Dance, people like to say, is a universal language. But ballet isn’t. Rather, it’s a language with many sharply contrasting dialects. Tradition, training and temperament all shape distinctive styles, and the English style of classical dance, embodied by the Royal Ballet, was largely shaped by Frederick Ashton (1904-1988), the company’s founding choreographer.
Ashton’s work is still regularly performed at the Royal Ballet and vital to its identity. British critics may grumble both about which ballets are performed and about a loss of nuance in their execution. But it would be hard to grouse much during the past two weeks of Ashton Celebrated, a mini-festival of work, running through Saturday at the Royal Opera House, which put the choreographer’s genius — and the English classical dance style — on abundant display in often remarkable performances. (Ashton Celebrated also included performances by the Sarasota Ballet of small-scale Ashton rarities at the smaller Linbury Theater.)
Like his contemporary George Balanchine, who shaped a very different aesthetic at New York City Ballet, Ashton developed his Neo-Classicism from the 19th-century heritage of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, the choreographers of “Swan Lake,” among other things. But unlike Balanchine’s pared-back, direct physicality, Ashton cultivated a pliant lyricism paired with intricate footwork and a complex use of épaulement — the contrasting angles of the head, shoulders and hips. Well-mannered and witty, the best of his ballets are also full of emotional subtlety and vitality.
Monica Mason, a former director of the Royal Ballet, said one of the principal challenges of performing Ashton now is capturing the flavor of the work. “Fred wanted expression through your whole movement, how you offer your hand, how he puts his arm around your waist,” she said. “The tiny, subtle things are the challenge.”
Those nuances were wonderfully evident in “Les Rendezvous,” Ashton’s first substantial classical piece, created in 1933 and back after a 19-year absence from the Royal’s repertory.
Set to irresistibly melodic music from Auber’s opera “L’Enfant Prodigue,” the ballet, which opened the first program, evokes a bygone world of long-elbowed gloves, cream teas and chivalrous escorts. It’s a rush of heady delight, full of unobtrusive virtuosity and filigree nuance.
The setting is an informal gathering in a park, young people coming and going, meeting and flirting, watching and talking. (There are lovely new designs and costumes by Jasper Conran.) Ashton delineates the stage space through varied geometric patterns: the ballet begins with individual dancers leaping across the stage on the diagonal, and they never stop forming circles, angles, crisscrosses and squared-off lines that sometimes showcase a central couple, sometimes a pas de trois. Footwork is fast and complex, while the shoulders, back, arms and wrists are constantly mobile and twisting.
Marianela Nuñez was charm incarnate in the central female role, making technique disappear as she pirouetted to face alternate corners of the stage, rippling through her shoulders and back, flourishing her crossed wrists. Her partner, Reece Clarke, managed his tricky variation, full of wide-legged jumps and rapid turns, with aplomb, although his height makes it harder for him to accentuate the rapid changes of épaulement that the choreography requires. In a second cast, Fumi Kaneko was impeccable if less at ease with the upper body eccentricity, and Vadim Muntagirov sailed through his solo with sunny, one-hand-behind-my-back ease.
“Les Rendezvous” was followed, in the first program, by a midcareer ballet, “The Dream” (1964), Ashton’s enchanting version of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” to Mendelssohn. Then came Ashton’s last ballet, “Rhapsody” (1980), created for Mikhail Baryshnikov, and set to Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.”
Coached by Anthony Dowell, the original Oberon, Marcelino Sambé was a revelation in “The Dream,” spinning in dazzling turns, unfolding smoothly into plunging arabesques, combining speed and legato control in a way that seemed to expand time and space. Watching this choreography for Oberon (also beautifully performed by Muntagirov, by William Bracewell and Calvin Richardson), it was clear how Ashton extended the possibilities of male classical dancing here, incorporating pliant, elongated lines and steps more often associated with female dancers.
As Titania, Queen of the Fairies, Francesca Hayward, Yasmine Naghdi and Natalia Osipova all embodied the character with marvelous plasticity, although Osipova took top honors in the tempestuous category. And only she and Bracewell conveyed the strange erotic charge of the reconciliation duet, perhaps the most beautiful pas de deux Ashton created.
In “Rhapsody,” Ashton used Baryshnikov as an exemplar of Russian bravura versus the demure English classicism of the ballerina Lesley Collier, and an ensemble of six women. Of the casts I saw, the soloist Sae Maeda gave a notably accomplished and musical rendition of the ballerina role. But while the men, Luca Acri and Taisuke Nakao, managed the role’s Soviet-style virtuosic demands, they looked slightly, if understandably, stressed rather than insouciant. A little too English in fact.
In a second program, a number of shorter, rarely performed works — “Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan” (1976), “Hamlet and Ophelia” (1977), “The Walk to the Paradise Garden” (1972) — were more a reminder of Ashton’s stylistic range than revelations of ballets we should see more often.
Still, it was terrific to see these works, book ended by “The Dream” and “Rhapsody,” as part of Ashton’s personal trajectory and a balletic lineage.
“There are often comments that the Royal Ballet should do more Ashton, but it’s a company with a vast amount of repertoire,” said Christopher Nourse, the executive director of the Frederick Ashton Foundation, which recently announced Ashton Worldwide 2024-2028, with 24 participating companies. (Ashton Celebrated was its first event.)
So is the Royal Ballet adequately upholding Ashton’s legacy and stylistic integrity? “There will never be a season without Ashton in the repertoire while I am director,” Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet’s leader, said in an interview. “But sometimes more than others.”
The Ashton Celebration, which captured the spirit and the details (mostly) of Ashton’s choreography, managed to negotiate the problem that befalls any dance legacy: Dancers today have different technical capacities and experiences of life than previous generations had. And in major companies, the repertories are stylistically far more diverse than they were even a few decades ago, requiring the dancers to move from academic classicism to Balanchinian rigor to contemporary techniques.
“The Royal Ballet could of course focus on only doing Ashton,” Nourse said, “and preserve the style and feel of the work more accurately, but then they would no longer be an international company, but a specialist group doing English work.”
So, how faithful should stagers be to the past?
“You couldn’t ask somebody today to dance like they did in 1940,” Mason said. “And why would you? The actual choreography is what matters, the values that are imparted to today’s dancers. The past is important; the past serves the future.”
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