Notes on the Fred Step, and the Fred Steps in Frederick Ashton’s Ballets

The triumph that the fiftyfive-year-old Frederick Ashton scored in 1960 with La Fille mal gardée was the greatest of his already long career. Later that year, the British publication Ballet Annual published a tribute to him. This contained entries by Arnold Haskell (the senior British critic), Marie Rambert (the founder of modern British ballet and of Ashton’s career as choreographer), George Balanchine (the great Russian-American choreographer and Ashton’s exact contemporary), the ballerina Margot Fonteyn, the ballet teacher Vera Volkova, and the leading dancer Michael Somes. These appreciations cover thirty-four years of choreography by Ashton, the larger reasons for his greatness as an artist, and the endearing qualities of his personality. But Somes, at the end of his appreciation, tucks in a note about a “signature step” that occurs in every Ashton ballet. “Not many people who have watched and loved his work over many years realise”, he wrote, that this step has become an Ashton tradition. “Even when a new work is completed, room must somewhere be found for it in one form or another…. (It) has become dear to all of us who have had the privilege of working with Frederick Ashton. For us, it is a symbol of the reverence and the high esteem that we have for him.”

  Somes left it to his readers to discover what that step is, though. Only when the critic David Vaughan wrote Frederick Ashton and his Ballets (1977), one of the most beloved of all ballet books, were the components of this step revealed in print. In technical terms, he gives the enchaînementas follows – posé  en arabesque (i.e. a step onto pointe, or onto the ball of the foot, with the other leg stretched straight behind), coupé dessous (i.e. a small step back, transferring the weight onto the other foot, while picking up the first foot), small développé à  la seconde (in which the raised foot is brought into the ankle of the supporting leg, is drawn up a little, and is then extended out to the side), pas de bourrée dessous (a series of four small steps, transferring the weight sideways in the direction of the développé), pas de chat (a sideways jump in which the knees are bent and which begins and ends with the feet closed together in fifth position). Vaughan also revealed that this step, or sequence of individual steps, is known by dancers as the “Fred Step”. Ashton often preferred his friends to call him Freddie, but Fred is the name that most dancers, even those close to him, tended to use; or “Sir Fred” as he became, two years after the premiere of Fille, in the Birthday Honours of 1962.  

  Ashton himself, as Somes and Vaughan both knew, liked to insist that he thought of this step-cluster not as “Fred” but as “Pavlova”. In an interview just before his eightieth birthday, he described it as a talisman. Anna Pavlova had been his introduction to ballet. “She injected me with her poison”, he often said, “and there was an end of me”. And, even though he went on to work with several of the twentieth century’s other greatest ballerinas, he was seldom in any doubt that Pavlova had been not only his first but the finest. When, in the 1960s, he asked Bronislava Nijinska “Who was the greatest ballerina of them all?”, he was gratified when she, without hesitation, replied  “Pavlova”. (When he asked “What about Karsavina?”, she answered merely “Belle femme, belle femme.”) He never ceased to draw inspiration from his many memories of Pavlova as he had watched her between 1917 and her death in 1931.

  So what was the “poison” she had planted in his veins? A devotion to classical dance itself: classicism not as mere academicism but as an endlessly expressive river into which all other dance forms could pour their enriching streams. His old colleague Robert Helpmann, who had danced in Pavlova’s company, said to an interviewer in 1970: “Every ballet that Fred choreographed, one knew or one saw that the principal female role would have been ideal for Pavlova. Next time you talk to him, ask him about it. Because I did and he said ‘Yes, of course she would have been wonderful. Because I think of her when I’m working all the time.’”

  Today, our prime evidence for how Pavlova danced are the several short films she made of various short dances in her repertory, and the many photographs taken of her. Ashton was adamant that the films gave a particularly poor, misleading impression of her. He would describe the unsurpassed finesse of certain aspects of her allegro technique, and the tremendous control of her adagio technique; he would explain the stylistic fascination she exerted by showing steps at angles (“never boringly, flat-on to the audience”) or by ending pirouettes in non-formulaic positions. Above all, however, he would show – often by demonstrating - the heady perfume of her dance personality: the way she would crown a dance moment by the use of her eyes, the exoticism with which she would wreathe her arms around her head, the intensity with which she would bend her upper body while performing a grand port de bras, the little needlepoint steps with which she displayed her strikingly arched feet.

