.1950 in a landscape in which the ancient gods were still powerful. The 1994 designs did the very thing that the creators of the 1951 production had sought to avoid. It set the ballet in the ancient world  and in doing so it destroyed the poetic evocation of the Greek landscape , removed any sense of immediacy and made the ballet's action and choreography suddenly seem distant,

remote and extraordinarily artificial.

 

One thing that needs to be understood about the company's somewhat ambiguous relationship with its founder choreographer is that the reduction of stage time allocated to Ashton's ballets according to Jeremy Isaacs was not a response to the audience's declining interest in them. Isaacs' autobiography makes clear that the Royal Ballet became a MacMillan company as far as its core repertory is concerned soon after Ashton's death as the result of a policy designed to give MacMillan's ballets more stage time because he was able to make new works for the company. At present the company's core repertory seems to consist of the following elements all of which management seems to deem essential, an interminably lengthy run of Nutcrackers,an inordinate number of performances of the MacMillan dram ballet timetabled for revival that season and far too many performances of the nineteenth century ballet selected for revival plus MacGregor's latest oeuvre.

 

The first step in restoring the works of the founder choreographer to the stage as part of the company's general repertory would I fear require special Ashton classes comparable to the Bournonville classes given by the RDB; an overhaul of the current established formula for programming revivals and the removal of at least one, if not both, of the after Petipa "classics" acquired since de Valois' directorship. Reducing the number of nineteenth century ballets retained in the repertory to those selected by de Valois plus a staging of La Sylphide which she always wanted for the company would be a good place to start. De Valois'"classics" were acquired and staged in order to establish and maintain high technical and artistic standards in the company.They were never intended to dominate the repertory each season as they tend to do now . Another useful change would be to reduce the number of performances allocated to MacMillan;s dram ballets each season. It really is not necessary that every senior dancer should give us her Manon or that most of them should give us two or three bouts of their Juliet either, when the effect of allocating so much stage time to three MacMillan dram- ballets is to push Ashton's works to the periphery of the repertory giving it the status of an optional extra rather than an essential element of the company's present and future.

 

I would like to see this change in approach to programming for a very selfish reason, I want to see the missing Ashton ballets and I want to see them danced well. I think that exposure to them and the other major twentieth century works  mouldering in the company's archives would benefit the company as well as its audience by expanding the range of experience of both. I think that the place to which the world of classical dance has drifted in the last thirty years is one in which ballet has become an increasingly arid display of technique and perfectly formed steps not that different from the current state of ice skating but without the skates.What got lost in the campaign to persuade the company's  dancers and audiences that there are two separate and inherently irreconcilably opposed approaches to choreography exemplified by Ashton the establishment man and MacMillan the rebel is the influence that Ashton had on the generation of dance makers to which John Cranko, Kenneth MacMillan and Peter Darrell all belonged, as an active, innovative and original choreographer working in the classical idiom. The idea proposed by those who seek to place Ashton and MacMillan in opposition to each other with Ashton as the exponent of formal, reserved, polite, old fashioned,derivative, small scale and on occasions slightly twee choreography and MacMillan as the original, rebellious and untamed dance maker does audiences and dancers alike a great disservice. It is plainly wrong and it limits the range of works available to inexperienced young choreographers at the very time they need exposure to a wide range of approaches to dance making if they are to escape from reworking the same tired choreographic vein of insipid abstract works which has dominated the repertory for decades as far as new works are concerned . If Ashton and Balanchin could find inspiration in Petipa perhaps today's aspirant choreographers could find inspiration from greater exposure to the company's twentieth century repertory and above all to the full range of Ashton's inventive and original choreography? I can but hope.

 

Among the works I would stage as part of the restoration of the Ashton repertory are Apparitions, Foyer de Danse, A Wedding Bouquet, all of his entertainments including Jazz Calendar  and the atypical Illuminations and Dante Sonata. I would give a permanent home to Ashton's Romeo and Juliet as its approach is so different from that chosen by MacMillan.  I an see no reason why the company should not have two very different ballets on the same theme. They could be revived alternately as the triennial Romeo and Juliet revival slot came round. In fact I think it would be easier to list the works I would never dream of reviving and those which need an extended rest. The works I would mark out for oblivion are Nursery Suite and The Tales of Beatrix Potter while those which I think would benefit from an extended rest of five or more years consists of Marguerite and Armand and Voices of Spring.

