Ashton and de Valois
I.
How did the Royal Ballet become one of the great companies of classical ballet? We can see how the different kinds of classicism practiced by the Paris Opéra Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, the Maryinsky Ballet, New York City Ballet, were each significantly shaped by a single ballet master: Pierre Gardel, August Bournonville; Marius Petipa; George Balanchine. But the Royal Ballet was founded, in 1931, by Ninette de Valois, who was an important teacher of academic ballet but a choreographer of largely demi-character style. Those two ingredients are enough to make a strong ballet company, but not to make it a world-leading voice of classicism. Yet de Valois, within her first few years at the helm, had the vision and generosity to employ two crucial colleagues: Nicholas Sergueyev and Frederick Ashton. Between 1934 and 1939, Sergueyev staged the nineteenth-century ballets for the company; between 1935 (when he became resident choreographer) and 1988 (the year of his death), Ashton created a stream of new ballets for it.[1] Especially between 1946 and 1970 (when Ashton stepped down from the post of the Royal’s directorship), the Royal’s brand of classicism was an international glory, admired in countries that had their own forms of classical ballet. My thesis is that a company takes its classicism from its choreography, and that Ashton infused the Royal with classical virtues that percolated through every aspect of its stage life. Some of them are still visible today. We can and should argue about the degrees to which these companies have or have not retained their classical virtues, but we can see that the Royal to this day employs a number of supervisory figures – Lesley Collier, Antony Dowell, Monica Mason, Christopher Saunders – who, some full-time, some now as guests, pass on what they in turn learnt from de Valois and Ashton.
De Valois and Ashton, “Madam” and “Fred”: they were and are an odd couple. In the early 1990s, I set a dance-history exam question for the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing, asking candidates to discuss the collaboration between de Valois and Ashton. At the time, the former ballerina Beryl Grey was president of the Imperial Society, and keenly involved in its dance-history proceedings. When she read the question, she shrieked, “What collaboration? Between those two? There wasn’t any!” She had danced for them both; she knew whereof she spoke.
Yet all companies are families. The Royal, as the New York critic Arlene Croce observed in 1983, projected more family feeling than any other. The Royal was a family for its devotees, too, among whom I’ve been one. This was and is the company with which we learnt to watch dance; has the repertory we came to know most intimately over the years; has given us the dancers for whom we feel we have cared most. Some of what I quote here has been gleaned from conversations with former dancers over the years, sometimes at lunch or dinner, or in one case over a good deal of vodka.
I knew neither de Valois not Ashton at all well. They were, however, very much presences at the Opera House and at Sadler’s Wells when I was first a ballet regular in the 1970s. The production of The Sleeping Beauty with which I became well acquainted with that ballet was the de Valois one of 1977-92. I can never forget either how “Madam” (you called her that even without having ever met her[2]) sat in the stage box at every performance for that staging’s first eighteen months or, more important, how we saw the results at every performance, since she kept making a non-stop stream of adjustments to details small or large. “We must get it right,” she was reported as saying in The Dancing Times[3]; that painstaking and objective approach has been the yardstick by which I have judged all dance and theatre productions ever since, and almost none has ever equaled it in terms of continual revision and re-thinking. She had involved Ashton in the staging, too. Supplementary choreography by him was danced in him in Acts One, Two, and Three; several of its Petipa numbers were danced in ways he had shaped decades before; he coached its first-cast Aurora, Lesley Collier, and some of her successors. De Valois was seventy-nine; Ashton was seventy-three. The production lasted fifteen years at Covent Garden. As danced this century by Boston Ballet, it can still seem the world’s greatest staging of the 1890 masterpeice.
That staging was new in 1977. I became a critic the following year, 1978. In autumn 1978, I went to the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet gala that honoured de Valois’s eightieth birthday, it included my first performance of both her The Rake’s Progress (1935) and Ashton’s Les Patineurs (1937). By some fluke, I was given press seats in row C of the dress circle, directly behind Ashton. Can you believe I watched my first Patineurs literally over the shoulder of its choreographer? I can’t quite believe it myself.
I had been a fan who had stood at the stage door for both him and de Valois; I well remember how we fans treasured any least remark either of those two deities might make. On another occasion around that time, for example, de Valois once thought she recognized my face, slapped my forearm in that characteristic way of hers, and said “Aren’t you with the other company?” I knew from Fonteyn’s autobiography that de Valois could often confused names and faces[4], and I knew that “the other company” meant the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet (today’s Birmingham company); I was tickled pink. Such encounters made you feel part of the family.
I’ve heard one senior critic relate how he used to look up to the stage box to see if de Valois was there; and if she was, he would think “All’s well.”[5] That kind of tone was widespread.
At this point, however, let’s distance ourselves from all this family glow. All really wasn’t always well on those occasions. But this was the kind of nanny-like effect de Valois had on the Royal Ballet’s loyalists. The climate she created was, in part, one of infantilization. But I readily admit that I once felt the same way as they.
II.
The basic facts are well known. Nonetheless I reiterate them. Ninette de Valois and Frederick Ashton were aware of each other from the 1920s on. She congratulated him on his first ballet, A Tragedy of Fashion, in 1926: he was twenty-one, she twenty-eight. He took some classes at the Institute of Choreographic Art, which she founded that same year. Both of them also danced for the Royal Opera in the 1920s; she was its lead ballerina. From 1931, they encountered each other in many ways. They both contributed – as dancers and as choreographers - to the Ballet Club or Ballet Rambert (which was Ashton’s main dance home between 1926 and 1935 and for which de Valois choreographed Bar aux Folies-Bergère in 1934), to the Vic-Wells Ballet (which de Valois founded and for which Ashton choreographed Regatta in 1931 and Les Rendezvous in 1933), and to the Camargo Society. As early as 1932, a year after she’d founded the Vic-Wells, de Valois imported ballets that Ashton had made on the Camargo (starting with The Lord of Burleigh). At the Ballet Club in the 1930s, Ashton danced in de Valois’s Bar aux Folies-Bergère; at the Vic-Wells, de Valois danced in Ashton’s Regatta and Les Rendezvous.[6]
In 1935, de Valois brought Ashton into her Vic-Wells fold, hiring him as resident choreographer to the company. He remained in that capacity until 1963 – twenty-eight years. The Vic-Wells, he said “gave me security. It gave me a regular salary, which I hadn’t had before, and I was immensely appreciative of the luxury of using proper dancers at last and having proper facilities.”[7] But he was always more than a choreographer there; and the connections between him and de Valois were complex. She used him as a dancer in her 1936 ballet Barabau; and he stepped into a role in her Douanes.[8] He used her as a dancer in his A Wedding Bouquet (1937): she was the housekeeper Webster, which was the role she danced in her final dance appearance in May 1950.[9] Among other things, he teased her by giving Webster the gesture for which de Valois was most famous – the one I’ve already mentioned, of smacking your hand or forearm in conversation.
Apart from a number of roles in his own ballets (Façade, Nocturne, Cinderella and others), Ashton appeared at the Vic-Wells Ballet, later the Sadler’s Wells and Royal Ballet, in supporting roles in the nineteenth-century classics: Hilarion in Giselle (a role he hated, but which he had played with the Camargo Society opposite Spessivtseva), Second Prince in the Rose Adagio and Puss-in-Boots in The Sleeping Princess. Later he became a famous Carabosse and a notable Dr Coppélius. De Valois supervised the company’s stagings of The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, Giselle and other classics, but she brought Ashton in to stage supplementary dances for all three of those ballets. He also staged a version of Casse-Noisette for Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet in 1951, keeping the Ivanov grand pas de deux. He had begun his work on supplementary dances for the old classics as soon as the company came to Covent Garden in 1946, and it was an aspect of his talent that continued into the 1960s. Almost the very last work he did in ballet, in 1988, was to supervise his Swan Lake dances for Natalia Makarova’s production for English National Ballet.[10] According to Pamela May[11], he was coaching Alicia Markova and Pearl Argyle in the Sleeping Beauty pas de deux as early as 1933; he went on coaching such Petipa dances for more than fifty years.
In 1963, he succeeded de Valois as artistic director of what was now the Royal Ballet, remarking “I feel rather like James I succeeding Queen Elizabeth.”[12] She had retired at the age of sixty-five; he in due course retired at precisely the same age, in 1970. Ashton in semi-retirement was a recurrent figure in the artistic lives of both Royal Ballet companies right up to his death in 1988; de Valois’s involvement with those companies was at times more intense, at others more intermittent, but certainly the companies and the school remained part of her life up to her death in 2001. Works by both of them remain intermittently in the company’s repertory. (A number of their ballets – in particular, more than a dozen of Ashton’s – are danced by companies in other countries.) Rightly, their names are printed to this day among the company’s founding figures. Those are the basic facts.