  Over the decades, the renditions he gave to younger dancers over the decades seemed to catch the very essence of bygone dancers, but none more so than Pavlova. Today, many dance-goers derive their main idea of Pavlova from such Ashton dancers as the Thaïs pas de deux (1971). Antoinette Sibley, the ballerina upon whom he choreographed this, has said “Pavlova is almost all he talked about when he was making it.”

  The talisman came from the Gavotte Pavlova that she often performed. Wearing mock-1800 costume, she danced it to winningly lowbrow music by Lincke called The Glow Worm. In his old age, Ashton, talking people through the lyrics, would show them how she phrased it: “Glow,” (posé en arabesque, the first quarter-phrase) “little glow-worm, (coupé dessous, small développé a la seconde, the second quarter-phrase) “glimmer” (pas de bourrée) “glimmer” (pas de chat) – and, running that concluding half-phrase together in a single flow, he would show how the tripping pas de chat arrived in a pounce on the first syllable of the second “glimmer”. When did he first place it in one of his ballets? In 1994, the ballerina Alicia Markova, speaking at the Ashton conference “Following Sir Fred’s Steps”, recalled the first time she worked with Ashton, in the short ballet that closed Nigel Playfair’s 1930 production of the play Mariage à la Mode. “It was the first time we met, and we seemed to get along very well. He started to choreograph the dances, and in the pas de deux I met for the first time what was later to become the ‘Fred Step’ at the time we both knew it was not Fred’s step, it was the step Anna Pavlova danced in her ‘Gavotte.’ He suddenly said to me, ‘You know that step she danced?’ and I said ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Let’s do it in the pas de deux.’ That was the very first time we had that step – it became the ‘Fred Step’. Perhaps that will put on record how that came about.” However, since the Fred Step seems not to occur in his enduring classic Façade (1931), it may well have been Pavlova’s death, later in 1931, that prompted him to start putting into the dances he went on to make, as if consecrating his art to hers. Certainly it’s there in contemporary film footage of his 1933 Rambert ballet Les Masques and in the ballet sequences he made for the 1935 movie Escape Me Never.  

  Even in so simple a sequence, it’s possible to bring yet more analytical detail. For the 1994 Ashton conference Following Sir Fred’s Steps, the former Royal Ballet dancer, ballet-master, and notator Adrian Grater observed that the posé en arabesque is usually followed by a small fondu(i.e. in which the supporting leg bends at the knee), and that the small développé is executed en fondu. I might complicate the matter yet further by adding that a particular sequence of ports de bras often, not always, accompanies this sequence of lower-body steps. The terminology might tire the reader, though; more important, such specifics would still seem lifeless unless each part of the sequence is executed with an Ashtonian sense of upper-body style. The eyes should show the focus of each part of the phrase; the wrists and fingers should be fluently submerged into the body’s changing line. Today, the Royal Ballet conjugates the Fred Step (incorporating a change of ballet vocabulary from posé to piqué) as follows:

1.​Piquée arabesque ouverte. Step on to pointe, or onto the ball of the foot, with the other leg stretched out behind.

2.​Fondu. Bend knee of supporting leg.

3.​Coupé piqué, petit développé à la seconde, fondu. Close extended leg behind the supporting foot on full or half point, keeping it straight. Draw what was the supporting foot up the ankle of the supporting leg and extend it to the side (but not high), at the same time bending the supporting knee.

4.​Pas de bourrée dessous. A series of three small steps travelling sideways, first closing the extended foot behind, stepping sideways onto the other foot – both steps on full or half pointe – and closing the first foot to the front, bending both knees.

5.​Pas de chat. A sideways jump starting and finishing in fifth position, during which first the back foot and then the front foot are lifted to the knee.