 

Restoring the Ashton repertory would require a lot of hard work perhaps even the introduction of special Ashton classes to prepare the dancers to perform his ballets which might encourage them to think of his choreographed combinations of steps in terms of phrases and sentences rather than individual perfectly formed steps. In other words it would help transform the company into one which dances Ashton's choreography idiomatically. It would of course take several seasons of hard work in the studio and on stage to learn and master a wider and far more varied twentieth century repertory than the one to which the company has been accustomed during the last thirty years. I am concerned that the idea of an Ashton Festival might well appeal to management as  a quick fix requiring far less effort and resource than a long term programme of restoration would require. Kevin would only need to stage a slightly wider selection of Ashton ballets than usual and describe it as a festival in order to gain the reputation of a man committed to securing the future of the Ashton repertory replacing the impression that he is a man with little sense of the history or traditions of the company which he now runs.

 

The problem is that however good he may be at telling amusing anecdotes about him at insight events Kevin seems far more interested in commissioning new works than he is in preserving the works and the performance style of the company's founder choreographer. I can't help wondering if Kevin ever thinks about de Valois' guidance on the way her company should be run, honouring the past, welcoming the future and working in the present, because the past he chooses to acknowledge and honour is an extraordinarily limited one. It is in essence the company's core repertory which currently consists of de Valois' classics derived from the Sergeyev stagings, two more recently acquired after Petipa stagings,  the three successful MacMillan dram-ballets ,Cranko's Onegin and based on whether a ballet is or is not guaranteed regular revivals a mere handful of Ashton one act works which bizarrely include the Margot Rudi vehicle Marguerite and Armand and the divertisement The Voices of Spring while far more substantial works are treated as expendable. I know it's not likely to happen because Kevin's real interests lie elsewhere but I can hope.

 

I don't want to see the company reduced to a museum of choreography but at the same time I don't want to discover that the new works come at the heavy cost of the loss of the Ashton repertory or the loss of Song of the Earth, Les Noces and what remains of the company's Diaghilev repertory. I can't help thinking that the company managed to achieve a much better balance between old and new works during the sixties and the seventies when it was a truly creative company with two in-house choreographers of distinction than it does at present. I wonder how everyone will feel, if in fifty years time it becomes clear that the Ashton repertory is almost entirely lost and that few of the works which replaced it are more than minor period pieces of little lasting significance. I am not sure that I would want to go down in history as the person who almost single handed destroyed the bulk of the company's twentieth century repertory and virtually eliminated the entire Ashton repertory. But then perhaps he believe he will be forgiven as the man who introduced works like Raven Girl to the repertory.

 

 

 

 

 

[Jane S]

Re Apparitions:

 

The only reviews of the London Festival Ballet version I have to hand are by John Percival and David Vaughan, both of them strongly pro-Ashton, and they both put the casting at the heart of the revival's failure - Schaufuss too solid and Makarova too worldly. (JP thinks the role would better suit 'a teenage ballerina with huge dark eyes'  - I assume he's talking about Trinidad Sevillano)

 

DV says that it didn't work on the big Covent Garden stage and it doesn't work in the Coliseum either.

 

Interestingly, JP says that Anthony Dowell had tried to persuade Ashton to let him revive it at Covent Garden, and Ashton had said no.

 

It would be interesting to know what Clement Crisp thought - is his review included in his book?

Edited December 9, 2021 by Jane S

[bridiem]

1 hour ago, Jane S said:

Re Apparitions:

 

The only reviews of the London Festival Ballet version I have to hand are by John Percival and David Vaughan, both of them strongly pro-Ashton, and they both put the casting at the heart of the revival's failure - Schaufuss too solid and Makarova too worldly. (JP thinks the role would better suit 'a teenage ballerina with huge dark eyes'  - I assume he's talking about Trinidad Sevillano)

 

DV says that it didn't work on the big Covent Garden stage and it doesn't work in the Coliseum either.

