The Royal Ballet, Forty Years On
Ballet is an art of inbuilt nostalgia. We can’t forget those who gave us our first revelations of its potential; but the degree to which they haunt the performances we see today keeps changing. Four Royal Ballet performances at Covent Garden in June 1-14 were Memory Lane for me, but not only that. Almost all the repertory – Mikhail Fokine’s “The Firebird,” George Balanchine’s “Symphony in C,” Kenneth MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet”, Frederick Ashton’s “A Month in the Country”, and a programme celebrating the centenary of Margot Fonteyn’s birth – took me back to the 1974-1979 years in which I discovered ballet and became a critic. For the past twelve years, however, I’ve been working in New York, with only brief return visits to London. To what degree is the Royal Ballet of 2019 the same as the one that introduced me to ballet?
To my happy astonishment, I observed many of the company’s younger performers – some new to me, none familiar - with a sense of keen recognition. Matthew Ball, Francesca Hayward, Beatriz Stix-Brunell, Valentino Zucchetti, have all joined the Royal Ballet during this decade; yet, at least in these June performances, they seemed to share the same instincts with which their 1970s predecessors branded me.
Ball, for example, is a dancer I’m unaware of having seen before. At his “Romeo” debut on June 1, he didn’t remind me of any of my earliest Romeos (Rudolf Nureyev, Donald MacLeary, Anthony Dowell, David Wall, Mikhail Baryshnikov) - yet he took me keenly back to the way those heroes invested each step as if it had a motive, and as if their music was inextricable from their thought process.
The same was true of Zucchetti, a dancer I’d seen only in very few roles. (I chiefly remember him from a few heart-catching phrases in Act Two of “The Winter’s Tale” at its world- premiere performances.) His Mercutio was at once closely related to the classic interpretations of Michael Coleman and Stephen Jefferies, who both retired long before his day. Although I’ve seen Hayward, and I’m well aware that she’s been winning golden opinions for some seasons now, the largest roles I’ve seen her dance have been those Vera (“Month”) and the Shadow Dance from Ashton’s “Ondine” this June. She immediately possessed their inner worlds, as if her nervous system were evident in every step.
Sure, there are archival films of Fonteyn in much of the repertory we saw at the centennial celebration in her honour. Still, those alone don’t explain the stylistic and temperamental connection shown here by Hayward, by Stix-Brunell in the solo from “Nocturne,” by Lauren Cuthbertson (with Ball no less fine) in the “Apparitions” ballroom scene, and by Romany Pajdak in the “Wise Virgins” solo. It’s as if Fonteyn’s whole kind of multi-faceted femininity has proved a living tradition.
Anna Rose O’Sullivan isn’t a real Chloë (dancing the role without tights is a mistake), but she’s indubitably a real dancer, claiming the movement with zest and spontaneity if not the rare elements of focus and deep lyricism that can make the Flute Dance life-enhancing. (The role has also eluded far more celebrated ballerinas than her.)
On this form, the Royal Ballet remains a company of instinctive but thoughtful dance actors, keenly responding to different layers of their music (melody, rhythm, sonority, force, harmony).
Footwork has changed – we used to speak of “White Lodge feet,” identifiable in the crisp, fleet delivery of such steps as relevé retiré – but the speed and attack that Hayward and O’Sullivan brought to Vera’s steps is terrific. In 1988, months before Ashton’s death, I lamented in these pages that the Royal was no longer the company to which Ashton had often said “Give me footwork, give me footwork - yet now Ashton is often being given what he asked for.
Ashton dancers have often related that his two favourite words were “Bend” and “More.” As Natalia Petrovna in “Month,” Marianela Nuñez and Lauren Cuthbertson exemplified several kinds of the bending he wanted: archings and tippings of the torso in several directions away from the vertical, as well as Nijinska-style épaulement from deep in the waist. (This is a rich reward after the meager texture and diminished brio Sylvie Guillem long brought to this role.) Beliaev in “Month” is one of the Ashton roles in which Anthony Dowell brought male dancing to a new peak of lyric complexity; Ball and Vadim Muntagirov honour almost all its demands. (In his first solo, shouldn’t those changements have more raw impulsiveness?)
We can question the acting decisions of several current artists - but it’s heartening to see that the Royal still allows them to take their own choices in their interpretations. I take one look at Jonathan Howells as the eccentric, preoccupied Yslaev in “Month” or the learned, solicitous Friar Laurence in “Romeo” and I suspend all memories of the roles’ previous interpreters: the integrity and imagination he brings is exemplary.
Since Nuñez is certainly in her prime and moving so admirably, I’m sorry that I didn’t love her account of “Month in the Country” more (June 4). Halfway through the ballet, though, I realized that I didn’t believe this Natalia: she was giving a performance of a performance. Much the same became true of Lauren Cuthbertson’s Natalia (June 14)). What a strange feeling: the whole ballet was being given with complete understanding, and yet the ultimate effect was not one of stylish, sentimental effectiveness rather than of true dramatic sincerity. This has been true of some other Royal performances I’ve seen this decade: too prepared, too glossy.