One could go on defining and redefining here. For example, is the Royal Ballet’s definition of a pas de chat quite appropriate here? At the end of the Fred Step, this jump is usually so low and fast that the feet seldom reach the knee. On the other hand, I miss David Vaughan’s point that the développé was petit; I’m aware of only one instance where it becomes grand.

  But the point of this Pavlova/Ashton talisman is that the “signature” is hidden - different each time. By contrast, there are other characteristically Ashtonian choreographic strokes that are easy to recognise from one ballet to another. Many dance-goers will recognise the “There you have it” gesture, which occurs in a number of ballets from 1934 to 1980, the “walking-on-air” lifts that he invented in 1939 and went on using in pas de deux as late as 1977, and the “Margot” arabesque (in which the downward diagonal lines of the woman’s arms continue those of her shoulders and in turn are paralleled by that of her raised leg), which is to be found especially in Symphonic Variations, Scènes de ballet, and Cinderella. But the Fred Step is often tucked away. He may give it to the ballerina (Antoinette Sibley as La Capricciosa in Varii Capricci, 1983) or to supporting dancers (Symphonic Variations, 1946). He may give it to a corps de ballet of peasants (Sylvia, 1952), to junior dancers (a pair of dancing artichokes in the Princess Ida vegetable ballet he made for the 1979 film Stories from a Flying Trunk), or to minor characters (the leading four fairies in The Dream, 1964). Often the eye is distracted from it by action elsewhere onstage. In each instance, it is changed in some aspect (particularly its conclusion), so that the entire step seems metamorphosed. (One of its most immediately recognisable renditions is in the 1947 Valses nobles et sentimentales: the leading female dancer performs it centre stage.)

  Perhaps its most archetypal setting occurs in Act One of Cinderella (1948). As the music sounds a gavotte, the Dancing Master teaches – of course! - the Gavotte Pavlova step to one Ugly Sister. But such is the fun of the situation that the audience is led to notice less their steps than this Stepsister’s timorous awkwardness - and the jealous pushiness with which the other sister forces her way in on the act. Left alone a little later, Cinderella recalls her sisters’ efforts to dance. When the music recalls that gavotte, she then shows, perfectly, how the Fred Step should have gone. She is at once so much the step’s mistress that she doesn’t end with its ending, she carries straight on, elongating the phrase into a quick series of relevés petits développés. Dancing it a second time to the other side, she embellishes its pas de chat into a less conventional jump.

   Ashton choreographs the way that Haydn composed: he takes a motif, adds to it, plays with it, changes its dynamics, sets it against something dissimilar, turns it inside out, extends it, transforms it. The Fred Step seldom occurs once alone in any place; usually, it is reiterated. If so, it may become a travelling step; or it may be danced to one side and then, mirror-fashion, to the other; or it may be cut up and reassembled in new form. An object-lesson in the latter occurs in Act One of The Two Pigeons (1961): when the female neighbour arrives, the heroine’s eight friends and then the heroine herself take turns to hold her hands by way of greeting, and each one, while doing so, performs a different chunk of the Fred Step, so that, by the end of this little social politesse, the young women have fragmented the old step and put it together again. When it arrives in The Dream (1964), it’s the step that opens and closes the Scherzo, but occurring top speed and back to front, first step last and vice versa, and with the middle steps swapped too - pas de chat straight into petit développé à la seconde, rushed pas de bourrée, ending with a piquée arabesque. As the Scherzo ends, it’s danced nervously, by Moth alone - the last fairy left onstage. (Some insist that it’s not a Fred Step at all. I think we can be sure Ashton intended it as one: he played many other games with the grammar of this Pavlova talisman.) Moth is hovering on pointe in that piquée arabesque ouverte when Oberon comes up behind her and sends her packing. By contrast with that presto rendition, in Rhapsody (1980) it is danced largo by the corps de ballet. One ring of six men intersecting another ring of six women, the two circles moving slowly and smoothly in and out of each other, all the dancers enounce the phrase in solemn unison, like some sacred ritual. This effect is ideal for the music: these twelve, in variation VII of Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, are dancing to his introduction of his counter-theme - the Dies Irae.

