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Special Preview Section Lincoln
Center Festival Ondine
Revisited by David Vaughan The fancy brochure for the 1999-2000 season of the Royal Ballet and Royal Opera at the reopened Opera House announces an Ashton triple bill under the heading “Ashton Revisited,” while a MacMIllan triple bill comes under the rubric “The MacMillan Inheritance.” The trouble with British ballet could not be more eloquently stated: MacMillan’s works constitute an “inheritance,” while Ashton’s are something to be “revisited” from time to time. As if that weren’t bad enough, the Royal Ballet’s opening program in December includes “A Celebration of International Choreography” that might as well be called “A Festival of Eurotrash,” a parade of some of the worst choreographers now working. True, it does include Twyla Tharp—how did they miss out Boris Eifman? One hopes that at least Ashton will be represented in the opening night gala on 4 December 1999, when the Royal Ballet’s contribution will “[chart] the Company’s great achievements in the House since 1946.” Last July Ashton was “revisited” with two revivals: Ondine, his last three-act ballet, and Rhapsody. When Ondine was previously revived, in 1988, Ashton said that it was a better ballet than he thought, and it is true that there is a lot of good stuff in it: above all Ondine’s own role, of course, which prompted a critic at the time of the ballet’s creation in 1958 to call it “a concerto for Fonteyn.” But also some of the writing in the third-act divertissement is full of invention, particularly the Harlequin solo, which has several new steps in it, and the second scene of Act I is masterly. Act II shows another aspect of Ashton’s genius—as a metteur en scene. (One remembers that he was a successful director of operas.) Dramatically there are lapses of logic in this act: where are they going on that boat, and what is Berta doing there? But the illusion of their being on a ship at sea is so vivid that you begin to share Berta’s mal de mer. The contribution to the effect of the designer, Lila de Nobili, is critical here: the transition from being in harbor to being in open sea is achieved by a kind of cinematic dissolve from one scrim to another. (This might suggest a possible solution to the problem of the Panorama in The Sleeping Beauty.) Another illusion, that of Ondine dancing on the waves at the beginning of Act III, where her partners, dressed in black, are unseen, may have been borrowed from the prologue to Pavlova’s film of The Dumb Girl of Portici. In any case, the role of Ondine is once again as much a homage to that great ballerina as to Fonteyn herself. But always one senses Ashton’s difficulty with Hans Werner Henze’s music. Henze himself felt this—Julie Kavanagh (in her biography Secret Muses) quotes him as saying it seemed “as though the dancers listened to another music that is not in the pit.” Kavanagh goes a bit far in suggesting the disjunction was reminiscent of the independence of music and dance in Merce Cunningham’s work: Ashton follows the letter of Henze’s music, it’s the spirit of it that was alien to him. One cannot blame Henze: he was obviously trying to give Ashton what he wanted, but he was first inspired to express his admiration for Ashton after seeing the choreographer’s most modernist work, Scenes de ballet, and Ashton’s conception of Ondine was romantic, not modernist. And for the most part Ondine is a manifestation of his craft rather than of his genius. Denby really said it all: after paying due tribute to Fonteyn’s artistry, he concluded “The ballet is foolish and everyone noticed it.” For me, Sarah Wildor is the dancer of choice in an Ashton ballet; the most English dancer in the Royal. Ondine is a most difficult role because Ashton wanted “the movement to be fluid like the rhythm of the sea rather than set ballet steps.” Wildor achieved that fluidity and also the innocent wilfullness of the character—and she found the passion in the final pas de deux, partnered by Adam Cooper. Otherwise Palemon, her lover, is something of a cipher, and so is Berta, his fiancee, Ondine’s rival. If Elizabeth McGorian was unable to make much of that role, neither were Julia Farron, who created it, or Deanne Bergsma—two of the strongest actresses the Royal Ballet ever had. In the original cast Alexander Grant gave the role of Tirrenio, Lord of the Mediterranean Sea, Ondine’s master, all his usual power, but again the role is weakly conceived dramatically, a sort of minor league von Rothbart, and Campbell McKenzie couldn’t do much with it. A dancer from the Paris Opera Ballet whom I asked about Rhapsody (1980), Ashton’s last important one-act ballet and the only one of his works to have entered that company’s repertory, dismissed it by saying the Rachmaninov music was “banal.” Well, yes—but one might paraphrase Denby and say that the more banal the music, the more beautiful is Ashton’s