III.
Let me give you two different images, both from around the times of their respective eightieth birthdays. In summer 1978, the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden gave a gala in honour of de Valois. It performed that same production of Beauty of hers, then just nine months old. De Valois had a great gift for selflessness. Coming onto the stage to join her dancers and colleagues, she thanked the audience in one of her many very touching – and wonderfully projected - speeches. In particular, she said:
I stood on this stage in 1949 when the company came home from New York, and I said to the audience ‘It takes more than one to make a ballet company.’ I say it to you again now.
If I recall correctly, Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan were onstage with her; so was Norman Morrice, MacMillan’s successor. It was clear that de Valois included them high in her list of those to whom credit was due. She also told the audience that it had just seen an excellent example of “the English style” of dancing.
The next day, I visited the office at Dancing Times. Mary Clarke, its editor and the author of the company’s definitive 1956 history, said to me “Were you there last night?” She went on to say:
It’s true that de Valois said those words in 1949 - but she said them in a very different voice. That performance that night really wasn’t the greatest, but the house was determined to congratulate the company for its success in America. So the applause went on and on. Ashton and everybody all took curtain calls: but that wasn’t enough. The fans wanted de Valois, who was sitting there in the stage box. Plainly, she wanted the applause all to go to the dancers. Finally she stormed onto the stage in a fury, exclaimed ‘Ladies and gentlemen! It takes more than one to make a ballet company!’ and, with that, ended the evening – she had the safety curtain brought down.
Six years later, I had an interview with Ashton not long before his eightieth birthday. I was an anxious young interviewer, with my question pinned to a clipboard. At one point I said to him:
There has never been in history a collaboration like yours and Ninette de Valois’s in history. If you think of the other great classical ballet companies, they’ve all been the product of a single ballet master who both taught and choreographed: that’s what Bournonville did in Copenhagen, what Petipa did in Russia, and what Balanchine did in New York. But the Royal Ballet came out of de Valois, who ran the classical teaching of the company while choreographed in a style that tended to be either expressionistic or demi-character, whereas you, who choreographed intensely classical ballets, didn’t teach. Is that a fair description?
Ashton made some brief low-key answer along the lines of “Yes.” There followed a long pause.
I had expected more reply than that. I started surreptitiously to consult my notes to see what my next question would be. Then suddenly he said:
Of course, we were cat and dog the entire time. It was always about dancers. Every dancer I liked, she couldn’t stand. Every dancer she liked, I couldn’t stand.”[13]
If you’re wondering which dancers de Valois and Ashton disagreed about, I can’t help you with any confidence. Of the dancers he named about whom they disagreed, he named only one, later in the same interview – Olga Spessivtseva, who, of course, never danced with the Royal Ballet or its predecessors. Ashton told me, as others have done, that Spessivtseva was unmusical; I asked him if her unmusicality was like that of Natalia Makarova, and he agreed. Nevertheless, he said, he adored Spessivtseva: he said she was classical perfection. (He singled out her Odette in Act Two of Lac des cygnes.) He said:
Ninette used to say ‘I don’t like that Spessivtseva of yours – she’s not musical.’ I told her, ‘All your English girls are musical, and none of them is Spessivtseva.
His cat-and-dog view of their work together was confirmed for me after his death by Beryl Grey in the remark I’ve already quoted. “What collaboration? There wasn’t any.” Unfortunately she didn’t enlarge.
Ashton had said that he and de Valois disagreed about dancers. We now know, however, that their disputes concerned other matters too.
IV.
People often talk as if de Valois’s work was so central to British ballet that she might have achieved her company with a choreographer other than Ashton. Yes, she might. So might Lincoln Kirstein, whose obsession with founding an American ballet that featured choreography with American subject-matter equaled de Valois’s with founding an English ballet with English subject-matter. Kirstein was first interested in Massine. Later on, when Balanchine was busy on Broadway, Kirstein had a whole series of American pets from whom he commissioned such American ballets as Filling Station, Yankee Clipper, Billy the Kid - just as Madam made her own Rake’s Progress and subsequently encouraged David Bintley to make English ballets.
This is all charming. It has nothing, however, to do with a vision of classical ballet. That, after all, is why Alicia Markova left in 1935: she was a great classical ballerina but the Vic-Wells was holding her back.[14]
I’d like to suggest instead that, without Ashton and Constant Lambert, the Royal Ballet might not even have been seriously theatrical. Before they came to the Wells, the Vic-Wells repertory looked, in the words of Marie Rambert, painfully dowdy.[15] Belinda Quirey, who had watched the Diaghilev Ballet in the 1920s, always related the difference: Rambert’s Ballet Club in the 1930s, despite its poverty, continued the elegance, theatricality, lighting and adult atmosphere of Diaghilev, whereas the Vic-Wells reeked of the classroom.[16] Agnes de Mille in 1951 recalled that, in 1933, the Vic-Wells company had been “merely a troupe of students located way out to hell, and gone, herded and driven by the implacable Ninette de Valois”[17], whereas she could already see how inspiring the climate was at Rambert’s Ballet Club. Ashton long recalled how Lopokova called de Valois’s dancers “the ugly ducklings”, whereas Rambert’s dancers, he said, “were beautiful”.[18]
This balance of ingredients changed only when Ashton and Lambert came to the Vic-Wells in 1935. It’s a sign of de Valois’s greatness that she invited them. She could see what was needed. She did not, however, always speak or behave with gratitude, in particular for Ashton.
We should make this distinction: when it came to pure-dance values in ballet, de Valois was an academicist whereas Ashton was a classicist. I suggest that, without Ashton, the Vic-Wells/Sadler’s Wells/Royal Ballet might have been a strong, vivid academic company with a strong demi-caractère quality. It would certainly have danced The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake, but very differently. Its classicism came from Ashton, just as the classicism of New York City Ballet came not from Kirstein but from Balanchine. Without Ashton, who joined permanently in 1935, the Sadler’s Wells Ballet would not have projected into the depths and heights of Covent Garden, let alone the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.
These are quite some assertions. Since I wasn’t an eyewitness to most of those performances, let alone a fly on the wall in rehearsal, I can’t entirely prove them. Still, I hope you understand my distinction between academicism and classicism, though it’s a very tricky point. Academicism, essentially negative, is about correctness. Classicism, essentially positive, is about philosophical connection with form and tradition.[19]
I don’t mean to give Ashton all the credit. He might never have been a major classicist had he stayed with Rambert’s Ballet Club. For him, the breakthrough into classicism for him came when he made his second ballet for the Vic-Wells, Les Rendezvous. There were several reasons why this breakthrough occurred. One was that he had just worked with Balanchine’s Ballet 1933 in London that year, and Balanchine’s way with classicism liberated and inspired him. Another, however, was that de Valois gave him dancers with technique he could play with - she herself was one of them - and in that technique he found inspiration.
We could argue about what the subsequent signature works of the Royal Ballet were. I would say that its classical peaks occurred in five particular works: The Sleeping Beauty (which it first danced in 1939), Ashton’s Symphonic Variations (1946), his La Fille mal gardée (1960), the Nureyev staging of the Shades scene of La Bayadère (1963), and Monotones (both the 1965 and 1966 pas de trois, not just the 1965 “white” trio to Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies, too often performed today by itself). In those works, the Royal set world standards that other companies have been trying to match ever since. Three of them were choreographed by Ashton; and the two others were partly shaped by him. I’ve already touched on his many years of coaching The Sleeping Beauty. (Monica Mason recalls that in the early 1960s he coached individual fairies in Prologue variations.[20]) He also worked with Rudolf Nureyev on the famous Shades scene from La Bayadère. Even the arabesque taken by the corps of Shades as they entered at the beginning of the scene was quite different from the Kirov Ballet arabesque at the same moment; it was instead re-shaped into one that we can recognize as Ashtonian, its front arm gesturing up into the air rather than straight ahead. Another key moment from the Shades’ dance was the slow sideways port de bras in which all thirty-two women in unison stretched and stretched – it’s on the cover of Alexander Bland’s 1981 history of the Royal Ballet, and it epitomizes Ashton’s accentuation of torso and épaulement. Monica Mason recalls Nureyev and Ashton deep in conversation as Nureyev began work; we can tell that Ashton was encouraging Nureyev to fuse Petipa style and Royal style into one.
