Frederick Ashton: Gender, Sexuality, Community
Frederick Ashton was famous for his good taste, and what I have to say is in bad taste. I think that Ashton felt the whole business of critical analysis was bad form - felt that it violated the mystery. But I am also going in for a much worse kind of bad taste. I want to connect Ashton’s private life to his public work. And I am committing a yet worse kind of bad taste, for I did not really know him. Though I presume here to speak of Ashton the private man, I speak from a position of ignorance.
No one will be shocked now to hear that Ashton was homosexual. But it was not mentioned - was not in good taste to mention – in discussions of Ashton’s work during his lifetime. Still, the fact is that when we speak of the ballets of George Balanchine or Marius Petipa, we automatically connect their vision of women and womanhood and partnering to the fact that these men were married more than once, and to their heterosexual world view. It is time that we began to ask equivalent questions about Ashton’s choreography.
We are at a transitional stage of Ashton studies. His biography is being written right now, by Julie Kavanagh - has been under way for several years - and, when it is published, it will no doubt contain many features that will illuminate his work, and other features that will seem more or less irrelevant to his choreography. I confess that I am both impatient for it and nervous of it. It will be fascinating to see which person or persons Ashton had in mind when he shaped or reshaped the character of Beliaev in A Month in the Country from Turgenev’s original play; but will that knowledge help to make A Month in the Country a larger ballet in our minds? In due course, some people will go to see Ashton’s A Month in the Country only after they have read the biography, and they will be likely to ‘read’ Ashton’s choreography in terms of cause and effect, as we never did during Ashton’s lifetime. Well, that is the nature of history and of biography, and of criticism too. And the good news about Ashton’s biography is that it is not one of those quick sensationalist efforts that rush to hit the markets as soon after the subject’s death as possible, as has happened to poor Nureyev. It is being seriously and carefully undertaken with (that key Ashtonian word) love.
I look forward to the Ashton biography because there are many questions about Ashton that his work makes me ask. Here are a few of them:
How come a man who could not read a score made ballets so profoundly musical?
How come a man who never taught a ballet class became one of the major ballet classicists of all time?
How come a man whose own sexual practice was chiefly homosexual made a series of ballets which expressed heterosexual love?
How come sexual love, of any kind, became an important theme to this choreographer at a time when sexuality had received little direct attention on the ballet stage?
How come supported adagio - the form of pas de deux usually employed by ballet classicists (I mean the kind in which man and woman keep at arm’s length from each other and he holds her hand to support her while she does supported adagio towards or away from him) - interested Ashton relatively little?
How come this man - Sir Frederick Ashton, Knight of the British Empire, Companion of Honour, Order of Merit, who in the last years of his life stayed at Sandringham each year as a guest of the Queen and Queen Mother, and who actually made a ballet about the Queen as a young princess[i] - made ballets that were far less full of hierarchy than his contemporary George Balanchine, who, by contrast, chose to live in the world’s greatest republic? If the biography can help us to answer these questions, then it will help us understand the fount of the ballets that we already love. I can only tackle a few of them briefly here.
Let me whisk you through a few familiar Ashton stories. He saw Pavlova. ‘She injected me with her poison, and there was an end of me. From then on, I wanted to be the greatest dancer in the world, I wanted to be Nijinsky.’[ii] Well, he found out that he could not be Nijinsky, and this led to choreography. Many years later, Margot Fonteyn was speaking to him about a choreographer she didn’t admire, whom she called ‘just a frustrated dancer’. Ashton looked at her and said, ‘But we’re all frustrated dancers’. Fonteyn added that Ashton ‘seemed rather surprised at the idea that anyone who could be a really good dancer would bother to become a choreographer’ (Dominic & Gilbert, 1971, p. 4). Choreography for him was, in part, the sublimation of his ambition to be a dancer. But it sublimated other things for him too. He was a great mimic, and a very important part of his work with dancers was his descriptions and imitations of the great ballerinas he had seen. As late as the 1970s, he was rushing around the classroom showing female dancers how to do their roles, and saying ‘I should have been a ballerina’[iii]. Robert Helpmann once remarked that every ballerina role Ashton ever made could have been made for Pavlova; and that, when he suggested this to Ashton, Ashton said ‘Yes, she would have been wonderful. Because I think of her when I’m working all the time’ (Dominic & Gilbert 1971 p 124). So yes, he would have liked to be Nijinsky but we can see that he would have liked to be Pavlova too - and that being Pavlova had a more enduring appeal for him.