 

Interestingly, JP says that Anthony Dowell had tried to persuade Ashton to let him revive it at Covent Garden, and Ashton had said no.

 

It would be interesting to know what Clement Crisp thought - is his review included in his book?

 

No, sadly it isn't.

[Dawnstar]

22 hours ago, FLOSS said:

Having said all that I would be happy to see another attempt to stage Apparitions at Covent Garden with a carefully selected cast. I suspect that it is another one of those Ashton ballets, like Ondine and Daphnis and Chloe, which are not workaday ballets which can be staged using a range of dancers more or less suited to their roles but one that needs the right cast to make it work. At present  I think the company would probably find the Poet easier to cast than the Woman in a Ball Dress.

 

May I ask what you thought of the casting & dancing of the excerpt of Apparitions performed at the Fonteyn Gala 2 years ago, assuming you saw it? That's my only experience of Apparitions so I don't have anything to judge it against.

[FLOSS]

In an evening devoted to a single dancer's career especially one as singular as Fonteyn' it is inevitable that few, if any, of the excerpts staged are going to be cast with dancers capable of capturing the essence of the performance style of the dancer being honoured or even hinting at it in any way for two very simple reasons, every dancer is unique and the company's performance styles has changed a great deal since Ashton's death. It was inevitable that we would find that for many of the dancers on stage that evening the only thing they had in common with Fonteyn was the fact that they were members of her home company. But of course the purpose of such an evening is not to highlight change but to evoke memories among those old enough to have seen the dancer being celebrated and for those too young to have seen the dancer being honoured in live performance to provide a selection of excerpts from works associated with him or her with no guarantee that any of the works being shown are going to be seen in full in later seasons. 

 

I found the excerpt from Apparitions intriguing and I should love to see the ballet in full, if only because the floor patterns for the corps look really interesting. But to answer your question directly I did not think that Cuthbertson was ideally cast as the Woman in the Ball Dress however my assessment may be of limited value as it is based on seeing her in the ballroom scene, on a single evening. Matthew Ball was not ideal either but in his case I think it may well have been a lack of maturity and experience that was the problem at that time. Ball in 2021 is a very different dancer from the Ball of 2019 as his performance of the Fisherman's solo from Le Rossignole shows. At present I should be torn between Ball and Bracewell if I were asked to cast the role of the Poet.

 

At the moment I would say that the real problem with Apparitions is finding the right dancer to cast in the Fonteyn role. 

I think, that like her role in Les Patineurs as one of the two dancers dressed in white, the Woman in a Ball Dress calls for the sort of presence that lights up the stage and compels your attention and those I think are personal gifts rather than ones that can be learned. I say this because I strongly suspect that the roles for Fonteyn and Helpmann in Patineurs were devised to exploit and build on their success of the previous year. In Patineurs  they appeared as an intriguingly glamorous couple who compelled the audience's attention however much or however little they did in the way of dancing. When it comes to technique and other skills that can be learned Cuthbertson is excellent. She is well worth seeing in Sylvia and Cinderella and I should like to see what she would do with the Fonteyn role in Scenes de Ballet,but those are ballerina roles created and danced by Fonteyn when she was .at the height of her powers. They call for technique while the role of the Woman in the Ball Dressthe stage, I suspect,depends more than anything on extraordinary stage presence and the ability to create an air of mysterious,compelling allure. Cuthbertson can do  many things but mystery and allure are not what you think of when her name is mentioned. I think if Kevin were to revive Apparitions then Hayward would be an obvious candidate for the Fonteyn role as I think she would also be for the roles of Chloe and Ondine, if he felt compelled to have a second cast and wanted to be radical he might think of Hamilton who can be strangely compelling in the right role.

 

l think what the Fonteyn Gala really showed was the range of roles and styles which she was capable of encompassing and, even allowing for the fact that she had a choreographer on hand whose task it was to transform her into a ballerina by providing her with roles that suited her but would also encourage her technical and artistic development, her range was extraordinary as was that of her choreographer Frederick Ashton . He of course from the 1960's onward would create an equally extraordinary range of ballets for the company's next generation of great dancers. The great pity in all this is that Kevin, in his pursuit of newly created repertory, seems oblivious to the choreographic treasures of which he is merely the temporary custodian.