About Bayadère, he told me, referring to the famous Entrance of the “I took all those girls down the ramp”.[21] Years later, the dancer Anita Young - who led that Bayadère corps down the ramp for over ten years, hundreds of times - told me how Ashton had talked to her about the line of those arabesques and had said of the use of fondu in them “It oils the knee.”[22] That’s such a teacherly remark. How interesting that it came from Ashton the non-teacher.
V.
Let me give you some of the ways in which Ashton and de Valois clashed. We know that in the late 1930s Ashton often chafed under the atmosphere created at the Vic-Wells by de Valois. His close friend Constant Lambert felt free to write to him in 1938: “I quite realize that the schoolroom atmosphere must irritate you even more than it does me”[23] The “schoolroom” was always the atmosphere created by de Valois, who had elsewhere been nicknamed “the games mistress”.
Over subsequent years, there were flare-ups of tension between de Valois and Ashton. “They were jealous of each other, and they needed each other,” Julia Farron said to Zoë Anderson in 2004.[24]
A particular bone of contention was their respective behavior at the start of the Second World War. Ashton always insisted that it was he, not she, was the one who kept the company going. With the backing of his friends Alice Astor and Kenneth Clark, he gave work then to a number of the dancers, organizing a tour, with Constant Lambert and Hilda Gaunt at the two pianos. In the 1980s, when Kathrine Sorley Walker (always a de Valois loyalist) wrote that de Valois “gave the company a lead throughout the whole course of the war,” Ashton remarked acidly that actually:
Ninette – wonderful Ninette – said that a woman’s place is the home and she went away and disappeared. She absolutely abandoned us. But that’s never written about. When Ninette saw it was going to work she came back and took the whole thing in her hands again.[25]
This contradicts the image of de Valois as the company’s “general”, an image approved both by her admirers and herself. (The image is one entirely justified by her leadership during the remaining years of the war).[26] I asked Pamela May and Julia Farron about the start of the war, they agreed that Ashton was indeed in charge at the beginning; but they had assumed that, if de Valois disappeared from the company, it was only because she was at work on their behalf elsewhere. Yet they may have been wrong about what de Valois was up to. Later, when she spoke to Julie Kavanagh about Ashton’s work at that time, she remarked dismissively “It was like a little concert party; I let them do it on their own, there was no point in me going.”[27] That’s a bizarre way to speak of a project that involved her leading dancers, her resident choreographer, and her music director. It sounds dismayingly defensive, even disingenuous. (She made another provably disingenuous remark on Ashton matters to Kavanagh, as we shall see.) Still, Ashton was recalling events to Kavanagh well over forty years later, and de Valois over fifty years later. In the twenty-first century, well after their deaths, we’re unlikely now to resolve this bone of contention.
Ashton and Valois quarrelled, but their sense of humour got them through at the time. “They got away with it because they laughed,” Pamela May said to Anderson.
They would have these arguments, and we’d be sitting wondering how it would come out. But it always ended in laughter.[28]
It was characteristic of Ashton, however, to collect and nurse grudges. His next cause for resentment arose at the end of the War – and it was a big one. It was Ashton who felt the company should move to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where Colonel de Basil’s Ballet Russe had had glorious seasons in the 1930s. De Valois was not convinced her company could re-illumine the old Opera House, even though it had danced two acts of The Sleeping Princess there at a 1939 gala. Ashton simply said “If you won’t, I will.”[29] He became so obsessed with the project that one friend later said “He didn’t want to supplant Ninette, but he felt that if he did not, the Russians would be back and English ballet would be on the fringe forever.”[30]
Then, when it came to the crucial stylistic matter of coaching the dancers how to project into the depths and heights of Covent Garden, it was Ashton – not de Valois - who led the way. This really is at the heart of any history of the Royal Ballet. In particular he coached Margot Fonteyn as Aurora. Ashton, in the 1960s:
I noticed with some disquiet that her effect was not registering fully. It was because everything which she had done in the small theatres had been seen so much quicker in those circumstances. I walked about all over the Opera House, watching her during a rehearsal. ‘It’s no good,’ I said, ‘….you’re not registering!’ Suddenly, she held a position a moment longer than normal, and I shouted ‘This is it!’ And it was. She filled the theatre.[31]
Where Fonteyn led the way, others followed. Ashton helped with them all, because he had made new supplementary dances in Acts One and Three that challenged them to project. (The male role in the Florestan pas de trois in Act Three was made on Michael Somes, but a celebrated later performer of it was Kenneth MacMillan. Pamela May long recalled how Ashton, prior to the Sadler’s Wells Ballet’s 1949 opening at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, coached MacMillan in the grands jetés in the coda, stretching a croisé arm in front and turning his head sharply to look out over his shoulder. MacMillan later put that very movement, with the same dynamics, into the third movement of his own Concerto.) [32]
It’s striking that no Sadler’s Wells or Royal interpreter of Aurora has ever spoken of de Valois’s coaching the role. Ashton, by contrast, coach the Act Three “Aurora” pas de deux with Alicia Markova and Pearl Argyle in 1933; Fonteyn in the entire role in 1946; and such later Auroras as Lynn Seymour, Lesley Collier, Cynthia Harvey. Evidently De Valois realized as early as 1933 that he had what it takes to make a great coach of a ballerina role. Perhaps his success on that occasion was one of the factors that led her to hire him in 1935 as Resident Choreographer. She always knew he would do more than just make his own ballets; she knew the good effect he could have on dancers. Ashton was a mime of genius, and he had a genius memory of the characteristics of the great dancers he had seen. Fonteyn describes how he would tell them every day of such dancers as Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, Olga Spessivtseva, and Lydia Lopokova, recreating them both in physical imitation and in words, challenging them to learn from his evocations.[33]
At one point in our 1984 interview, he said “I’ll tell you when I teach a dancer. That’s when I teach her a role. I really take a dancer apart then.” What Pamela May would always remember was how he taught Aurora in 1933 to walk slowly around the stage, using her weight as she walked. (Normally to this day, that walk counts for nothing. I remember how much it registered with Seymour and Collier, both of whom had had his coaching.) He himself especially remembered about coaching Fonteyn in Beauty in 1946 in the supported pirouette that ends in first arabesque. He showed me with his fingers how bland supported pirouettes into first arabesque can be; then he showed how the point was suddenly to explode from the pirouettes into an immediate and perfect arabesque. He said he told Fonteyn “It’s like you’ve been shot in the back!” This kind of thing is what de Valois needed her dancers to receive, and knew she needed. Aurora became Fonteyn’s signature role; and Sleeping Beauty the company’s greatest calling-card.
Where did Ashton derive this instinct for classicism? His teachers – Massine, Rambert, even Nijinska – don’t really explain it. Ashton was a mime of genius, and he had a genius memory of the characteristics of the great dancers he had seen. Fonteyn describes how he would tell them every day of such dancers as Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, Olga Spessivtseva, and Lydia Lopokova, recreating them both in physical imitation and in words, challenging them to learn from his evocations.
He learnt classicism by observation: osmosis. He took it from sources ranging from Petipa and Pavlova to Nijinska and Balanchine. You’ve all heard how, when found watching his umpteenth Sleeping Beauty, he would say “I’m having a private lesson.” So when I first interviewed him, in 1980, I asked him if it was true that he took inspiration from the classics. His reply was pointed: “I take inspiration from classi-cism.”
Dance musicality is not better in ballet than such other forms as flamenco or Indian dance; there you feel the dancer is intimately involved in the act of music-making. But because ballet is about big spatial projection, music and dance can combine in space to phenomenal effect: ballet’s musicality becomes an expression of the time-space equation in physics. Symphonic Variations is an object-lesson in this. It was the first new ballet Ashton made for Covent Garden, also in 1946, a little later than his new dances for The Sleeping Beauty. When Symphonics is well performed, it becomes the perfect work for the dimensions of that theatre. (Perhaps only those who watch it in “the gods”, up in the Amphitheatre know just how true that can be.) It makes you feel music in space; and in ballet - which is married to music - that becomes one of the hallmarks of classicism.
In the last conversation I had with him (in February 1988), I asked him about how he thought Symphonics was looking. He said
Just now it’s dead. But they’ve got the steps right, and that’s important. Someone could come along and illumine it. The arms should go like this <he indicated with a slowly straightening finger the amplitude of a gesture> – whereas now they’re like this <he indicated how the same finger could open with less tension and projection>. And the lifts. In the biggest lift, the ballerina now goes like this <with one pointed finger he showed an absolutely even parabola without interest> whereas she used to go like this:
- and with one pointed finger he traced an arc whose climax was delayed, prolonged, and had suspense and excitement.
