Creative Spotlight: Frederick Ashton

Ashton was born in Ecuador to British parents. He first saw ballet when Anna Pavlova performed in Lima in 1917, later claiming ‘from the end of that evening I wanted to dance’. In England Ashton was tutored by Leonid Massine and made his choreographic debut for Marie Rambert in 1926.

After working with Rambert and Ida Rubinstein, in 1935 he was appointed Resident Choreographer of Vic-Wells Ballet (later The Royal Ballet) by Ninette de Valois. With De Valois Ashton played a crucial role in determining the course of the Company and The Royal Ballet School. In 1963 he took over from De Valois as Director of the Company and in addition to choreographing introduced several significant works, including Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Noces and George Balanchine’s Serenade, and commissioned Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet. He retired in 1970 but continued to choreograph throughout his life, producing his last major work, Rhapsody, in 1980.

Over at New York City Ballet, among Manhattan’s gleaming skyscrapers, Ashton’s similarly gifted contemporary George Balanchine developed a grand, lofty form of neoclassicism that wore its newness on its sleeve and favoured tall, long-limbed dancers. But Ashton’s neoclassicism, while a match for Balanchine’s in its extraordinary musicality, is otherwise very different. Like Balanchine’s, it took the rigorous classical technique of the 19th-century masters Lev Ivanov and Marius Petipa and wove into it all manner of choreographic novelties. Yet the technical innovations in Ashton’s work are more often than not extremely subtle, and are almost invariably means of heightened expression rather than ends in themselves.

Moreover, where Balanchine fetishizes the leg, Ashton places a special emphasis on épaulement (the angling of the head and shoulders that stems from a twist at the waist), constantly surprising changes of direction and uniquely intricate footwork – it is probably no coincidence that Ashton himself had beautifully arched feet. Ashton’s first and most fundamental influence was Anna Pavlova, whom he first saw perform in Lima (where he was raised) in his 13th year, in 1917.

Every trope in Ashton’s style of choreography owes something to that great ballerina, and yet he also soaked up the theatricality of the modernist pioneer Isadora Duncan and owed a considerable debt, too, to his mentor Bronislava Nijinska. The latter not only helped heighten his fondness for épaulement, but also taught him the importance of complete immersion in the score, and the transformative effect that a subtly inflected limb could have on a dancer’s line.

Ashton’s understatedly radical new style grew under the watchful eye of De Valois, The Royal Ballet’s founder and first director, whom Ashton succeeded as director in 1963, a year after being knighted. De Valois was trained by masters from across Europe but, like Ashton, was particularly inspired by the example of Enrico Cecchetti: as she said in her memoirs, he ‘put “grace” before anything in a woman dancer’. (It is also telling that when she visited the Soviet Union in April 1957, she was more impressed by the – in performance terms – mildermannered young pupils at the Kirov’s academy than by their more physically precocious counterparts at the Bolshoi’s – ‘[this] spirit’, she wrote, ‘was what I have always searched for and hoped to install in our own school’.)

Because of the below-the-knee dexterity that Ashton’s work requires, it is, in marked contrast with Balanchine’s, traditionally best suited to less lofty dancers. It was one such performer, the perfectly proportioned 5ft 4in Margot Fonteyn, who became his longstanding muse and most prominent executor, and as such she was to have an immeasurable influence on his output. Much of it, especially pre-1960 or so, was first and foremost a homage to her fusion of linear, lyrical perfection and resplendent musical awareness. Her career developed symbiotically with his, and it is no coincidence that she was at her best in his works, even if a number of his finest later pieces were in fact made on others.

So, thematically speaking, what sort of ballets did Ashton create? He is probably best known to many as the wittiest and most passionate of all romantic comedians, and understandably so. Many of his greatest works – Cinderella (1948), La Fille mal gardée (1960), The Two Pigeons (1962), The Dream (1964) – are largely comic tales of true love conquering all, as witty, playful and tasteful as they are profoundly and poetically heartfelt.