Of course, Ashton was not unique in his personal involvement with women’s roles. Maria Tallchief, who was Balanchine’s third wife, said that she could never dance the Swan Queen as beautifully as her husband (Taper, 1963, p. 23). Other Balanchine ballerinas have said the same; and some of them say the same about Jerome Robbins too. But Balanchine and Robbins did not make female roles for themselves or spend time imitating female dancers of the past or dressing up as women of the Victorian or Edwardian eras. For a man to have a penetrating understanding of femininity is one thing, for a man to need to keep representing himself in female guise is another. Ashton’s performances as the Ugly Sister and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle are famous; as many people know, he was a fine Carabosse; if you have David Vaughan’s book on Ashton, you will have looked a hundred times at the photographs of him as Queen Victoria and Queen Alexandra; and some of you may know the photographs of him as an Edwardian dowager in Cecil Beaton’s My Royal Past (Vaughan, 1977. p. 195 et seq.; von Bülop, 1939). Ashton made male roles for himself too - in Façade, Foyer de danse, Nocturne, Les Sirènes, Salut d’amour and others - and it would be wrong if we thought of him as some kind of drag artist. Interestingly, like Mark Morris (who also made female roles for himself), he disliked what he called drag – by which he meant, I think, all the Priscilla: Queen of the Desert kind of maquillage and coiffures and glamorous frocks. Nor was he without heterosexual experience. But it is very interesting to watch what the ballets tell us about sexuality.
Love became an important theme in his work during the 1930s. It is possible that his time in America in 1934 made him attend to it more seriously; and it is probable that Margot Fonteyn, who became his new muse at this time, helped him to express many aspects of love. She was the Bride in his 1935 Baiser de la fée; she said that it was that ballet that first gave her the delight of dancing an Ashton pas de deux (Fonteyn 1975, p. 55); and she said also that (with the exception of certain Ashton solos), her greatest pleasure came from dancing in duet (p. 135). And Ashton could see, as the outside world could not, how complex a woman, even in her teens, Fonteyn was.[iv] As early as 1936, Ashton began to take delight in showing these opposing facets of her – just compare her roles as the crushed vulnerable innocent in Nocturne and the unattainable muse of Apparitions (both 1936) - sometimes revealing them to her before she acknowledged their truth in herself. He would do the same for other dancers. Antoinette Sibley has spoken of her delight at how he could reveal her as the wild, impulsive, sensual fairy queen Titania in The Dream (1964) and then as the stuttering young English Dorabella, hero-worshipping the older artist Elgar in Enigma Variations (1968) (Dromgoole, 1976, p. 30). Of course, he was showing us these truths in ourselves too.
But love is not the same as sex. Perhaps he became more interested in sex during the War. At that time, he first started to think of a ballet about Don Juan even before he investigated the Richard Strauss score that he eventually used. (It is always revealing when a musical choreographer has been prompted to take up a subject by other than musical cause.) And in The Wanderer (1941), he created a striking duet for a pair of young adult lovers, which showed more physical intimacy than many British balletgoers were prepared for at the time (Vaughan, 1977, pp. 192-3). It was, however, in the late 1940s when a particular concern with sexual love entered his work. No doubt there was some reason in his own private life at that time for this; and no doubt he was encouraged by contemporary dance representation of sex in such ballets as Anthony Tudor’s Pillar of Fire and Roland Petit’s Carmen, both of which were brought to London soon after the War. He developed his new interest in sexual love in four particular ballets. In each of them, he seems to have had something different to say about sex and/or sexual love; in each, he contrasted different kinds of love and desire. Don Juan (1948) showed him developing new ways of presenting the female body in a way that caused one reviewer to suggest Ashton had been going too often to Roland Petit’s Ballet des Champs-Elysées; and it is noteworthy that the subject of the ballet is the connection between sexual love and death (Fonteyn danced La Morte Amoureuse) (Vaughan, 1977, pp. 227-8).[v]
In Illuminations (1950), the hero - the Poet - is caught between the figure of Profane Love, with whom he engages in sexual, Petit-type grapplings (the point of which is surely that they are merely sexual), and that of Sacred Love, a remote figure of strange beauty. He is torn: prose or poetry? Flesh or spirit? The dichotomy between the ballet’s two extremes is, for the protagonist, tragic: which leads to his death (and then an apotheosis). The Poet here is essentially Rimbaud, whose words are used in the Britten score to which Ashton choreographed; and the divide between flesh and spirit which was so striking a part of Rimbaud’s own life, is also generally an expression of the divide between homosexual desire and Christian devotion that has generally obtained in the Western world. Since Rimbaud’s own practice was homosexual, the complaint has sometimes been made that a more honest portrayal of the subject would have been to have shown the Poet involved not with a woman but with a man. Ashton’s ballet is, however, by no means dishonest. It does bypass literalism, certainly. How could it not? It is clearly a picture of the violently changing landscape of Rimbaud’s mind, and it deals in symbols. The figure of Profane Love certainly represents the figure of Rimbaud’s famous lover and fellow-poet Verlaine in certain features - just as Verlaine shot Rimbaud, Profane Love shoots the Poet - but, with one foot bare and one on pointe, she represents other elements in Rimbaud’s poetry too. And it is Rimbaud’s poetry and Britten’s superbly imaginative musical setting of it that shape Ashton’s ballet most of all. Like Sacred Love, Profane Love is a ballerina conception of ‘other-ness’, conveying meanings that could not be achieved were the role to be danced by a man.
