Special
Preview Section
Lincoln
Center Festival
Ashton Celebration
July 6-17, 2004
La
Fille Bien Élevée
by David Vaughan
copyright © 1999 by David Vaughan
originally published in DanceView, Winter 1999
It is so rare nowadays that one can say anything good
about the way a major ballet company is taking care of its heritage that
when a company does the right thing, it should be commended for it. John
Percivals article What became of Ashton? in a recent
issue of the British magazine, Dance Now, is only the latest complaint
about the neglect of Ashtons ballets by the Royal Ballet, which
of all companies should be guarding that heritage.
Percival points out that almost half of the 100 ballets to be danced
by New York City Ballet in its fiftieth anniversary year are by its founder,
George Balanchine, and compares this with the sorry record of the Royal
Ballet, which will have performed seven of Ashtons ballets in its
1998-1999 season. Of course, the Royal Ballet carries a smaller repertory
anyway, which is one of its problems. Ballets dont stay in the repertory
long enough for the dancers to get used to performing them. Thus, a triple
bill of Les Patineurs, Birthday Offering, and Enigma Variations
was performed a few times at the new Sadlers Wells in the fall,
and Rhapsody turned up in another mixed bill. There were Christmas
revivals of Cinderella and La Fille mal gardée at
the unsuitable Royal Festival Hall. In the summer, Ondine will return.
Next year, when the Opera House is supposed to reopen, there will be another
triple bill, consisting of Les Rendezvous, Symphonic Variations,
and Marguerite and Armand. These few swallows dont quite
add up to a summeror, to change quotations, do much to alleviate
the winter of the discontent of Ashtons admirers. (To be fair, I
should add that Fille will be in the repertory for the companys
Far Eastern tour this spring.)
All the same, as I started to say, if they do something right, we should
be grateful for it. I was lucky enough to catch the last of the series
of performances of La Fille mal gardée in January. I admit
that I went with some trepidation. The company had not danced the ballet
for six years; a half-dozen dancers were dancing the leading role of Lise,
all for the first time. Alastair Macauley had told me that in revivals
he had seen elsewhere, there were changes in the choreography.
But the performance, on the whole, was wonderful. Sarah Wildor may not
be the technical virtuoso Nadia Nerina, the original Lise, was, but she
is musical, which in an Ashton ballet is perhaps even more important.
Bruce Sansom couldnt manage the lift at the end of the pas de deux
in Scene 2 where she sits on his handbut there have been others
who were defeated by it. But he and Wildor did make you believe that they
were in love, which is what the ballet is about.
One major flaw was Ashley Pages performance as Widow Simone. Yes,
she is irascible and a bit stingy, but Page was too nastyhe missed
the underlying warm-heartedness and much of the fun. Perhaps the English
tradition of the pantomime dame, from which this character derives, is
no longer understood by a younger generation of performers. But Page is
an intelligent artist, and I feel sure that if he could be coached by
Stanley Holden, the incomparable creator of the role, he would be able
to add an important dimension to his characterization.
The triumph of the performance was the Alain of Jonathan Howells who,
I take it, was coached by the creator of the role, Alexander Grant (who
owns the rights to the ballet and was present at the performance). Too
often Alain is merely silly, and there is a danger that the audiences
laughter at his expense may become cruel. Ashton cannot have meant this
to happen; he really loved all the people in the ballet and made sure
that even Alain is made happy in the end when he comes back to retrieve
his beloved red umbrella. But as soon as Howells came on, one knew that
the part was in the right hands; however daft this Alain might be, he
was a real person. Howells danced the role better than anyone I have ever
seen since Grant, but also, like any good actor, he created the world
in which he lived.
What a masterpiece this ballet is! Only a genius like Ashton could have
made something so entirely fresh and new out of the bits and pieces of
the old ballet that Karsavina had given to him, or that he had picked
out of the old libretto. I have said that the ballet is about two young
people in love, but the friend I was with, seeing it for the first time,
said that it is also about Ashtons own love of dancing, of the ballet
vocabulary that he so enriched at (literally) every step of the way. So
far from being lost when called upon to dance in a style that has become
somewhat unfamiliar to them, every member of the corps de ballet seemed
to take pleasure in the opportunities it offered them. I might add that
there was a bonus in the presence in the orchestra pit of John Lanchbery,
who collaborated with Ashton on the concoction of the score and whose
conducting made it sound like something much more than a pastiche of old
tunes and quotations from various composers.
Needless to say, the audience adored the performance. They always do;
whenever I see an Ashton ballet, I wonder why the directors of ballet
companies dont realize that his ballets are not only works of genius,
but crowd-pleasers, too. Im told that there was one English critic
who condemned the ballet for its lack of political correctness. All I
can say is that such a person deserves to spend the rest of her life watching
the works of William Forsythe.
www.danceviewtimes.com
Volume 2, Ashton Preview Section
July 1, 2004
Copyright
©2004 by David Vaughan
reprinted from DanceView, Winter 1999
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