And yet, as with all bona fide creative geniuses, and as The Royal Ballet’s current programme makes abundantly clear, Ashton was in fact, for all his indelible choreographic hallmarks, an artist of almost infinite variety. Love does not always find a way in his work, and nor is restraint always the order of the day. His Ondine (1958) has mortals and immortals mixing, with deathly consequences. His Turgenev adaptation A Month in the Country (1976) is a tale of thwarted passion as bittersweet – and, thanks to its astonishing sequence of pas de deux, as beautiful – as any ballet ever made. Marguerite and Armand (1963), a paean as much to Pavlova as it was to its stars Fonteyn and Nureyev, is a 24-carat tragedy, a response to Dumas that features some of the most reckless-looking love duets ever created.

But Ashton is often also at his most compelling when there is little or no apparent narrative at all. Set to César Franck, Symphonic Variations (1946) – a superficially simple homage to the passing of the seasons and a summation of his art hitherto, for six simply clad dancers – is a transcendent masterpiece. Almost in the same league are 1933's Les Rendezvous (his first substantial creation for the then Vic-Wells Ballet) and Scénes de ballet (1948, to Stravinsky), for a principal couple and small corps. Created ten years later and danced to Ravel, the far larger-scale La Valse has been pulled up by some critics over the years for its relative lack of innovation, and yet it is arguably this very uniformity that helps lend its swirling human vortices their hellish edge.

There is nothing, however, remotely infernal about the two Monotones (1965 and 66), Ashton’s gently contrasting, utterly luminous responses to Satie’s music. Where La Valse is for 21 rather Viennese-looking couples in fearsome perpetual motion, each of these is for just three performers who appear – especially in Monotones II – both to come from and to be performing on some distant, weightless planet. Moreover, although this diptych is now almost sixty years old, it might, to look at the steps, have been created yesterday.

Much the same goes for many of Ashton’s smaller works. As Balanchine once said, perhaps prevaricating somewhat to make a point, ‘Mr Ashton and I may make bad ballets, but we never make incompetent ballets’, and, certainly, Ashton tended to pour all his reserves of brilliance into any commission he undertook, however tiny. Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan, his charming tribute to that great trail-blazer of modern dance, in fact began life as a single, standalone waltz first seen at a 1975 gala in Hamburg – it was only the following year that Ashton fleshed it out to a quintet of dances. Created in 1977 for The Royal Opera’s production of the Johann Strauss operetta Die Fledermaus, Voices of Spring is an irresistible pas de deux that shows Ashton in exuberant, athletic La Fille mal gardée mode. And, by bracing contrast, another extraordinary two-handed pièce d’occasion, the ‘Méditation’ from a 1971 staging of Massenet’s opera Thaïs, is a Bayadére-esque vision scene of almost narcotic lyricism and hopeless desire. His final major work, Rhapsody, is a scintillating virtuoso showpiece created in 1980 on Mikhail Baryshnikov and Lesley Collier.

Ashton is, then, the wit who loves graveness, the romantic optimist drawn to tragedy, the storyteller who delights in abstraction, the grand stage-filler in thrall to miniatures. He is also the master of seraphic grace who, thanks to the combination of serene poise and formidable attention to detail required by his steps, is devilishly difficult to perform. On joining The Royal Ballet shortly after his defection to the West in 1961, even Nureyev, used to the broader brushstrokes of Soviet choreography, was astounded at how much there was to think about when realizing Ashton’s work.

There is, as everyone who performs him soon learns, nowhere to hide. But, as dancers, aspiring choreographers and audiences the world over continue to discover, nor has there ever been a more magical, mercurial or marvellously rewarding setter of movement to music.

Taken from an article written for The Royal Ballet and Opera by Mark Monahan. Mark Monahan is Arts Editor and Chief Dance Critic of the Daily Telegraph.