In Daphnis and Chloe (1951), the duet for Lykanion and Daphnis contains the most poetically explicit, and explicitly poetic, depiction of sex that I have ever known in dance. You can see the excitement of friction between the bodies, the ecstatic frissons of the woman, and, as David Vaughan has written, the moment of orgasm, all expressed in dance terms (1977, p. 249). This pas de deux was, I believe, a break-through for Ashton, the open-sesame to several later less explicit, but more sustained, and even more poetic, depictions of sexual love.
The fourth of these ballets is Tiresias (1951). David Vaughan has spoken of the lost Ashton ballets we will get to see if we get to heaven - but I have to say that I suspect, if we get to heaven with him, that Tiresias won’t be one of the ballets we get to see there. Nobody seems to have admired it much. Still, what a fascinatingly peculiar subject for a ballet. Tiresias, you may recall, is the aged prophet who, in the course of his life has been both man and woman, and who is able, from experience, to state which sex derives most pleasure from sex: namely, woman. (In fact, only the female Tiresias was shown experiencing love in the ballet) Constant Lambert and Ashton specifically planned the role of the female Tiresias, the one who enjoys sex the most, for Margot Fonteyn; and this role was probably the most sexual that Ashton ever made on her (Vaughan, 1977, pp. 252-5, 421-3).
From then on, Ashton made a series of ballets in which he shows the sensuousness of woman’s response to man, shows her erogenous zones, joys in her sensuality. In some of these ballets, we hardly think of the love as sexual, but we cannot miss the importance of physical contact. In La Fille mal gardée (1960), when Colas is consoling Lise for having surprised her in the middle of her daydream of marriage and children, he places a series of kisses up her arm, and she at once responds in bourrées that tremble with desire.[vi] And the sensuousness of female response to man is also evident in such later ballets as A Month in the Country (1976) and Varii Capricci (1983). The final duet of The Two Pigeons (1961) begins with the hero’s touch on the woman’s underarm or shoulderblade area, and the thrilled, arching response she makes to that. And in the final duet of The Dream, Titania alternately melts and radiates in Oberon’s arms. In both the Two Pigeons and Dream duets - which are, I believe Ashton’s two greatest expressions of fulfilled sexual love – the phrasing and structure has the sexual quality of Wagner’s erotic music in Tristan: of initiative and response, of pressure and relaxation, phrase by phrase, question and answer, building up in a crescendo, reaching a moment of full-out climax - and then the tender dying fall.
