Tradition and the Royal Ballet
A ballet company requires constant vigilance. A day is all it can take for a point of style to become smudged, a choreographic detail lost forever. Few of us in the March 12 audience for a Royal Ballet Swan Lake would have guessed that this would be the company’s last performance for months. When the company next appears onstage, which dancers will have changed? If so, how? Will everything in every ballet be the same as before? Do we want things just as they were? or as they were four years ago? or forty?
Much is at stake for the Royal, more steeped in tradition than any Western company. (The Royal Danish Ballet has an even older tradition in its Bournonville ballets, but seldom dances them. The Paris Opera Ballet is oldest of all but not in its repertory.) At Covent Garden, in the second fairy variation in The Sleeping Beauty, as the dancer takes a pair of advancing piqués retirés, leaning slightly forward from the waist with each arrival, we’re seeing an accentuation that Pamela May, in the 1990s, used to recall: this is what she had learnt in 1939 from Nicholas Sergueyev when he staged this ballet on the then Vic-Wells Ballet. That upper-body stress, leaning more on the second retiré, is not recorded in the Stepanov notation; we may assume Sergueyev passed it on to May from his memory of Mariinsky performance.[1] Yes, we’re right to talk of tradition here.
Yet the Royal Ballet, subtly or unsubtly, has been changing the text of The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake for decades. When the corps of swan maidens does its most powerful “swan” port de bras in the first lakeside scene of Swan Lake – heroically cleaving the air while parting and straightening the arm sideways - we’re not seeing Ivanov’s choreography, we’re seeing something that Ninette de Valois interpolated after one of her mid-1950s visits to Soviet Russia, not knowing that this was a modern revision.[2] The old gesture was gentler, just declining one arm to the side: it changes the ballet’s drama. As for the latterday one, it had greater power at Covent Garden before 1979: those arms used to straighten long before they descended, so that you felt the mighty strain of their wing-beats.
I could go on with a litany of such changes. How much change can we take from the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden? Many of us will want the company to honour the traditions developed by de Valois, Ashton, and Fonteyn – but how comfortable do we feel when we realise those founding figures, too, made alterations? In Coppélia, giving Swanilda six friends rather than eight was a change made by Ninette de Valois in 1954. It did not improve the wonderful Act One theme-and-variations dance, surely the ballet’s greatest single item of choreography. Who needs a tradition that only began in 1954? [3] Even though some touches may be considered improvements on the original - the prolonged balances in the Rose Adagio, developed by Fonteyn in the 1940s, were retained by Sergei Vikharev and Alexei Ratmansky in productions that otherwise honoured the 1890 original[4] - each of them changes the ballet’s character.
Between December 2019 and March 2020, I watched performances at Covent Garden of Coppélia, The Sleeping Beauty, and Swan Lake. In outline, the Royal Ballet’s style is often close to the one I came to know in the 1970s. Today as then the dancers show a carefully focused sense of line, with wrists and knees unobtrusive to the point of seeming invisible. The third, fourth, and fifth fingers still work subtly together rather than, as in other companies, being flared. In some features, execution has certainly improved. More Covent Garden women today jump and turn impressively. Still, line tends to look dutiful where it once seemed inspired; the placement of the pelvis and waist has lost its bygone rigour. And though phrasing often has charm, I’m seldom aware of dancing that seems to sing its music into the theater. There’s more than one species of musicality, but the Royal’s, at its best, has been the most multi-layered, both melodic and rhythmic, capable of syncopation and rubato.
Features of detailed coordination and phrasing, inevitably, change. In The Sleeping Beauty, one Royal touchstone in the years 1977-1982 was the series of relevés retirés passés executed by Aurora’s eight friends in Act One, perfectly timed to the music’s pizzicati. The step marvelously showcased what used to be known as “White Lodge footwork,” crisp and sure. The last retiré in the series would hang there for one extra beat: it seemed that time stood still. That moment happens today - but it no longer matters. Some inner spring in the relevé retiré is no longer life-enhancing. When Swanilda’s friends perform a series of slow piqués retirés, the follow-through of front arm and eyes is affable, but it used to bewitch.
Coppélia, the ballet least central to Covent Garden tradition, was nonetheless the freshest this winter. I prefer the productions at New York City Ballet (George Balanchine and Alexandra Danilova) and the Bolshoi (Sergei Vikharev), both closer at times to the Petipa source and more expansive, but this small-scaled one has its own vitality. Thanks to good conducting, the brio of the central Petipa dance numbers was happily alive; the narrative, too. Of the three Swanildas I saw, Anna Rose O’Sullivan, was the one who claimed the role as if by birthright: bright from toe to eye.