For many people between the 1940s and 1970s, and even today, Symphonic Variations became not only a major work of classical art but the ballet of ballets, the work where line and musicality combined ideally to make an endlessly rich masterpiece. When he said “I take inspiration from classi-cism,” he was speaking just a week before the premiere of Rhapsody; but the ballet to which his remark most applies is Symphonics: which goes back to Greek statuary, to the idea of Arcadia, and to the rich tradition of English lyrical poetry he had loved since his schooldays.
Symphonics wasn’t a one-off at that period of his career. The years 1946-53 were the greatest period of his classicism so far: he made supplementary dances for Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake, he made Valses nobles et sentimentales, Scènes de ballet, Cinderella, Daphnis and Chloë, and Sylvia; he was thinking of how classicism could develop in pure-dance terms and in narrative contexts, he – usually so fond of minor nineteenth-century music - was using scores by Ravel, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Gluck and others.
Yet at this very time, when Ashton was entering his prime as a choreographer, de Valois brought Leonide Massine to Covent Garden and Sadler’s Wells, to stage ballets old and new. Massine had been Ashton’s first teacher, and Ashton continued to admire certain of Massine’s older ballets. The late 1940s were not, however, a vintage time for the Russian choreographer. De Valois told Kavanagh that to bring Massine into her company was
necessary. I did it for the men who were madly weak after the war. It wasn’t as if I’d brought in some little Englishman; I brought in a distinguished choreographer from the last generation. Fred wasn’t interested in the men, he never was. He was principally a woman’s choreographer. I knew the girls were all right with Fred; I was worried about the boys. Massine did the men a lot of good, and if anyone benefited it was Alexander Grant: I did it for him as much as anything. Massine was onto him at once and when Grant tackled Fred’s ballets afterwards, he was a different person. That’s what I was working on. I knew Fred would like him as a character dancer.”[34]
This is baffling: the founder director of the Royal Ballet thought that the choreographer of Façade, Les Rendezvous, Les Patineurs, A Wedding Bouquet, Harlequin in the Street, and Symphonic Variations was not interested in choreographing for men. More bafflingly, she said this decades later, when he had choreographed La Fille mal gardée, The Dream and many other ballets that extended the male repertory very considerably. Did de Valois even mean what she was saying here? Or was she reverting to her old loyalty to ballets about character-dancing? Was her faith in ballet classicism solely confined to works of the past?
Her own preferences at the time emerge from the letters she wrote in the years 1947-1955 to her longterm colleague Joy Newton, who spent that period running the Turkish National Ballet under de Valois’s guidance. De Valois writes with enthusiasm of Massine’s new Mam’zelle Angot, made for the Covent Garden company in 1947. When Ashton’s Scènes de ballet is nearing its premiere in 1948, she writes:
I find it interesting – but inferior to Variations - & I am not particularly happy about the costumes – décor good… however it is choreographically elegant, sincere, & in perfect taste even if it is, as usual, for the chosen few & slightly repetitive….We still await a giant in this country; but then why should we expect such an apparition in the first 15 years. We haven’t done badly![35]
De Valois’s views on modern classicism, and the postwar Ashton, become painfully clear in a 1952 letter about New York City Ballet’s second season at Covent Garden:
We have had the Civic Theatre New York Ballet again. It has proved to be a painful experience – with house down to almost nil. It really is the fault of policy & direction. To understand you must picture Fred in his immediate post-war egotistical mood in complete control (both privately & publicly) to know what mischief Balanchine is doing to his own fine beginnings. We <?>had<?> abstractions that fail to add up to anything, do not even succeed in subtracting to nothing. They just stand still in a series of uncomfortable unconvincing meaningless pointless (but brilliantly facile) inventions. Mostly no scenery & no costumes – because of their utter tastelessness. The girls are like nice little robots – the boys do not exist – because Balanchine “isn’t interested” & they have nothing to dance.[36]
The sentence “To understand you must picture Fred in his immediate post-war egotistical mood in complete control (both privately & publicly) to know what mischief Balanchine is doing to his own fine beginnings” reveals all too much about de Valois’s taste in choreography: Ashton, immediately after the war, had entered his greatest period, both in his work on The Sleeping Beauty and in Symphonic Variations, while Balanchine, with the formation of New York City Ballet in 1948, had made a rich series of ballets that changed the history of ballet.
In the 1960s Ashton went so far as to refer to Massine as “the Antichrist”.[37] In precisely the same era, however, de Valois installed Massine at the Royal Ballet School to teach choreography. Ashton was more moderate when he spoke to me about Massine with me in February 1988; we spoke of Massine at some length. The main point he made then was that all Massine’s ballets depended on wonderful designs to succeed. The one he singled out as the best was La Boutique fantasque. When I said, “I love it too, but I also love Le Tricorne.” Ashton replied “Tricorne’s marvelous, but when you keep watching it, you find it has very empty patches. Boutique is the only one that’s perfect all the way through.” By contrast, de Valois in 1980 went so far as to tell Massine’s former assistant Mary Anne de Vlieg that Massine had been “the greatest choreographer of the century.”[38] To us, it seems bizarre that de Valois thought Massine greater than, for example, the choreographer of Symphonic Variations and La Fille mal gardée; but it accords with her own instinct for character ballets.
It’s to be remembered that de Valois never thought Symphonic Variations a masterpiece. “People scream at me, but it has never been my idea of an Ashton work. It doesn’t stress his individuality.”[39] But Ashton’s individuality was not the point of Symphonics, any more than Petipa’s individuality is the point of Sleeping Beauty or Balanchine’s is of Serenade. Twenty-six years before the creation of Symphonic Variations, T.S.Eliot had written, in an internationally celebrated essay, “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”[40] Apparently such talk would always have been wasted on de Valois: she wanted choreography to have “individuality” and not the impersonal involvement with tradition and classicism that often profoundly absorbed Ashton. She, so selfless in other respects, did not admire the selflessness that Ashton demonstrated here.
The history of British ballet is paved by the condescensions of British critics to Ashton’s choreography. Here’s one example. After the Bolshoi Ballet’s visit in 1956, Mary Clarke, author of the classic history The Sadler’s Wells Ballet, wrote “With Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet fresh in our minds, his Cinderella, as staged by Frederick Ashton, was bound to seem thin, unconvincing dramatically and at times almost amateur.”[41] (De Valois tried for years to get the Lavrovsky Romeo into British repertory. Today it has crumbled, whereas Ashton’s Cinderella is still danced in more than one country.) Ashton never needed enemies; he had such critics as this for decades.
We should also ask: did de Valois ever respect Ashton as a great choreographer? Agnes de Mille noted in 1951 that, while most choreographers were tortured characters, the two “great exceptions” were Balanchine and Ashton, who both knew how to succeed without personal misery.[42] Ashton’s methods, however, involved using the dancers improvising to help him find the movement; and De Valois had no respect for that:
Laziness, nothing but laziness, Real old pros wouldn’t attempt anything like that. Balanchine didn’t and Nijinska didn’t – I worked with them both. You did what you were told.”[43]
“You did what you were told”: was that her criterion? (Actually, Fokine had given considerable leeway to the dancers of such ballets as Petrushka.[44] Even Balanchine allowed plenty of laissez-faire to dancers he liked working with, as Jacques d’Amboise describes in his recent autobiography. “Rarely did he choreograph the position of our arms or how we were to enter or exit the stage – that was left to us.”)[45]
A number of Ashton’s long-term dancers came to understand that Ashton usually knew very well what he was driving at. He knew the construction of a piece before he came to rehearsals, when people made exits and entrances, who would dance to what music, where the climax should occur, what kind of images he was seeking.[46] If dancers wanted to volunteer material, he liked to take that and edit it; but with a dancer who did not, he went right ahead and choreographed every step, as Lesley Collier has told of her role in Rhapsody (1980).[47] De Valois chose not to appreciate this.
VI.
Instead, during her own retirement, she involved herself in terminating his career as artistic director. By so doing, she curtailed the classical peak of the company she herself had founded.