I stress the sexual element of Ashton’s choreography because it may not seem pronounced to those of us who know our Kenneth MacMillan. But not only are Ashton’s pas de deux the more poetic, MacMillan actually refers to them when he is depicting sexual love (the pas de deux of Act I of Macmillan’s Romeo and Manon are full of Ashtonisms). But now compare Ashton’s pas de deux to those by those other ballet classicists, Petipa and Balanchine. In the supported adagios choreographed on many occasions by Petipa and Balanchine, man and woman often keep at arm’s length from each other. He holds her hand or her waist, and the distance between the two becomes as expressive as the proximity. When physical contact is emphasised, as when he rocks her in his arms from behind in the great adagio of Swan Lake, or in the highly erotic duet of The Prodigal Son, it makes an unusual effect. It is curious, by contrast, how seldom Ashton’s duets make any emphasis on this distance between ballerina and partner. There are a few examples; and it may be biographically relevant that they come from the period 1948-56[vii]. In Act III of Cinderella (1948), there is a striking passage of supported adagio, when the ballerina takes a grand développé in second and then turns without his support into arabesque where, taking his hand again, she makes a pronounced penchée. It resembles the second movement of Balanchine’s Symphony in C, but only briefly. It is only a phrase. The ‘Being Beauteous’ section of Illuminations is more prolonged - is indeed Ashton’s ultimate version of the kind of supported adagio that emphasises the distance of the woman from the men who partner her - but it is a one-off, unlike other Ashton choreography (and Balanchine had a hand in its making)[viii]. There is a very striking instance in the pas de deux for the Queen of the Air in Homage to the Queen (1953) as recorded on a 1970 film. And in the pas de deux of Birthday Offering (1956), the ballerina makes some spectacular effects at arm’s length from her partner - but, in the context of the whole pas de deux, they seem simply to be brief displays of a ballerina’s grandeur amid her generally radiant contentment with her partner.
In other words, a woman’s need to be independent of, or remote from, her partner - so striking a feature of Petipa, Ivanov, and Balanchine choreography - was something that almost never interested Ashton. In Ashton’s duets, the nearness of the bodies is all-important – we constantly sense two bodies seeking union. Does this - the thrill at a man’s touch, the excitement in sensual coupling - reflect aspects of his own sexuality? I believe so. During the last years of his life, I became increasingly interested by the peculiar subject matter of Tiresias, and a mutual friend asked Ashton about it. Ashton replied, ‘Oh yes I was always the woman, you see’.[ix] To the extent that this clinched my theory, this was gratifying. It will be interesting to see what the biography has to tell us about Ashton’s masculinity and his femininity. What is more interesting, however, is what the ballets tell us about them. And what is most interesting is what the ballets tell us, not about Ashton, but about ourselves. The more we are in touch with both masculine and feminine sides of ourselves, the more we will delight in his choreography.
Now ballet is a hierarchical art. It not only places classical dancers in ranks - corps de ballet, coryphées, soloists, ballerinas and so forth – it also distinguishes classical from demi-character and character dancers. Ashton, we can see, enjoyed using all these different ranks and genres - but we can also see that hierarchy matters to him remarkably little. Sure the ballerina of Scènes de ballet is supported by four men in one dance as well by her own partner; but those four also partner the girls in the corps. (Just imagine how The Sleeping Beauty would feel if the four princes in the Rose Adagio took time off to partner Aurora’s little friends.) In Cinderella, there are character, demi-character and classical dancers, corps de ballet and ballerinas and prima ballerina. But at first Cinderella herself is very far from being a prima; and in the main scene where all the ranks are assembled together - the ballroom – her position is extremely ironic. Perhaps his most hierarchical work was Homage to the Queen, but it did not survive long. In Birthday Offering he created one of those ballerinas-at-a-gathering ballets, in which, like Paquita and Divertimento No. 15, each ballerina expresses her identity in a different variation. But unlike Paquita or Divertimento No. 15, he does not put them in the context of a corps de ballet. They have their crowns and jewels - chandeliers too - but they are seen in private, without subjects. The Dream, of course, has its distinctions - ballerina distinct from corps de ballet, classical versus character - and yet Ashton makes less of these distinctions than several other artists who have set the same story.
Hierarchy matters little to Ashton; community matters much more. In ballet after ballet, from Capriol Suite (1930), Les Rendezvous (1933) and Les Patineurs (1937), through to Rhapsody (1980) and Varii Capricii (1983) it is clear that the star dancers are members of the same community as those in the corps de ballet. The heroines of La Fille mal gardée and The Two Pigeons are socially equal to the coryphées. In Enigma Variations, the more virtuoso classical roles are no more central than the character or demi-character roles. Most remarkably of all, Ashton’s great plotless works, Symphonic Variations (1946) and Monotones (1965-66), are entirely communities of equals.
