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The Englishness of Ashton, Sarasota-Style

2014; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/thr.2014.0091

1939-9774

Jay Rogoff,

Theatre and Performance Studies

The Englishness of Ashton, Sarasota-Style Jay Rogoff (bio) In over half a century with Britain’s major dance company, the Sadler’s Wells Ballet—it became the Royal Ballet in 1956—choreographer Frederick Ashton defined the English style of dancing: technically strong while exuding apparent ease, ingratiatingly musical without musical surprises, defining dancers through character, often engaged with drama and plot, and always elegant, especially supple in the upper body and graceful in port de bras. American audiences got to know Ashton through Royal tours during the 1950s and 1960s; today we see mostly his narrative and dramatic works, especially as danced by American Ballet Theatre, which performs several Ashton ballets. Chief among his postwar oeuvre, the story ballets brim with dramatic and choreographic variety: Cinderella (1948), Sylvia (1952), Ondine (1958), and La Fille mal Gardée (1960), as well as the shorter narratives Daphnis and Chloe (1951), The two Pigeons (1961), Marguerite and Armand (1963), the Dream (1964), and A Month in the Country (1976), extended a Royal repertory tradition that also included Swan Lake, Giselle, Coppélia, and the Sleeping Beauty. [End Page 565] Ashton’s pursuit of story ballet bucked dance’s high modernist trend while his exact contemporary, George Balanchine, pared away narrative and character with his New York City Ballet to uncover the art’s abstract essence and plumb its allegorical depths. The Royal’s more traditional bent resulted partly from England’s great dramatic history and partly from the circumstances under which Ashton operated. Its greatest ballerina, Margot Fonteyn, its directorship, and presumably its audience all treasured the narrative balletic tradition. In the past few years, a small-scale Ashton hothouse has thrived in Florida, where former Royal Ballet dancer Iain Webb and his wife, former Royal Touring Company principal Margaret Barbieri, took over Sarasota Ballet in 2007. Both worked with Ashton in his later years, and they have transformed the company’s repertory, acquiring some sixteen Ashton ballets, as well as dozens of works by many other choreographers, including Balanchine. They have trained this regional company to dance Ashton with the skill and charm necessary to throw a four-day Sir Frederick Ashton Festival, which ran April 30–May 3, 2014, at the intimate Sarasota Opera House, one of the company’s performance venues. Although Sarasota dances two famous Ashton narratives, La Fille mal Gardée and The Two Pigeons, the festival instead focused mostly on non-narrative ballets and included some little-seen work. These shorter ballets, mostly bright and effervescent, revealed Ashton’s variety, stylistic interests, and obsessions, and the apparent fluffiness of Birthday Offering (1956), Les Rendezvous (1933), and the rarely seen Valses Nobles et Sentimentales (1947) disguises the technical skill required to perform them, subordinating technique to smoothness, elegance, exuberance, and both the dance’s and dancers’ wish to ingratiate themselves with the audience. Their style is mostly presentational rather than dramatic, and their effect pleasing rather than psychological or allegorical. Sharing the dancers’ apparent pleasure in executing the choreography creates real pleasure for the audience. At best, in Birthday Offering and Les Rendezvous, the performers’ broad grinning and occasional winking jokiness intensifies the dance’s charm through false modesty, making this difficult choreography look easy and even at times inconsequential; at worst, in the music hall-inspired Façade (1931), with its grinning milkmaid and flamboyant tango dancers, presentational style deteriorates into mugging and preciousness. Yet among these glittery baubles, the festival also offered two modernist masterpieces, Illuminations (1950) and Monotones I & II (1965–66). Ashton created Birthday Offering in 1956, to selections by Glazunov, to commemorate the silver anniversary of Sadler’s Wells Ballet and Elizabeth II’s gift of a royal charter, making it the Royal Ballet. The ballet is eccentrically classical, signalling both the company’s great tradition and its thrust toward modernity. Ashton gave each of the Royal’s seven ballerinas a solo, especially showcasing Margot Fonteyn, so it mildly resembles a Balanchine masterpiece from that year, Divertimento No. 15, where five ballerinas solo in similar fashion. Because the music is a Glazunov grab bag, [End Page 566] it operates less as an integrated foundation than as a pleasing medium for the dance...