Since becoming director in 1963, Ashton had distilled his style further than it had ever gone before, notably in such works as The Dream, Monotones and Enigma Variations. He absorbed himself in all the repertory, bringing in such works as the Shades scene from La Bayadère, Nijinska’s Les Noces and Les Biches, Balanchine’s Apollo and Serenade, Tudor’s Jardin aux Lilas, Kenneth MacMillan’s Concerto and Song of the Earth. (To me, he said in 1988 that Song of the Earth was MacMillan’s finest ballet.) He commissioned the premieres of MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet and Antony Tudor’s Shadowplay. True, you will still inevitably hear some people claim that the Royal Ballet deteriorated during his period, that he never commanded the same respect as Ninette de Valois, and that his work suffered because of his work as director. The truth is that, under him, the company certainly commanded yet greater triumphs in America than ever before and tours as long; the Bayadère Shades Scene and Monotones became one of the company’s signature works for the next fifteen years; Biches and Noces still occupy valued places in repertory; The Dream and Monotones have moved on into international repertory and are generally accepted as being among his greatest works; its new generation of principals – notably Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell, but others too - were not just world-class but epoch-making; Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet and Song of the Earth made extraordinary impressions. In 1967, the Royal was the first dance company to play the new Metropolitan Opera House, which had opened in late 1966; it then returned for three further consecutive years, 1968, 1969, and 1970, often playing opposite New York City Ballet, creating an era that still strikes many as the zenith of ballet in New York. (“Royal Ballet fever” was a term used of fans and even critics at this time.[48]) In the years 1967-1970, the Royal enjoyed four consecutive seasons at the Met. The dancers loved Ashton; many were devastated by the announcement that he would be replaced by MacMillan. As usual, however, not everybody back home in London appreciated full Ashton’s achievement.
Certainly de Valois did not. At one point in 1968, she was placing daily phone calls from Turkey on this very subject until she got her way, replacing him Kenneth MacMillan.[49] Some of her involvement in this process is recorded in Kavanagh’s Ashton biography. Richard Glasstone witnessed the phonecalls, made in his house.[50] John Tooley, then assistant general director of the Covent Garden opera house, later recalled to Zoë Anderson: “She <de Valois> used to ring up sometimes and say ‘Fred’s getting on, you know. Time the older man gave way to the younger generation.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said ‘I think Fred should stand down.’”[51] When Julie Kavanagh asked de Valois about this, de Valois simply lied, denying her own involvement and even blaming others for Ashton’s departure, just as she disparaged aspects of Ashton’s achievement as artistic director.
It’s hard not to believe that de Valois found it hard to forgive Ashton the great success the Royal Ballet had when he was director. She also claimed
The school dropped off very badly when Fred was Director. I tried hard but I was only able to cope with the top class.[52]
The graduates from the Royal Ballet School in 1966-70 included such artists as Wayne Sleep, Marion Tait, Wayne Eagling, Stephen Jefferies, Marguerite Porter, David Ashmole, Carl Myers – all dancers with whom de Valois and Ashton later worked - and the general level of Royal Ballet School style remained remarkably strong well into the 1970s. What used to be called “White Lodge feet” – a characteristic of de Valois’s training - could be recognized until the early 1980s. (Complaints about the director of the Royal Ballet being too little involved with the running of the Royal Ballet School did not go away with Ashton, by the way. They have continued with every successor to the job.)
In 1968, David Webster (director of the Royal Opera House) publicly announced that Ashton would be stepping down in 1970, at the same time as himself. About this de Valois even dared to remark later “I think Webster was rather naughty. He should have changed his mind.”[53] If Webster was “rather naughty”, then what adjective should we apply to de Valois for her part on this?
VII.
De Valois, on first establishing her company in 1931, had proclaimed that “It is the belief of the present Director that if the ballet at Sadler’s Wells does not survive many a Director, then it will have failed utterly in the eyes of the first dancer to hold that post.”[54] This was an impressively selfless statement when it was young. Who would have thought then that de Valois herself, during her own supposed retirement, intimately involved herself with the removal of her first successor, Ashton? Then in 1977, she then took the precise step that made his successor, MacMillan, feel obliged to resign forthwith. His 1973 production of The Sleeping Beauty had not won favour. So she went, behind MacMllan’s back, to the Royal Opera House’s Ballet Sub-Committee to announce and prepare a new production of that ballet, to start the coming season.[55] (She did not stop there, by the way. MacMillan was succeeded by Norman Morrice, whose regime was soon controversial. In 1985, she again went to the powers at Covent Garden, behind Morrice’s back, to arrange that he would be succeeded in 1986 by Anthony Dowell.[56])
In 1977, for MacMillan, aged forty-seven, resignation from artistic direction came at the right point in his career. Becoming resident choreographer to the Royal Ballet, he moved at once into making a series of works in which he developed his own choreographic vision without being compromised by directing a classical company. In 1970, by contrast, for Ashton to leave the direction of the Royal at age sixty-five came just at the wrong point in his career. Directing a classical company coincided exactly with his choreographic vision.
Probably de Valois thought he would be more prolific in retirement. Not for the first time, however, she misjudged her man. Deeply hurt, Ashton sulked for years. From then on, he made far fewer ballets. She also misjudged his successor. Complaints about the decline of Royal Ballet style increased during Ashton’s retirement. When MacMillan was replaced by Norman Morrice, the complaints increased big-time. I would say that since 1979 the Royal Ballet has been at best a part-time classical company. Some others have taken a more severe view; they set an earlier date.
VII.
In the 1984 interview I conducted with Ashton before his eightieth birthday - the one in which he said that he and de Valois were always “cat and dog” about dancers - the terrain that at the time felt trickiest to enter was Balanchine, who had died the previous year. I knew from interviewing Ashton in 1980 that he respected Balanchine as “a great master”; but he had stressed the difference between them (“My ballets have to have a heart.”)[57] (I wish now I’d asked him how his Scènes de ballet has a heart in a way any Balanchine ballet doesn’t.) In a more recent interview, he had made clear that he had learnt more from the early Balanchine than the later one.[58] Now, however, in 1984, referring to New York City Ballet, Ashton just asked me “How are things over there?”
I told him that at the moment the company was on a high, and that I thought it would last five years; after that I had no notion. There was another long pause. I wondered if I’d said the wrong thing.
So, to fill the silence, I went further. I said “It’s been amazing to have a company where the style and the repertory is all principally the classical vision of one man.” Now there was no pause at all before Ashton replied. He was more forceful than at any other moment in the interview:
That’s how it’s got to be, that’s how it’s got to be. When I was in charge of the Royal Ballet, I didn’t just supervise my own ballets. I took the girls down the ramp in Bayadère, I gave everyone notes after each performance of the classics, I absorbed myself in all the new works that joined the repertory. That’s how a classical company must be.[59]
When he spoke like that, I understood how much it hurt to have been replaced as artistic director. It remains strange to think that de Valois was central to his removal.
I can’t prove that he discovered that de Valois had been involved in replacing him. It seems likely, though. Around 1971, he gave her the snub that perhaps upset her most. At a book launch to mark the book of photographs and tributes by John Selwyn Gilbert and Zoë Dominic, he paid a series of tributes in which he pointedly did not mention de Valois. She expressed her mortification to Peter Wright.[60]
In the 1980s, he told Julie Kavanagh that, if de Valois died before him, he would tell her his main ground for complaint about de Valois. Kavanagh formed the impression that this was about something else.[61] Since he predeceased de Valois, we’ll never know.
So yes: they were, as he put it, cat and dog – and not only about dancers.
VIII.
Yet their relationship is also complicated by their mutual esteem and, for want of a better word, friendship. De Valois and Ashton irritated each other badly, yes. But they also respected each other greatly, at least some of the time. They had plenty in common; they needed each other. Certainly she needed him: she knew she could not do it alone.