This stress on equality and community is easy to love. Please note, however, how unusual it is in classical ballet. And it ties in with Ashton’s unusual emphasis on physical love. The classic example here is La Fille mal gardée, where the loving couple comes together surrounded, and accepted, by the community at large. But the sense of community is equally important in Enigma Variations, though the hero there is involved with three different women and numerous friends: he may not find completely satisfying love for himself- unlike two of his younger friends shown in the ballet - but he finds his peace in being part of a community of friends. I believe that Ashton was expressing, or sublimating, the homosexual’s need for private lives and private loves to be accepted by a larger, caring, society.
I seem to have struck a melancholy note. Well, melancholy was an important factor in Ashton’s make-up. Fonteyn once said that “I think Fred’s perfect day would always contain a few moments of melancholia and regret because it hadn’t been quite perfect” (Dominic & Gilbert, 1971, p. 126). And I believe that, though love and sex always interested him, after 1964 he ceased to see successful love as a cure or resolution or happy ending. Indeed, in several earlier ballets also, he showed successful sexual love as being possible, but not for the particular hero or heroine of the ballet. There are three ballets where this is particularly clear: The Wanderer, Illuminations, and Enigma Variations. In each of these, a subsidiary pair of junior young lovers is shown calmly absorbed in one another, expressing a kind of love that the hero cannot attain. Ashton seems to be echoing here W. H. Auden’s point: “I think that no homosexual, if he is honest, is truly happy in his sex.”
Yet melancholy is only one note in Ashton’s perfect day, in Ashton’s perfect ballets. I find it interesting that there are very few deaths in his work, and very little transcendence - less than in Balanchine.[x] Ashton is often called a Romantic, and in his emphasis on the importance of love and feeling we can see why. But in another, larger, sense he was not a Romantic at all. A Romantic is one for whom this world is not enough, who strives to find an essence beyond this existence. Ashton’s ballets are all about this world. Other choreographers have made ballets that go beneath our skin to our inner selves; Ashton’s ballets are about our skin, about our social selves, about the way we relate to each other and to the world about us. This is true, I believe, even of the celestial Symphonic Variations, with its Suffolk green, and the lunar Monotones, with its “There you have it” gesture. Harmony is an important word for Ashton’s ballets; vitality is more important yet. At the Ashton gala in 1970, Robert Helpmann, nearing the conclusion of the evening, said “The man is the work, the work is the man”.[xi] Well, whatever its genesis, whatever the mind of its maker, what a wonderful vision it is. Ashton’s sense of community was so thorough that it percolates right through to his distribution of dance language. There are innumerable examples; two will have to suffice here.[xii] Romeo and Juliet (or at least Ashton’s 1985 London Festival Ballet version of his 1955 ballet[xiii]) has four different versions of the famous “Fred Step”: for Juliet and Paris in the ballroom, for the courtiers in the ballroom, for the street-scene crowd while Livia is dancing in the foreground, and for the nurse’s page Peter. The Dream is full of magic circles traced on, or just above, the floor.[xiv] Hermia, slowly turned in fondu on pointe by Lysander, traces one such circle with the point other extended leg; and then Titania, in her pas de deux with Oberon. traces another. And both of these are slow, supported versions of other magic floor-circles we see, such as Titania’s ground-skimming double pirouettes in the Lullaby.
Fokine, at the beginning of this century, like Jean-Georges Noverre in the eighteenth century, stated that each kind of character should have different, and appropriate, kind of dance vocabulary, and Ashton was, in this respect, generally a Fokinian choreographer. Hermia’s way of dancing is nothing like Titania’s; little Peter is nothing like Juliet or Paris. But Ashton, in showing how these very different characters can nonetheless unconsciously share a very specific step or phrase, was making a point beyond Fokine’s ken. Each of us, prima or corps, character or classical, belongs to the same little world, and can be touched by the same magic.
Parts of this paper are taken from a longer lecture on Ashton given in The Threepenny Review’s 1989 lecture series ‘The Art of Criticism’.
[i] Nursery Suite (1986), made for Queen Elizabeth II’s sixtieth birthday gala at Covent Garden.
[ii] Ashton said part or all of this many times. See Vaughan, Frederick Ashrton and his Ballets , 1977, p. 4; Dominic and & Gilbert, Frederick Ashton,1971, p. 26; and the 1979 BBC documentary on Ashton.
