Margot Fonteyn and Classicism
In one section of Frederick Ashton’s Symphonic Variations, five dancers move, sometimes in question-and-answer alternation, but the central ballerina stands still. She’s in one corner of the stage, downstage right; her arms are by her sides; she stands with one foot crossed over the ankle of her supporting leg and resting on point. In today’s performances, this stillness is seldom remarked upon; that stance, after all, is a motif of the whole work, with stationary dancers marking the peripheries of the dancing space like closely sculptures of the human figure. But with the role’s original ballerina, Margot Fonteyn, that stillness was, we’re told, transcendent.
The critic James Monahan, in these pages and in his book The Nature of Ballet (1976), was one of many for whom that stillness at the side of the stage was the most marvelous achievement of Margot Fonteyn’s long and exemplary career. I came to dance ten years too late to see her dance it, but Keith Money, in conversation, once described her there as “the still centre of the world.” Fonteyn, standing still, conveyed not only repose but rapturous meditation: the philosophical quality at the core of this still great ballet. Her head was, I believe, slightly raised, her eyes more so, gazing upward on a diagonal into space; the teacher Patricia Hutchinson McKenzie told me that part of this moment’s beauty lay in the calm at the base of Fonteyn’s neck. I know of no good photograph of that moment, but other shots of her in Symphonics show that that area of her body had a repose worthy of Praxiteles.
What’s classical? Fonteyn was a dancer who, without ever adopting any intellectual parlance herself, led us back to the multiple meanings of classicism. Standing still in Symphonic Variations with that one foot crossed over the other leg, she seems to have been as profoundly an emblem of classicism as anyone in fifth position. Too often in dance talk, the adjective “classical” is often used as if it was synonymous with “academic.” In truth, there are many classicisms: which may be refractions of a larger essence. That combination of stillness in motion and motion in stillness - so crucial to the dance character of Symphonics and certain other classical ballets - was one that Merce Cunningham singled out as one he sought for his dancers and choreography. As he knew, it has been a goal of the dance forms of South Asia for centuries.
As a young critic in 1980, I asked Ashton if he derived inspiration from the nineteenth-century classics. I was expecting him to re-tell of how he had been found watching an umpteenth Sleeping Beauty to have what he called “a private lesson.” Instead, however, Ashton gave me a far more interesting reply: “I derive inspiration from classicism”; he emphasized the “-ism.” I now believe that Fonteyn, who was central to his creativity between 1935 and 1958, led him again and again – as he led her - into discovering the further possibilities of classicism.
And as she came into her prime, after the Second World War, he explored the links between ballet and ideas of ancient Greece. Among the many beauties of the configurations of Symphonic Variations is the way its central ballerina holds a supported arabesque in her partner’s arms while the other four dancers are in motion around them. The arabesque is one I’ve often labeled the “Margot arabesque.” Although her face, arms, and raised leg are in profile, her shoulders are squared to address the audience, while she holds her arms in symmetrical lines that continue the downward slope of her shoulders – and her raised leg is parallel to her back leg. (Ashton chiefly used this arabesque line in his ballets of 1946-1948. It seems to have haunted Kenneth MacMillan, who went on to employ it more often.) Although this arabesque is held with serenity, it distils a quality of ecstasy in the exposure it places on the neck. And when the ballerina raises her head to look upward, it echoes the depiction of Maenads (followers of the wine-god Dionysus, their heads raised in abandon) in the art of the ancient Greeks. (Isadora Duncan copied the Maenad look of the upper body.) The throat and jawline are exposed.
Ashton was at his boldest in those postwar years, often working with a range of twentieth-century music (Berners, Ravel, R. Strauss, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Britten, Lambert, Bax, Arnold). He choreographed most of the role of Cinderella not on Fonteyn (who was injured) but on Moira Shearer. Though Shearer may have surpassed Fonteyn in two great one-act pure-dance ballets, Ashton’s Scènes de ballet and Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial, Fonteyn by all accounts surpassed Shearer when she tackled Cinderella. Most people remember her triumph as an actress: in the kitchen she was bleaker than other interpreters, in the ballroom more radiant. But if there is one astounding moment I would single out from the TV film of her performance, it is one that shows her dancing at its most breathtaking. When Cinderella dances her variation’s third phrase with her back to the audience, there’s one step when, while remaining on a single point, she does a backbend toward the audience and then, without losing balance, returns to vertical stance. The TV direction is by Ashton himself, who brings the camera round to view her as if from the wings; the lissome fullness with which Fonteyn arches right back is breathtaking even when you are used to the gymnastic skills of latterday ballerinas.