One of the big scandals of de Valois’s regime as director came in 1951 with the premiere of Ashton’s one-act ballet Tiresias to a new score by Constant Lambert. The story concerns the blindness of Tiresias, the Greek prophet who in his long life had spent time as both a man and a woman; the goddess Hera struck him blind when he gave her the answer she did not want to hear. The score and scenario had problems. The critics dumped on it; Richard Buckle, the most splendid of them, dumped hardest, in The Observer. Picking up the theme of blindness from the scenario, he titled his review “Three Blind Mice”: he explained that the three mice were de Valois, Ashton, and Lambert, who evidently should have saved Covent Garden from this fiasco. In her 1977 book Step by Step, de Valois recalls all this. And she stands by Ashton and Lambert with a pride that is quite magnificent and a wit that puts Buckle in his place. “When I am struck blind again, may it be in such equally worthy company.”[62]
What did she and Ashton have in common (apart from a vital sense of humour)? Ashton as a choreographer loved brilliant footwork: de Valois’s dancing exemplified precisely that. The critic Arlene Croce has called the pas de trois in Les Rendezvous “the ultimate instep dance”:
its leitmotif is pas de cheval done around and around the stage, alternating with hop in arabesque and small beaten stage. It is all set in a single rapid tempo, and it must be the most difficult-to-sustain number in the ballet.[63]
The woman in that pas de trois was Ninette de Valois. Ashton as a choreographer would often cry to his dancers “Give me footwork, give me footwork.”[64] Fonteyn writes of De Valois:
Her movements were quick, like her temper…. I can remember her on stage doing brisés that seemed faster than the speed of light, and faster than any conductor could catch or musicians play.[65]
And as a teacher de Valois worked to give the same footwork to her dancers. For her, neat footwork was the hallmark of the British style. She often voice her theory that a company takes its style from the local folk dance idiom: the Russians dance big with imprecise footwork like the Cossacks, but the British travel less but with much more intricate footwork.[66]
This brings us to another of de Valois’s peculiarities. She insisted that the Royal Ballet Junior School at White Lodge learnt and performed what were always billed as the Dances of Four Nations – that is, the dances of the United Kingdom. Those included Irish jigs; and she herself was Irish. Yet she spoke not of the British but of the English style. She did so onstage at Covent Garden in 1978: she told the audience that that evening’s performance of Sleeping Beauty had shown an excellent example of the English style. To superimpose “English” over “British” is an old stroke of snobbishness. Nancy Mitford, in one of her most outrageous remarks about U and non-U class distinctions , observed in the early 1950s that the word “Britain” was non-U, i.e. not an upper-class locution, “England” was U.[67] When an English aristocrat such as Nancy Mitford talks that way, you can perhaps forgive it as a tease. When Ninette de Valois, née Edris Stannus, an Irishwoman who has been made Dame Commander of the British Empire talks that way, you feel a deeper split of values.
De Valois felt that Sleeping Beauty was the classic that suited the British, or the English, best: it had lots of footwork but few of the big jumps that marked other classics.[68] (Under her supervision and up to at least the late 1970s, the Royal Ballet - especially its women - had much less capacity for big jumps than Russian, Danish, or American dancers. Dancers like Nadia Nerina and Ann Jenner with big jumps were the exceptions; dancers like Fonteyn and Sibley with relatively low jumps were the rule. This is a period point about Royal Ballet style, by the way; it no longer really applies. Some prima ballerinas as Darcey Bussell and Alina Cojocaru have large jumps.) And as we all know, Sleeping Beauty was the classic that fascinated Ashton the most.
He and de Valois actually had features in common as choreographers. If you look at de Valois’s The Rake’s Progress, its more dancing characters aren’t far from the demi-caractère characters in several Ashton ballets. Compare the Dancing Master in the de Valois ballet to the Dancing Master in Ashton’s Cinderella, for example. (And the Betrayed Girl in Rake holds her arms much as the Dancing Master in Cinderella: a shared evocation of eighteenth-century deportment.)
Ashton had a lifelong genius for sublimating the acting qualities that de Valois and others felt were core characteristics of the British or English style in ballet.[69] In this, both of them learnt in particular from Massine. Both of them were also strongly influenced by Nijinska. Ashton always later said that his first ballet, A Tragedy of Fashion (1926), was shamelessly derivative of Nijinska, in particular of Les Biches; David Vaughan has pointed out that the Mannequin Dance in that actually resembles the solo de Valois choreographed in 1930 called Pride (which was danced by Maina Gielgud as late as 1977).[70]
The main differences between them are that de Valois never tried to transcend character and to achieve pure classicism, while Ashton seldom if ever had her occasional but strong penchant for expressionistic use of repeated or heightened gesture. His most expressionistic work, Dante Sonata (1940), is carried by a pure-dance lyricism that is miles from any de Valois ballet.
I’ve just mentioned épaulement. De Valois may have choreographed it, but it played virtually no part in her early teaching. Julia Farron told me in recent years “When I think back to how Madam used to teach us, it was all beneath the waist – really, all beneath the knee.” To Anderson, Farron called de Valois’s teaching “straight up and down… It was all so fast, you couldn’t really bend.”[71] There were all kinds of gaps in de Valois’s teaching. (Some were recounted at the April 2011 conference.) Pamela May remembered how in the 1930s sometimes when de Valois was teaching she was called away to make a ‘phone call. She would ask them to carry on without her. As soon as this happened, Margot Fonteyn and she, May, would at once teach steps that they had been learning from the Russian ballerinas in Paris – such as temps liés – that played no part in de Valois’s teaching. When the company went to Paris in 1937, de Valois sent her dancers to those Russian teachers and asked them to write down what they learnt. But as Julia Farron has often said, everything they learnt about matters of épaulement “We learnt from Fred.”
After Ashton’s first leading role for Fonteyn, Tamara Karsavina praised Fonteyn’s line and musicality to him, but said “She has no conception of épaulement.” Ashton replied “From tomorrow I will ensure that she does.”[72] Today precise and vivid épaulement is expected to be a characteristic of the Royal Ballet and the Royal Ballet School: which indicates that de Valois gradually adjusted the syllabus to accommodate the style that Ashton was demanding of his dancers onstage. Indeed, she adjusted her own teaching. At a dance teachers’ summer school in the mid-1950s, she worked with Lynn Seymour and Antoinette Sibley, then students at the Royal Ballet School, on épaulement in particular; they never forgot.[73] (About eight years later, she worked with Lesley Collier’s generation. Now her great concern was something else that had always preoccupied Ashton: arms.[74])
Here we touch on the central matter of how any leading ballet school should prepare its students for the specific choreographic needs of the company to which it is attached. It was controversial in the mid-1980s when Merle Park, then director of the Royal Ballet School, changed the accentuation of a chassé because of the words of a visiting French teacher. Where should the heel go? The French led chasse by pointing the toe, whereas the British Cecchetti style led with the heel, emphasizing the contact of the sole of the foot with the floor. Once the French teacher learnt that Ashton’s ballets demanded the old way of doing a chassé, he retracted his point. The classroom, he said, must prepare the dancers for the choreography. But it was too late: the Royal Ballet School had adopted the French way.[75] The basic skating steps – featuring chassé - of Les Patineurs, I’m afraid, have never looked the same since. I mentioned seeing Les Patineurs for the first time in 1978 at Sadler’s Wells in that first season I saw it: the illusion of skating was so real that I thought they had put a special surface on the stage. The cast was led by Wayne Sleep, Marion Tait and others who had joined the Royal Ballet School during the period de Valois claimed saw such a decline in its standards. Later Royal Ballet dancers may have had as much technique or more, in subsequent Patineurs revivals; the style, however, has partly eroded.
In 1988, a former Royal Ballet School dancer told me that one day, after an Ashton premiere, de Valois came to the School and said out loud “Well, if that’s how he’s setting the step on stage, then that’s how we must teach it at the school.” This was fascinating – the most specific evidence I had ever heard of de Valois adjusting teaching to suit choreography. Years later, I had the opportunity to ask that dancer to enlarge. Alas, too much time had passed. She said “Oh, I can’t remember.” (Dance history is all too often like that.) I was able, however, to ask Barbara Fewster if she knew of de Valois ever saying that. Fewster had been in charge of Royal Ballet School teaching for many years. She replied, about de Valois:
She may well have, but she was equally capable of then saying the complete opposite a month later. She could completely contradict her own edicts.
When I say that de Valois needed Ashton, let me point out that his choreography gave new meaning to the syllabus in which she believed. Teachers at the Royal Ballet School told Mary Clarke in the 1960s that, in the 1950s, their students had learnt the British folk “Dances of Four Nations” reluctantly. Only when Ashton made La Fille mal gardée, with its wealth of folk-related dances, did the penny drop. Henceforth they danced those folk dances with real motivation.[76] This is a perfect example of how school and repertory can feed each other.
When we see how de Valois and Ashton worked together here as leading teacher and leading choreographer, we see how they combined to make the two halves of one ideal ballet master: the team they made together really was the equal of the ballet-master example set in Paris by Pierre Gardel, in Copenhagen by August Bournonville, in St Petersburg by Marius Petipa, in New York by George Balanchine.