[iii] Lesley Collier, interviewed by the Ballet Association in the late 1970s
[iv] In her memoirs, Fonteyn describes the paradoxical situation whereby she would kiss Helpmann onstage and believe she was in love, and yet slap on the face the first of her stage-door-johnny admirers who dared to kiss her in a taxi (1975, p.57). What she left unsaid, but which we also know now, is that during these years Fonteyn was secretly involved in a highly sexual affair with Constant Lambert (see Motion, 1986). I believe that all these sides of Fonteyn, paradoxically, were sincere. In the mysteries of her own mind, she was a vulnerable innocent, a happily sexual being, and an inviolable nun at the same time. In due course, she became other women too: an unattainable muse, a man-eater, an emblem of international chic, a frightened virgin who longed for sexual fulfilment but feared she would never find it, and a radiant child of nature. I am imagining this, but I am led to imagine it by the roles she danced, and by the way she danced them. Ashton, of course, knew about her affair with Lambert at the time, as few other people did
[v] The connections between Petit’s choreography at this time and Ashton’s deserve further research. It is at least possible that the foot-tappings of Fonteyn’s dances - tapping a pointe on the floor behind - in Scènes de ballet (1948) and Daphnis and Chloe (1951) were inspired by those in Petit’s ballets (though the device also has simply a look of Fred Astaire to it). And it is important to notice that Fonteyn’s work with Petit at this time and her offstage liaison with him had a strong impact on her career: the fans called it ‘Margot’s awakening’.
[vi] At this conference, Alexander Grant supported this point, stressing that Ashton wanted Colas to place the kiss into the palm of Lise’s hand. (‘Ashton knew where the erogenous zone was.’)
[vii] At the time of writing, I had not yet seen the 1962 Raymonda pas de deux, due to be restored to Royal Ballet repertory in December 1994; it may contain other examples. Possibly the pas de deux in the 1982 Pas de légumes (from the 1979 film Tales From a Flying Trunk) danced by the heroine and the Potato Prince, is a late example; but I recall this pas de deux as the one disappointing item of an otherwise delectable ballet.
[viii] Years later, in the central movement of Sinfonietta (1967), Ashton devised another dance with the same basic structure of one woman and four male partners, and the same generally remote quality, but no emphasis is laid on the woman’s separateness from her male partners, who lifts her so that she seldom, if ever, touches the floor
[ix] Source withheld
[x] See, or read about, Balanchine’s Cotillon, Le Baiser de la fée, La Sonnambula, La Valse, Don Quixote, Robert Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze. Death in Ashton is confined to Apparitions, Illuminations, Romeo and Juliet
[xi] Helpmann at the 1970 Ashton gala, as preserved on film.
[xii] Two other examples occur in Cinderella and La Fille mal gardée. In Cinderella, we can see how the season fairies introduce the heroine to steps that she then develops in her own dances, but also how the minor courtiers, mysteriously, are already showing us some of the same steps. (Just look at the various uses in the ballet of the jump with feet tucked up together underneath the dancer’s seat. Fairy Spring does it; then all four season fairies together; then the Jester; then the Prince’s four friends; and finally Cinderella does it, but in a lift, during the ballroom pas de deux.) I had watched La Fille mal gardée more than sixty times until I realised that my favourite step in the ballet occurs in two different contexts: first when Lise is dancing alone with her ribbon in the first scene; then when her girlfriends start the finale for Act II. (The step - tricky to describe - involves a saut de basque, which arrives and opens, with a relevé, into a small developpé in second, which is followed by a quick raccourci.)
[xiii] It was no secret in 1985 that Ashton added a new pas de trois for Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio. But, as Katherine Healy (the first-cast Juliet of that production) has confirmed, Ashton made several further changes and additions.
[xiv]Ashton, I suspect, was thinking of the magic rings left on the ground by toadstools.
References
Dominic, Z., & Gilbert, J. S. (1971), Frederick Ashton: a Choreographer and His Ballets, London, Harrap.
Dromgoole, N. (1976), Sibley and Dowell, London, Collins.
Fonteyn, M. (1975), Autobiography, London, W. H. Allen.
Motion, A. (1986), The Lamberts, London, Chatto & Windus.
Taper, B. (1963), Balanchine, New York, Harper & Row.
Vaughan, D. (1977), Frederick Ashton and His Ballets, London, A & C Black.
von Bülop, (1979), My Royal Past as Told to Cecil Beaton, London, Batsford.
Gender, Sexuality, Community © Alastair Macaulay, 1996
Following Sir Fred’s Steps © Stephanie Jordan and Andrée Grau