The Sleeping Beauty is supervised by Monica Mason and Christopher Newton, both of whom have memories of this ballet going back to the 1950s. At points, I think they’ve made the wrong choice: Christopher Wheeldon’s Garland Dance, his second since 2005, remains trivial; the Act Three Ashton-Petipa “Florestan and his Two Sisters” pas de trois works better with the 5/4 “Sapphire” variation, which is the final version Ashton approved during his lifetime, than with the “Diamond” one.[5] Even so, everything here reflects judicious discrimination. The larger problem, one I’ve increasingly observed over several years in this production, is the conducting, which is dancer-indulgent, and never fast enough. Like the Mariinsky’s productions of its Tchaikovsky classics, The Sleeping Beauty at Covent Garden has become a tepid ballet ritual, an exercise in stylishness that puts the ballet itself to sleep. Marianela Nuñez has become its exemplar: gracious, polished, immaculate, neither quite convincing nor quite sincere. Yet the right baton could quickly cast off its cobwebs.
In Liam Scarlett’s Swan Lake, new in 2018 but new to me this March, not much is left of what Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov created in 1895. Those that remain have been narcoticised. Odette’s variation is lethargic, Odile’s devoid of sparkle, thanks to the dreadful tempi.
Whose ballet are we watching? How much Petipa is left in Odile’s choreography? It’s famous that Fonteyn travailed to acquire the technique to deliver this ballet’s choreography - scrupulously and at quite a lick - even though Odile’s footwork was far from what suited her.[6] Today, by contrast, the Royal Ballet sanctions its Odiles to perform part-Soviet versions that someone thinks suits them. When was the last time any Royal Odile ended the coda with a series of échappés up the centre line as choreographed by Petipa? It’s harder than the tawdry alternative we now see, but also tells us more about Petipa’s Odile.
Scarlett’s pretty, superficial staging is a revision of a revision of a revision. Tchaikovsky and Petipa located Swan Lake in a medieval Age of Chivalry they imagined; here it’s updated to show the late nineteenth-century world they knew. The overture is staged to show, as Tchaikovsky never envisaged, a version of Odette’s pre-history. (The British-American critic Dale Harris used to say, of opera and ballet, “If they stage the overture, leave.”) Benno, the Prince’s friend - whose one important function was to accompany Siegfried, especially in his partnering of Odette - becomes a virtuoso dance role. The first appearance of the swan theme at the end of the first scene, the most magical passage in the entire score, is bled into the second one, early in the lakeside scene. In a mistake that goes back decades, Siegfried’s mother gives him a crossbow - as if she preferred him to go hunting, whereas Petipa’s character wanted him to learn to behave as a future ruler. This also one of those Swan Lakes where the Princess Mother has sent out invitations to all the foreign courts, telling the princesses across Europe, “Your chance to win my son! Bring own national dance team, but also show off your own technique.”
Scarlett’s more original touches are not wise. He makes Rothbart conspire for Siegfried’s throne, successfully. (So why does Rothbart double back to the lake to interfere more in Odette’s life?) At the end, Siegfried carries one dead Odette while another appears in the sky doing swan gestures, apparently still stuck in swan form. (She dies so that she can remain stuck in the swan existence that made her miserable?)
Ninette de Valois changed ballet history in the 1930s by making Giselle, Coppélia, The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, and other ballets the cornerstones of her company’s repertory: she created a canon, which – despite a few maverick deviations of her own - she guarded zealously for decades, with effects that set standards copied across the world. Over the last twenty-one years, a number of other ballet companies have gone back to the archives to rediscover the old choreography for these and other ballets. Isn’t it time for the Royal Ballet to return to the source for those old ballets? In the old ballets, what standards does it hope to set?
Alastair Macaulay 2020.v.10, Dancing Times, June 2020
[1] Interviews with May, London, 1997-1999.
[2] Victor Jessen’s composite 1949-1956 film of the Sadler’s Wells Lac des cygnes establishes the way the arms used to move. The late Valerie Taylor recalled in 2009 how de Valois changed it after visiting Russia.
[3] Programmes show that between 1946 and 1952 the Covent Garden Coppélia featured eight friends, as we can see in other Coppélia productions around the world.
[4] Vikharev staged the 1999 Kirov/Mariinsky production, no longer performed. Ratmansky’s 2015 production was for American Ballet Theatre, shared with La Scala.
[5] The first variation, to the Silver music, was choreographed in 1890 by Petipa as a unison pas de trois for the Gold, Silver, and Sapphire fairies, which is how the Vic-Wells danced it in 1939- 1944. Ashton simply arranged it for a single soloist in 1946. The second current variation, though it has been reaccentuated, is the Diamond Dairy solo from the 1890 original. The “Sapphire” variation, to unusual 5/4 music, seems to have been used by no production until Ashton added it to the Prologue in 1968 as the Fairy of Joy’s. Ashton moved it to the “Florestan” pas de trois for de Valois’s 1977 production, where it remained until 1992. Monica Mason coached it for the Ashton Foundation in 2018.
[6] She sometimes omitted the fouetté turns in her fifties. Until then, I know of only one change she made to Odile’s steps. (Until 1942, Odile and Siegfried used to end their adagio with him kneeling to her and her, in penchée arabesque, clutching his raised knee. That might suit today’s interpreters better than it did Fonteyn.)