Further connections between de Valois and Ashton pervaded the Royal system. Dancers who knew what Ashton wanted became teachers at the Royal Ballet School. In our 1984 interview, he particularly mentioned this. “Some of the dancers who worked with me a lot over the years have gone on to become teachers, like Pamela May and Julia Farron; they know what I like to see in dancers.” May and Farron - important teachers at both the Royal Ballet School and the Royal Academy of Dancing – have spoken about just how Ashton affected their teachings: épaulement, for example, but also bending, presenting the body on angles, and how to present the hands.[77]
IX.
Style and technique do not remain static. Ashton kept developing both after de Valois’s 1963 retirement from the directorship. In the pas de quatre and final act he added to Swan Lake in 1963, in every role he made in The Dream (1964), in both halves of Monotones (1965 and 1966), in the pure-dance allegro and adagio of Sinfonietta (1967), in the prince’s solo and Awakening pas de deux and Fairy of Joy solo he added to The Sleeping Beauty in 1968, in the meeting of character and classicism that he made in Enigma Variations (also 1968), he was refining his own style and his company’s style in several new directions. In particular, the roles that he made on Anthony Dowell had no stylistic precedent. I can’t help wondering: How did de Valois feel as she saw new intricacies of phrasing, new hyperextension, new concepts of line?
Because of Ashton, male style changed in those years. Across the world to this day, male dancers are still working hard to keep up to the standards he set them. (Ashton didn’t stop with Dowell’s exceptional gifts. In 1983, when Phillip Broomhead started to do penchée arabesque to 180 degrees, Ashton choreographed it straight into a supporting role in the Varii Capricci - just as in 1965 he had made Vyvyan Lorrayne’s 180-degree split into the opening image of Monotones.) The Royal Ballet School kept up; most of those ballets have been danced by its students in subsequent years.
Ashton’s classicism has many stylistic features you will find nowhere else. Just as people still look at some of Balanchine’s more radical stylistic developments and say “That’s not classical,” so people away from London do so with aspects of Ashton. In a 2007 lecture about his work at Covent Garden, I once demonstrated how the women in Birthday Offering and Rhapsody sweep forward while their arms alternate back and forth, right versus left, with lavish épaulement. The Danish-trained Johan Kobborg was present; he said “Yes - and that particular combination of upper-body and lower-body movement isn’t classical.” I would say that it is, but certainly it’s a nice instance of a very particular classicism that isn’t for all tastes.
In the wonderful pas de quatre that Ashton added to Swan Lake, he actually went too far for many polite Royal Ballet people. You often hear that that is “neo-”- classical, and therefore out of place in the classical Swan Lake. That point of view – that Ashton’s pas de quatre is “neo”-classical but not the real thing - shows a desperately inhibited idea of classicism. By the same token, you should take out not just the Florestan pas de trois from The Sleeping Beauty but the pas de deux for the Bluebird and Princess Florine too. Those dances are in a faster, more intricate style. Yet they do nothing but offset the grandeur of the central sections. People don’t call them “neo-“ because they’ve lived with them longer. As Ashton so well understood from his “private lessons”, the old ballets by Petipa and Ivanov were celebrations not of stylistic uniformity but of stylistic diversity. When I was first watching Swan Lake in the 1970s, you would get such vivid principals as Jennifer Penney and Lesley Collier or Laura Connor and Ann Jenner dancing in Ashton’s pas de quatre; they were marvelous, but they did nothing to spoil the marvels of Petipa’s or Ivanov’s choreography as those were danced by Merle Park or Lynn Seymour or Natalia Makarova or Monica Mason (or, at some performances, Penney or Collier).
Do I seem to be getting away from de Valois? Not so. In 1977, when she and the Board decided that she should stage a new production of The Sleeping Beauty to replace MacMillan’s one, she decided not to return to her very successful 1946 production with its designs by Oliver Messel, and not to return to every aspect of its text. She did revert to such parts of it as the Garland Dance and Florestan pas de trois that Ashton had added in 1946 and the solo for the Vision of Aurora that he had added in 1952, yes. But she also included three dances he had added in 1968: the adagio solo made for Dowell, the Awakening pas de deux made for Sibley and Dowell, and the 5/4 Sapphire solo made for Georgina Parkinson as the Fairy of Joy. (But de Valois and Ashton now placed the 5/4 solo where it belongs musically, as part of the Florestan pas de trois, where it replaced a Petipa solo that had been danced in the 1946 production.) She also got Ashton to coach at least her first-cast Aurora, Lesley Collier. (I strongly suspect she also involved him in staging certain features of the production that were new. One such moment came when the Lilac Fairy bourréed among the sleeping bodies before the Prince arrived at the palace. Another was the wonderful ending, in which Aurora and her prince - as she went down into penchée and up again in his arms - were at the centre of the whole kneeling court, who bent forward towards them in révérence and then arched back again. The image, like a rose closing its petals and then re-opening, was superbly poetic.)
In other words, she staged a Sleeping Beauty that acknowledged how Royal Ballet style had moved on since her day: in particular, she incorporated the best features from Ashton’s 1960s work. You could call this British compromise. I call it outstandingly far-sighted and large-minded vision.
If you want to see that production today – it is, with Alexei Ratmansky’s, one of the two best current stagings of that great ballet – you have to go to Boston Ballet. If you want to see the staging of Swan Lake with Ashton’s Act One waltz, his Act Three pas de quatre and Spanish and Neapolitan dances, his Act Four, your last chance was to visit the Perm Ballet while it was dancing Makarova’s staging. What does this tell us about how subsequent directors of the Royal Ballet have failed to understand Ashton’s vision of classicism, its stylistic diversity and inclusiveness? Boston Ballet pays half the rights to de Valois’s heirs and half to Ashton’s.
As de Valois said selflessly in both 1949 and 1978, it takes more than one to make a ballet company. She had often contradicted herself in the past; Ashton’s greatness as a choreographer was another subject on which her views kept changing. She dedicated her 1957 book Come Dance With Me to Fonteyn and Ashton; in it, she describes Symphonics as “one of our major successes” and “a study in neo-classicism of the highest quality”[78] – yes, views she had contradicted on other occasions. In her 1977 book Step by Step (1977), she scarcely mentions Symphonic Variations - and yet she says “The Ashton scene is kaleidoscopic. I do not search among the dignified accepted classics of his that have received the accolade of the entire world of ballet. I search for my own special loves.” She dwells on Birthday Offering and Ondine; she recalls dances from Apparitions, Nocturne, Cinderella, and his supplementary dances for the Petipa classics.[79]
And Ashton, although he certainly felt rancor about her, also gave her credit on many occasions. As is now well known, he inserted an enchaînement into almost all his ballets an enchaînement now known as the Fred step. It’s always interesting to note which dancer he gave it to. In A Wedding Bouquet, he gave it to Webster – the role created by Ninette de Valois.
When he was working for her, she demanded that his ballets should be double-cast: he furiously resisted this. Yet the moment he became the director, he double-cast his very first new ballet, The Dream. When Alexander Grant indicated surprise at this new policy, Ashton remarked “Yes: it’s all different now.”[80] Ashton was learning from de Valois after all.
The last time I saw him, he gave me two books from his collection as a present. One of them was a history of the Royal Ballet in Russian, which I can’t read. But he opened it up and showed me why he wanted me to have it: “This picture of Ninette is so beautiful.” It takes more than one.
@Alastair Macaulay, 2020.
2020.x.18
Quotations where not cited are from unpublished interviews and conversations with Frederick Ashton (1980, 1984, 1988), Lesley Collier (1979, 1980, 2015), Ninette de Valois (1987), Richard Glasstone (1997-1998), Beryl Grey (1988-1995), Julie Kavanagh (1996-2011), Julia Farron (1997-2012), Monica Mason (2014-2020), Pamela May (1996-2001), Belinda Quirey (1982-92), Lynn Seymour (2014), Antoinette Sibley (2014), Peter Wright (1994, 1998), Anita Young (2001, 2019).
[1] He had already choreographed for the company before 1935, notably Les Rendezvous (1933). His last creation of note for it was Varii Capricci (1983), but he still came to rehearse a number of his works as late as 1988, when his Ondine (1958) was revived.
[2] Margot Fonteyn in her Autobiography (W.H.Allen, 1975) spells it “Madame”. Generally, however, “Madam” is the spelling and pronunciation used. Mary Clarke, who write the 1956 history The Sadler’s Wells Ballet, insisted on it.
[3] Quoted by G.B.L.Wilson in Dancing Times, probably December 1977.
[4] Fonteyn, Autobiography, 1975, W.H.Allen, p. 75.