treatment of it. In any case, Ashton felt at home with the Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini (music he had been considering for some time) in a way that he did not with Henze. Not that Rhapsody is an entirely successful ballet—certainly it did not succeed in its main purpose as a vehicle for Mikhail Baryshnikov, who was uncomfortable in it. Looking at it now, one sees another ballet inspired by its original ballerina, Lesley Collier—her musicality and brilliance in petit allegro, revealed in a dazzling series of solos, each swifter and more intricate than the last. This time I did not see Wildor; Viviana Durante is strong but she lacks Collier’s refinement and delicacy—and most tellingly, her musicality. Virtuosity is the subject of the ballet, and Baryshnikov was certainly well able to meet its technical challenges. The male dancers who have attempted it since have not always been anywhere near his level. But Carlos Acosta, the Cuban dancer who recently joined the Royal Ballet, is a virtuoso in terms of both technique and charisma, and came closer to bringing the ballet off than anyone else I have seen. Equally important, he does not take himself too seriously, and provides the element of comment on the role that it needs. (His final gesture, though, wasn’t quite the familiar Ashton one of “and there you have it.”) The six supporting men were more secure in face of their technical challenges than some of the originals were, but the women were not differentiated either by personality or by costume—originally Ashton made short solos for them that showed off their individual qualities as only he could. The costumes are indeed a great part of the problem. The new designs by Patrick Caulfield are yet another disaster for the Royal Ballet in that department. The decor looks like something for a moderne Soviet ballet, such as the nightclub scene in The Golden Age, especially with the corps dancers standing as though at the bar at the rise of the curtain. It’s true that William Chappell’s original costumes were over-decorated, but it would have been easy enough to remove the glitter, and Ashton’s own simple set was all the ballet needed. The triple bill that closed with Rhapsody opened with another pure dance ballet by one of the great choreographers of our time, Balanchine’s Serenade. It was decently danced, though I prefer Francia Russell’s version for the Kirov, which tactfully removes some of Balanchine’s more questionable emendations, to Karin von Aroldingen’s for the Royal Ballet, which does not. In between there was a new ballet by William Tuckett, based on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw of all things. If you have not read James’s novella— or seen Benjamin Britten’s opera or one of the several film versions of the story—you cannot possibly understand what is going on. How, for instance, are you supposed to guess at the contents of the letter that is passed from hand to hand? Some of Tuckett’s movement is quite interesting, but this is a story whose action, let alone its psychological ambiguities, cannot be depicted in dance. In this case Irek Mukhamedov was evidently all too pleased with the role made for him, that of Quint, to judge by his curtain calls in character. The curious casting of Bruce Sansom as [Miss] Jessel worked well enough, and Zinaida Yanowsky (who danced beautifully in Serenade) was convincing as the Governess. Monica Mason, in what would have been the Gerd Larsen role in earlier days, coped bravely with the arbitrary gestures given to Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper. The music by Andrzej Panufnik provided a sound-track. The best element in the ballet was the design of the projections that constituted the set, by Steven Scott. Ashton’s 1946 masterpiece Symphonic Variations (one of the ballets to be “revisited” in February 2000) was his manifesto of classicism versus the literary ballets that had taken over the repertory in wartime. Even in his story ballets the dance element is paramount, the poetic language with which he expresses his subject. One looks at British ballet today and asks oneself, did he live in vain? For British ballet has beccome an equivalent of Masterpiece Theatre, with all the (often full-length) ballets based on novels (Far From the Madding Crowd), plays (Hobson’s Choice, Edward II), and English history (the forthcoming King Arthur)—and those are just ballets by David Bintley, often touted as Ashton’s heir. Look around at other British companies, with their ballet versions of Peter Pan and Dracula and heaven knows what, or Matthew Bourne’s Adventures in Motion Pictures, in whose works the modernity is all in the subject matter, not the form. Is that what they mean by the MacMillan Inheritance? David Vaughan’s Frederick Ashton and his Ballets has just been reissued in a revised edtion by Dance Books, London. Originally
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