  When members of the audience spot the Fred Step, it is usually by the swaying change of direction that marks its opening half-phrase. The dancer seems to set forth in one direction, then to step back and to move in another. How Ashtonian this is: I’ll go left – no, I’ll go right. The humanity lies in the self-contradiction. And not just humanity. You can see a hedgehog doing it: Ashton himself as Mrs Tiggywinkle in the 1971 film The Tales of Beatrix Potter.

  Some of its most recognizable uses have occurred when Ashton set it as an exit step, repeating it gently in a straight line until it takes the dancer into the wings. In his two last dances for Margot Fonteyn, Salut d’amour (1979) and Acte de presence (1984), Ashton himself joined the ballerina onstage and led her gently offstage, dancing the talisman as they went. In A Month in the Country (1976), Natalia Petrovna, after a brief scene with her loyal admirer Rakitin, takes his arm and leaves the stage with him: their backs are to the audience as they dance the Fred Step, letting it lead them in a gentle zigzag path, as if it were the easy this-and-that conversation that these two old friends are having. In Ashton’s 1955 Romeo and Juliet, by contrast, it is an entry step: the Nurse does it as she comes into the square with her page Peter. Likewise the seven ballerinas of Birthday Offering (1956) do it during the opening ensemble that brings them sweeping onto the stage.

   Sometimes it is easy to miss the “Fred Step” even when it is happening centre stage. Some artists involved in the Royal Ballet’s most recent revival of A Wedding Bouquet (1937) remarked that it seemed not to occur in that ballet. In fact, the housekeeper Webster (a role created on Ninette de Valois, and danced for many years by Monica Mason) does it in her opening solo. If we don’t notice it, there are good reasons why. Ashton has changed the pas de chat ending into a non-jumping step (one that’s yet more like elaborate needlework, pas de bourrée piqué sur les pointes); the sequence is phrased as part of an ongoing dance; and the mind is drawn principally to Webster’s bossy character, to the brusque way she pulls up her skirts, and to the fussy way she holds her head. Likewise it’s simple to overlook the talisman in Scènes de ballet (1948) - even though it’s the ballerina who dances it, in her entrance solo, and just as she reaches centre stage. Ashton here, again, changes the signature step’s end, with an unusual version of tour jeté replacing the pas de chat; and anyway her dance contains so much else that it’s easy not to notice this only partly familiar component. And it has often gone unnoticed in Enigma Variations (1968), even though Ashton there does several little variations upon its theme during the duet for Isabel Fitton and Richard Arnold. For, while they are dancing it stage right, Elgar’s wife enters on the other side. Finding one of her husband’s scores on the table, she picks it up, turns a page, and then tenderly presses the script to her breast: all of which proves an eloquent counterpoint to the serene Isabel-Richard romance. No wonder that many forget to look at what their feet are doing.

  When Michael Somes stopped dancing, he became Ashton’s devoted régisseur. Anthony Dowell once recalled how sometimes, in rehearsals, Ashton would just be finishing his choreography when Somes would exclaim “We haven’t had a Fred Step yet - you’d better put one in.” Back in 1950, Ashton, when making Illuminations on New York City Ballet in 1950 (with no Somes on the scene), forgot to include his signature. Actually, there were a few occasions in later years, even with Somes present in rehearsals, when the Fred Step was omitted: such as the Thaïs pas de deux (1971), and The Walk to the Paradise Garden (1972). (The Pavlova step, of course, would be out of place in Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan (1975-76).)