[5] Clement Crisp, 2001 BBC Radio programme on Ninette de Valois.
[6] David Vaughan, Frederick Ashton and his Ballets, 1999 second edition, Dance Book, p.8, 15, 21, 63, 93-95, 106-7, 468-83.
[7] Ashton, quoted in Zoe Dominic and John Gilbert, Frederick Ashton: A Choreographer and his Ballets, George C. Harrap, 1971, p.76.
[8] Vaughan, op. cit., pp. 123, 140-42
[9] That final dance appearance of hers came when she was 51 years old, at a gala commemorating the company’s 21st anniversary, even though actually, as Zoë Anderson points out in her history, actually it was its 19th. As Anderson writes: “It was a giggly performance: when a pirouette was called for, she walked straight forwards twiddling her fingers instead.”
[10] Conversation with Julia Farron, 1999; Vaughan, op. cit, pp. 76, 168, 202-3, 255-8, 268-9, 314, 419-20, 499.
[11] Pamela May, quoted by Alastair Macaulay, “The Sleeping Beauty – the British connection”, Dancing Times, September 2000..
[12] Ashton, “I feel like James I”. Bland, The Royal Ballet - the first fifty years, Doubleday and Company, Inc. p. 140
[13] The interview was published in Dance Theatre Journal., vol. 2, no 3. At his request, I did not repeat the remarks about de Valois (or also those abot Rudolf Nureyev and Natalia Markova) during his lifetime.
[14] Richard Buckle, Balanchine, Random House, U.S., p.65. David Bintley on 2010 de Valois film made by Anderson, op. cit., p.51.
[15] “painfully dowdy”: Rambert’s words to David Vaughan in the 1970s. He confirmed them to me in March 2011.
[16] Belinda Quirey spoke to me often in the 1980s on these and other matters.
[17] “merely a troupe”: Agnes de Mille, Dance to the Piper, Hamish Halmilton, U.K., 1951, p. 181.
[18] Lydia Lopokova (“the ugly ducklings”) and Frederick Ashton (“were beautiful”), quoted by Zoe Dominic and John Selwyn Gilbert, op. cit., p.76.
[19] Macaulay, “Notes on Dance Classicism” Dance Theatre Journal, summer 1987; “Further Notes on Dance Classicism,” Dance Theatre Journal, summer 1997. Croce, “Ballets without Choreography,” Afterimages, A.& C. Black, 1988, pp.327ff.
[20] Monica Mason, interviews by AM, Voices of British Ballet, 2015-2016.
[21] Ashton, interview with AM, June 1984.
[22] Anita Young to AM, 2002.
[23] Julie Kavanagh, Secret Muses, Pantheon, US edition, 1997, p. 209.
[24] “They were jealous”, Julia Farron quoted by Zoë Anderson, op. cit., p.24.
[25] “Ninette – wonderful Ninette – said that a woman’s place” Ashton quoted by Kavanagh, op. cit., p.241.
[26] Margot Fonteyn, Autobiography, p. 86; James Monahan, Ballet Annual, 1963; de Valois’s niece, speaking at the 2011 de Valois conference.
[27] de Valois in Kavanagh, op. cit., p. 241.
[28] “They got away with it”: Pamela May quoted by Anderson, op. cit, p. 25.
[29] Ashton quoted by Kavanagh, ibid, p. 290.
[30] “He didn’t want to supplant” Gilbert Vernon quoted by Julie Kavanagh, ibid, p. 290.
[31] Frederick Ashton quoted in Keith Money, The Art of Margot Fonteyn. No page numbers. Dance Books 1975 edition.
[32] Alastair Macaulay “The Sleeping Beauty – the British connection,” op. cit.; and Alastair Macaulay, “Ashton and MacMillan,” Revealing MacMillan, Royal Academy of Dance conference 1992, conference proceedings.
[33] Pamela May in 1997-2001 conversations; Lynn Seymour, autobiography; Lesley Collier, 1979 interview with Ballet Association; Fonteyn, op. cit,, p.52.
[34] de Valois quoted in Kavanagh, op. cit, p. 317
[35] de Valois to Newton, Jan 14, 1948.
[36] De Valois to Newton, August 14 <no year given, but it’s evident that 1952 rather than 1950 is the year; Ashton’s Sylvia is in preparation.>
[37] “the Antichrist”: Clement Crisp to AM, c.1983.
[38] “the greatest choreographer of the century”. 1980 conversation with Mary Ann de Vlieg.
[39] “people scream at me” De Valois quoted in Julie Kavanagh, “Secret Muses”, Pantheon, US edition, 1997, p. 318.
[40] “The progress of an artist”: T.S.Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Eliot, The Sacred Wood – Essays on Poetry and Criticism, Methuen, 1920, 1950 edition, p.52-3.
[41] Mary Clarke, Ballet Annual 1957.
[42] “great exceptions” Agnes de Mille, Dance to the Piper, Hamish Hamilton, UK, pp. 198-9.
[43] “Laziness, nothing but laziness,” de Valois, quoted by Kavanagh, op. cit., p. 251.
[44] Bronislava Nijinska, Early Memoirs.
[45] “Rarely did he choreograph”: Jacques d’Amboise, I Was a Dancer, Knopf, 2011, p. 99.
[46] Conversations and interviews with Pamela May, Julia Farron, Lesley Collier, et al.
[47] Lesley Collier, interview with AM, July 1980.
[48] David Vaughan.
[49] Glasstone, conversation, 1990s.
[50] Kavanagh, op. cit, pp. 473-5.
[51] “She used to ring up sometimes” Tooley, quoted by Anderson, op. cit, p. 171.
[52] “The School dropped off very badly”: de Valois quoted by Kavanagh, op. cit., p. 451.
[53] “I do think Webster”: de Valois, quoted by Kavanagh, op. cit., p. 475.
[54] “It is the belief”, de Valois quoted by Mary Clarke, The Sadler’s Wells Ballet, A.&C. Black, 1955, p. 4.
[55] Jann Parry Different Drummer – The Life of Kenneth MacMillan, Faber, p. 467. Anderson, quoting Deborah MacMillan, is less ambiguous, op. cit., p. 200.
[56] Information via Bryan Robinson and Richard Alston.
[57] “a great master”, “My ballets have to have a heart”: Ashton, interview with Macaulay, July 1980.
[58] Gillian Widdicombe, “A Guru of the Ballet”, The Observer, 14 August, 1983.
[59] Ashton to AM, June 1984.
[60] Peter Wright, conversations in 1994 and 1999.
[61] Julie Kavanagh, successive conversations with AM between 1987 and 2011.
[62] “When I am struck blind again,” Ninette de Valois, Step by Step, W.H.Allen, 1977, p.57.
[63] Arlene Croce, “Split Week”, December 29, 1980, The New Yorker, reprinted in Croce, Going to the Dance, Knopf, US, p. 333.
[64] Ashton quoted by Mary Clarke in Dancing Times.
[65] Fonteyn, op. cit., pp. 47-8.
[66] De Valois on BBC Radio.
[67] Nancy Mitford, “The English Aristocracy”, p.28 of Mitford (ed.) Noblesse Oblige, Harper & Bros, NY, 1956.
[68] de Valois, interview with Macaulay, 1987.
[69] See Arlene Croce, “Artists and Models” The New Yorker, November 1, 1982, Sight Lines, Knopf, 1987, p. 72: “British dancers are instinctual actors, but they are at their greatest when the instinct is sublimated.”
[70] David Vaughan, op. cit., p. 16n.
[71] Farron, conversations, 1997-2010; Farron, quoted by Anderson, op. cit, p. 23.
[72] Karsavina and Ashton quoted by Kavanagh, p. 175.
[73] Interviews with Lynn Seymour and Antoinette Sibley for Voices of British Ballet, AM, autumn 2014.
[74] Lesley Collier, interview with AM, July 2015.
[75] Richard Glasstone conversations, 1990s.
[76] Mary Clarke conversation, early 1980s.
[77] May, Farron in conversation, 1990s and 2000s. See also Following Sir Fred’s Steps, edited by Stephanie Jordan and Andrée Grau, 1996, Dance Books.
[78] “one of our major successes” “a study in neo-classicism of the very highest quality”: Ninette de Valois, Come Dance With Me, Hamish Hamilton, U.K. 1959, p.164.
[79] “The Ashton scene is kaleidoscopic”: de Valois, Step by Step, pp. 60-62.
[80] “Yes, it’s different now,” Grant and Frederick Ashton, quoted by Kavanagh, op. cit., p.451.