II
By the end of 1978, the year I became a critic, I was steeped in the way the Royal danced Petipa, Ivanov, Fokine, Ashton, and MacMillan; but, although I loved such ballets as “Apollo,” “Prodigal Son”, and “Serenade,” Balanchine choreography hadn’t fully registered on me. In January 1979, I crossed the Atlantic to watch New York City Ballet. The performance of “The Four Temperaments” that I saw at the end of my first full day there was the greatest single dance revelation of my life. The way those dancers moved their whole bodies in that masterpiece, making mighty convex and concave shapes in alternation, was overwhelming. The dancers’ ease, there and in so many ballets, in fearlessly stepping off balance made a profound moral impact. And the companies’ clean-slate way of presentation, with no heightened facial expressions, opened up so much: the movement emanated from a deeper level of the persona. That summer, New York City Ballet came to Covent Garden for three weeks. Though only a few of the reviews were entirely positive, I remember the way that the choreography transformed the balletomanes I knew, needing to talk throughout the intervals about the movement they had seen rather than just deciding which dancers they liked most and why.
I saw “Symphony in C” on both sides of the Atlantic that year, and retain many images from it. The Covent Garden audience then wasn’t ready for Balanchine’s way with high classicism - the same ballet won twice as much applause when the company returned in 1983 – but the performances by Merrill Ashley (first movement) and Suzanne Farrell (second) have never been surpassed in my experience, while the look of the very dark-skinned and high-leaping African American soloist Debra Austin (third movement) was a revelation of how a racially diverse ballet company could look: the white tutus heightened the excitement.
“Symphony in C” entered the Royal’s repertory in 1991. (For a while in the 1990s, the Royal danced more Balanchine than it did Ashton.) Since then, the main advance has been that today’s Royal is far less hesitant in stepping off balance – a central tenet of Balanchine style - than formerly. Yet even now, 28 years on, this Bizet classic remains a completely different ballet from the one danced by New York City Ballet, for several reasons. For whatever reason, however, the company’s footwork here is far less spruce (“soggy pas de chat,” noted a friend) than in its Ashton; in the jetés battus (a key Balanchine step) of the finale, the dancers don’t have much spring, so that the batterie matches the music’s flourishes without catching their élan.
Layers of charm and acting inform Royal stage manners here – this “Symphony in C” is both lively and classy - but in Balanchine those layers don’t help, they get in the way. The new team that comes onstage in each of the work’s four movements is like a different royal family and entourage. But the drama doesn’t deepen beyond that surface impression of the grand manner.
III
In a 1984 interview, Ashton said about Royal Ballet dancers “I was always trying to knock the Britishness out of them,” making clear that by “Britishness” he meant stiffness and primness. Would he have welcomed today’s situation, where many of the company’s leading dancers are both foreign-born and often remarkably bold?
The Royal has always had foreign-born dancers, but the proportion of them grew extensively in the 1990s. It’s to the great credit of both the Royal Ballet and its school that today’s dancers, drawn from so many backgrounds, largely exemplify a single style. On YouTube, you turn to a Royal Ballet video of Ashton’s “Symphonic Variations,” in which three British-born former dancers – Henry Danton, Anthony Dowell, Lesley Collier – speak of working with Ashton, and two foreign-born present dancers – Marianela Nuñez, Vadim Muntagirov – speaking about its challenges and rewards. There in a nutshell is the situation of the Royal today, with artists from thoroughly un-British backgrounds now leading us back into the essence of this home masterpiece, often considered a cornerstone of the British style in ballet.
You often hear that the individual styles of companies are in danger of becoming ironed out. Even these performances of “Symphony in C” do much to refute that: first-rate not as Balanchine but as Royal Ballet theatre. The co-ordination of legs, arms, torso, head and eyes is pronounced; the wrists do not break the line. Balanchine’s ballet abounds in brisk relevés; the dancer whose insteps in relevés most reminded me of the old Royal was Yukui Choe (third movement, June 4), who was born in Fukuoka. If there’s one dancer I’d guess Ashton might tell to be less British, stiff, and prim, it’s Lamb, who was born and trained in America.
IV.
Though I’ve seen better performances of all the solo roles in “The Firebird” and “Romeo,” those ballets weren’t dead for a moment. What’s more, Fokine’s ensembles were the greatest pleasures of all these June performances; one friend remarked, rightly, that they show how this ballet is the great forerunner of Bronislava Nijinska’s masterpiece “Les Noces.” The groupings of the twelve princesses and the khovorod they weave around the Beautiful Tsarevna and Ivan Tsarevich retain their intensely picturesque charm; and the stillness of the final stage picture, while the music surges, is one of the knockout scenes of all choreography.
Isn’t it amazing that no better kiss has ever been choreographed than the one for the Tsarevna and Ivan? Their lips meet just before Stravinsky’s chord tells us of their bliss. The way the princesses arrange themselves to watch is part of the long moment’s enchantment, like the moon in the sky and the subdued colours of the garden at night. Then, when alarms sound in the music and Kostchei’s approach is sensed, Ivan and the Tsarevna just go on kissing. Those princesses have to pull them apart. The spell of such moments only deepens with the years.
Alastair Macaulay 2019.vii.02