Between 1951 and 1953, that Ashton addressed Greece directly in a series of ballets – Daphnis and Chloë, Tiresias, Sylvia - and in his staging of Gluck’s opera Orpheus. Photographs and descriptions show – Tiresias and Orpheus did not survive - that each of these works had a different movement idiom, but all of them depicted the mythological world in which gods are active in the lives of humans, who are made in their image and venerate them. Fonteyn did not dance in Orpheus, but she – now the world’s most celebrated ballerina - was Chloë, the female Tiresias, and Sylvia. As Chloë, she was the heartbeat of a community at one with nature. As Tiresias, she epitomized carnal knowledge. In Sylvia, she was heroic chastity transformed into enamoured bliss. It’s striking that in Daphnis and Tiresias, her legs and arms are held in angular positions, not turned-out but kept in profile; with Fonteyn, the line remains profoundly satisfying. As Ashton once remarked, she was apparently incapable of unharmonious or ugly movement. Parts of Chloê’s flute dance are gorgeously drawn from the ballet lexicon; but she’s no less classical when she simply, percussively, taps her foot behind her on the floor (on one beat), next against her hand (second beat) and finally turns her head forward and up as (third beat) she opens her hands and arms, as if releasing energy into the universe. A film of her dancing this was broadcast in a TV documentary immediately after her death. One of the choreographer Mark Morris’s friends called him to say “Are you watching this?” Morris replied “It’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen” and ended the call.
Ashton had been choreographing different ideas of Greece since Leda (1928). In 1938, Fonteyn stepped into one Graeco-Roman ballet of his, The Judgement of Paris, replacing Pearl Argyle as the goddess Venus (to whom Paris awards the prize for beauty). The ballet, composed to a score by Lennox Berkeley, didn’t last long; yet I’d like to have seen it because of one exceptional photograph of Fonteyn’s Venus, taken by Gordon Anthony: exceptional because she’s both off-balance and on-balance. She’s stepping so expansively forward while her back foot remains on point that she seems infused with an impetus not Ashtonian but Balanchinean. Meanwhile her upper body arches ecstatically back.
Over the years, Fonteyn developed an unmannered use of the hands, arms, and wrists that ideally continued the line and life of the arm; that style has characterised Royal Ballet style ever since. The wrists and elbows tend to seem invisible; often the fingers, too. (But her wrists take on a special life in The Firebird, where the hands seem to shake off sparks.)
“She has the body of Venus and the mind of Minerva,” Ashton said of her in a 1979 documentary. He also loved to speak of how she too time to absorb things he told her. “Now tonight’s performance was perfect,” he said once; “Why was it perfect?” She replied “Because tonight I understood what you told me two years ago.” In her Autobiography (1975), she relates a tale he had told her in 1939 of Markova and Danilova, both then principals of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, vying with each other in the same part at rehearsal. “Markova was dancing with her effortless grace and creating a great impression on the surrounding corps de ballet; Danilova, when it came to her turn to repeat the same dance, announced, ‘I am Russian. I dance strong!’ Whereupon she went into a spit-fire attack on the difficult solo.” Fonteyn adds, “From that moment I danced strong, with every bit of energy I could muster.”
That strength is only sometimes evident in studio films of her dancing. Watch live film of her before an audience and you keep seeing Fonteyns you didn’t know. My favourites, filmed in North America between 1949 and 1956, are in the Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts: a complete Aurora, an almost complete Odette-Odile, and a few minutes of her Sylvia. Returning to the stage after dancing Odile’s grand pas de deux, she looks ready to dance the whole thing again; as Sylvia, the trust with which she hurls herself across the stage to arrive upside down in Michael Somes’s arms is the revelation that brings the plot to its resolution.
Has any other ballerina ever generated as many books of photographs? Between the 1930s and the 1970s, Fonteyn picture books kept appearing, by photographers from Gordon Anthony to Keith Money. Even after decades, I still love to return to them all; they show not just why her proportions seemed so ideal but how endlessly poetic her line is, both when academically impeccable (the radiance of Aurora’s arabesque and attitudes) and when deviating from full turnout for stylistic reasons. And if I had to take one group of dance photographs - of any dancer - to a desert island, then I’d take those that Keith Money took in 1963 of Fonteyn dancing Symphonics in Baalbek with Royes Fernandez as her partner; they form five pages of his book The Art of Margot Fonteyn. The Greek theatre is an ideal alternative to Sophie Fedorovitch’s décor; and the endlessly harmonious configurations of Fonteyn’s body, memorably complimented by the architecture, are transcendent testimony to the lines of ballet at its purest. Selfessly, they sing of form beyond form.
2019.iv.06
Alastair Macaulay @2019
Published Dancing Times, May 2019.