Which sex most enjoys sex? - Frederick Ashton, Margot Fonteyn, and the Tiresias factor: Women’s History in Dance.
Women’s History in Dance 132. “Ballet is woman”, said George Balanchine (1904-1983), and part of the history of women is how they have been depicted onstage. One important aspect of womanhood that Balanchine seldom if ever showed onstage was women’s greater capacity for sexual bliss - greater than man’s. By contrast, his exact contemporary Frederick Ashton (1904-1988) made a long series of ballets in which the woman’s erogenous zones, her vividly sensual responsiveness to the man, even sometimes her moments of orgasm and ecstasy are variously and poetically dramatised.
In 1951, Ashton had already choreographed the most poetic sex in all ballet in “Daphnis and Chloë”, a seduction scene in which Lykanion, initiating Daphnis to sex and constantly taking the initiative, shows the heat of friction between their two bodies, the expansive wildness of her upper and lower body as she reaches expansive abandon, and finally the ecstatically beaten frissons of her quivering foot in attitude (her front leg wrapped around his pelvis) as he promenades her and as her torso and arms writhe jubilantly. This was a sequel to the erotic encounters Ashton had created in 1950 for Profane Love (Melissa Hayden) and the Poet (Nicolas Magallanes) - and a prequel to a work where the degrees of sexual pleasure experienced by men and women was the ballet’s central theme, “Tiresias” (1951). Margot Fonteyn - Ashton’s muse and by 1951 the world’s most renowned ballerina - had not danced in “Illuminations”; and in “Daphnis” she danced not the seductress Lykanion but the blithe, innocent Chloë, who finally experiences a different and less specifically sexual form of ecstatic rapture with Daphnis. But in Tiresias”, she was the absolute focal point of the ballet’s depiction of sexuality.
“Tiresias” had been conceived by its composer, Constant Lambert, for Ashton to choreograph. Not only had Lambert been Ashton’s great friend for over twenty years, he had had a long and passionate affair with the young Fonteyn from 1936 to the mid-1940s; it had been he who conceived “Apparitions” (1936), the neo-Romantic ballet that shot her into new eminence. Lambert discovered and admired, as others of Fonteyn’s lovers did over the years, her intense pleasure in the sexual act. He told Ashton that “Her cunt muscles are so strong that she can activate me single-handed”. As you may imagine, there was a brouhaha among the prim and anxious when this line reached the reading public in Meredith Daneman’s “Margot Fonteyn” (2004) - but there need not have been. Just think of what ballet does to a woman’s pelvic musculature; I remember a sexually experienced man recalling his first sex with a sexually inexperienced ballerina “I was MOST impressed!” Fonteyn in sex as in dance had that bit extra. Some of her lovers were awed by her happy need for sex; John Craxton, the painter who was her lover in 1951-1952, spoke fondly of this “pagan” side of her. But Fonteyn’s public persona was correct, even demure; her two most celebrated roles were the sweet-sixteen Aurora and the frightened, virginal Odette. She was, in short, a more profound dance actress than many realised at the time.
When it was new, Tiresias” was considered a failure - a spectacular failure for some - but Ashton went on reworking it. To add tragedy to fiasco, Lambert died - of diabetes compounded by alcoholism - six weeks after the premiere. But Ashton carried on with “Tiresias” for four more years, making cuts and revisions. When the Sadler’s Wells Ballet performed it in New York in 1955, John Martin, dance critic of the “New York Times” hailed it. It anticipated George Balanchine’s “Agon” (1957) in several ways: it reconceived aspects of Ancient Greece in modern terms, it charged a high-tension pas de deux with erotic implication, and, as this photograph shows, it asked its ballerina to hold her own foot above and behind her head while on point, supported by her partner’s hand on hers - a position still remarkable in “Agon” today. (Very remarkably, the late Arthur Mitchell remarked at a 2017 “Agon” symposium that Balanchine wanted Fonteyn to dance “Agon”.)
What makes the idea of “Tiresias” fascinating is that sexual pleasure is its very subject: which of the two genders derives greater joy from the sexual act? In Greek mythology, the blind prophet Tiresias is the one mortal who can answer that question from personal experience: he has been both man and woman in his long life. When Zeus and Hera, king and queen of the Olympian gods, are arguing about sex and adultery, Hera denies Zeus’s claim that women derive greater pleasure from sex than men. Who can adjudicate? Tiresias! To Hera’s fury, he relates that women’s sexual joy is far greater and more profound. (Hera strikes him blind. Zeus rewards him with the gift of prophecy.)
The ballet “Tiresias” showed Fonteyn as Tiresias the woman and Michael Somes as Tiresias the man. (Somes, though heterosexual, had been the greatest love of Ashton’s life. Since Somes was now Fonteyn’s foremost partner and her occasional lover, Lambert and Ashton must have enjoyed making a ballet where Fonteyn and Somes were two halves of the same person.) Despite the reviews, the dancers had great faith in “Tiresias”; the late Valerie Taylor Barnes always remembered the admiration that she and other members of its cast had for Ashton’s choreography for it.
The too few photographs of “Tiresias” do not make Fonteyn’s role look sexually charged - but it was. Although Fonteyn and Lambert had moved onto other partners by the time of his death, she was convulsed by tears when she attended his memorial service; and after his death she danced “Tiresias” with new fervour. Her future husband Roberto (Tito) de Arias, on re-entering her life around 1953, was so amazed by the sexual intensity she brought to the “Tiresias” sex duet that he insisted she gave up the role: he wanted nobody else to see a side of her that he felt was now his alone.
Ashton gave the role therefore to Violetta Elvin, who danced it in the 1955 New York season. When she acquired a new husband at this time, however, this new man in her life likewise insisted that she stopped dancing the role for the same reason: it showed the world what he wished to be exclusive to him. At this point, Ashton gave up on “Tiresias”, feeling that the powers were against him.
But he never abandoned his interest in female sexuality. The Nocturne pas de deux in “The Dream” (1964) is a peak in this respect: its depiction of reconciliation and responsiveness builds to peak upon peak, so that the audience is in no doubt that Titania finds an ecstasy and transformation in sexual union with her consort, Oberon, beyond any he himself achieves, even though he is in harmony with her throughout.
Ashton’s successor as resident choreographer and director of the Royal Ballet, Kenneth MacMIllan, made duets that are more erotically explicit - at least in “Mayerling” (1978), which he dedicated to Ashton - but without Ashton’s poetic power: MacMillan shows neither the woman’s erogenous zones nor her erotic bliss. And in “A Month in the Country” (1976), Ashton showed a woman’s life as few choreographers have ever known how. The heroine Natalia Petrovna is seen in context of her husband, her son, her female ward, her resident male admirer, her employees, and then of the young tutor to whom she loses her heart. The final pas de deux has hardly opened than, in her first lift, Natalia has quivered her foot in the air (and arched her neck back) in a way that shows the maturity of her erotic response: the Ashton touch.
I do not mean by the above that Ashton was a greater choreographer for women than Balanchine. Mr B. made superlative drama from male-female relations, often from the woman’s point of view, often in ways that seem to reveal women’s souls, often showing the conflict a woman may feel about her male partner, needing to elude him just as she also needs his devotion. When will any twenty-first century choreographer make dance duets with the drama achieved by either of these two masters?
Friday 2 April
132: Margot Fonteyn as the female Tiresias with John Field as her lover in Frederick Ashton’s ballet “Tiresias” (1951).
133: Margot Fonteyn lifted by John Field in one scene of Ashton’s “Tiresias”
134: Margot Fonteyn as the female Tiresias in Frederick Ashton’s ballet of that name.