  All these ballets were successes without any Fred Step in them. Yet Ashton and Somes remained generally superstitious in their efforts to include it. In 1981, when reviving Illuminations for the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, Ashton made sure to add it this time. The same year, when making new choreography for the Stravinsky opera-ballet Le Chant du Rossignol, the seventy-seven-year-old Ashton made one of his most radical transformations of the sequence, as danced by Dowell as the Fisherman. Here, the dancer leans more forward than usual in the opening arabesque, and raises his leg higher than usual; then he arches further back, while making the développé for once not small but large. Next, instead of a pas de chat, his legs explode in a temps de flêche. Whereas often the Fred Step looks like crochet, here the Fisherman takes it skimming over a great deal of stage space; and it’s performed in a zigzag that sweeps from side to side of the stage. As the music-dance scholar Stephanie Jordan has recently observed, the legato phrasing is so fluent that it fits a four-bar musical phrase the first two times (at its most orthodox, the Fred Step has eight counts), and then fits a five-bar phrase without any apparent strain.

  Ashton remembered to include it in 1955, when making Romeo and Juliet in Copenhagen on the Royal Danish Ballet. Nonetheless, in 1985, when he revived that on London Festival Ballet (later English National Ballet), his new staging demonstrated three other Fred Steps. Possibly they were newly inserted for this later staging: better safe than sorry. One for Juliet and Romeo in the ballroom; one for the courtiers in the same scene; and one (very well hidden) for the townsfolk of Verona in Act II, usually overlooked because in the foreground Livia is dancing brilliantly.

   The 1985 version of Romeo and       Juliet is not the only ballet in which it occurs twice. Though the short Voices of Spring pas de deux (1977) is short, the sequence happens twice in it. The first time is an especially neat display of Ashton’s craftsmanship: the ballerina and her partner dance it at the same time - she (in front) as the conclusion of her little solo, he (behind) as the opening step of his. Both times, they dance it in opposite directions – one to the right as the other does it the left. Likewise there are story ballets in which it is to be found in more than one scene – for examples, Scenes One and Three of Daphnis and Chloë. In Scene One, it is rearranged to fit a seven-beat musical phrase; in Scene Three, when the finale has five beats to a bar, Ashton fits in the opening three-quarters of his signature - and then, as the music erupts into its last calls of joy, all the dancers (instead of skipping sideways in pas de chat) leap up and down in high changements on the spot – perhaps the most ebullient conclusion of any ballet.

  And in La Fille mal gardée the Pavlova talisman crops up in all three of the ballet’s main scenes. Each of them, however, is tricky for the layman to spot. In Scene One, it’s the peasants (as in Sylvia) who do it. Although these smocked farm-workers do bending, beaten jumps to and fro that make them instantly heartcatching, Ashton also brings them right down to earth in the Fred Step, making them bend the supporting knee almost throughout. In Scene Two, by contrast, one of Lise’s friends dances a light, bright variation on the Fred Step as she starts to dance the flute dance. Then, as she summons her friends to join in, she and two others do a further variation on it, half in reverse. (Later, when Alain tries to play the flute himself, these friends respond by starting to dance the Fred Step very slowly and awkwardly. They just can’t complete it.)

  The most recognisable Fred Step in La Fille comes in the finale of Act Two: Lise does it, first alone, then with her friends. This too has a new twist, though. It substitutes, for the pas de chat, something that looks like an inversion of it: a pair of relevés assemblés - pulling up onto pointe just where the pas de chat would have arrived down on flat foot.

  Ashton was rightly proud of his craftsmanship. There are rare works – the endlessly intricate Scènes de ballet is the main ultimate example – where he calls some attention to this. As a rule, though, his is the art that conceals art, so that those who love his works tend to do so for reasons other than that they are brilliantly constructed. But he was an Old Master, even when young, and there is no choreographer whose work repays multiple viewings more. The Fred Step is just one of his choreography’s many secretions. To study the way he kept changing it and hiding it is to see in detail just how he handled his classical mastery of dance language. For all that this talisman may be broken down into individual steps, it’s right to call it a step as a whole. It is a unit; it has its own flow, its own vigour. With it, he took Pavlova’s poison and alchemically transformed it into the serum that would make his ballets grow.

 (An earlier version of this essay was published in a 1992 issue of the American magazine “Dance Ink”. A shorter version was published in a 2004-2005 Royal Ballet Covent Garden programme. The essay was also published full-length online in 2005. This version, however, is the most complete.)