Ashton, who did not entirely approve, nonetheless understood their charismatic appeal better than most. In 1963 he created his last ballet for Fonteyn: Marguerite and Armand, to music by Liszt, inspired by Alexandre Dumas’s nineteenth-century novel La Dame aux camélias—and by Greta Garbo’s sentimental take on the same story in Camille (1937). It was a sumptuous, sex-tinged melodrama lavishly designed by Cecil Beaton, a vehicle for Fonteyn and Nureyev and, in the words of one critic, an “orgy of star-worship.” But in spite of its negligible choreographic merits (and the grumblings of critics) it was ecstatically received—just as Ashton had predicted.47
There was more. Fonteyn may have been a foil to Nureyev’s 1960s wild child, but she was no shrinking violet herself. As we have seen, she was a gutsy dancer and steely competitor, and even Nureyev was amazed by her newfound abandon: “Margot throw herself—God knows where—and I have to wrestle.” And for all his daring and animal magnetism, Nureyev himself was quite conservative. He preferred the nineteenth-century classics to more modern works, and Fonteyn had grown up with them too. Thus it was not just that Nureyev made Fonteyn young again: they also stayed old together. As MacMillan and choreographers on the Continent turned in more experimental directions, Fonteyn and Nureyev danced the classics over and again across Europe and America. In fact, Fonteyn was doing what she had been doing all along: making ballet a newly popular mass art. Only with Nureyev she did it paradoxically by living in the past.48
As Fonteyn disappeared into world fame and the drama of her own personal life (her Panamanian husband was shot and crippled in one of his political adventures, and Fonteyn nursed him devotedly) and MacMillan pushed toward ever more “relevant” art, Ashton dug in his heels: he set out to defend classical ballet as he knew it. “Since when,” he complained of MacMillan’s success, “are ‘subjects’ the all-important matter of works of art? [You] may as well say Chardin was a bad artist because he painted cabbages.…Why can’t I be left to my livestock?”49
And so in 1960 he created La Fille mal gardée, a short two-act ballet with a score by Ferdinand Hérold, freely adapted and arranged by John Lanchbery. “I was swept by a longing for the country of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century,” he later explained, “the country of today seems a poor noisy thing by comparison.” Cecil Beaton later recalled that Ashton worked on the ballet at his Suffolk country home, surrounded by memorabilia of a lost age, “roses in Victorian vases, on china and on chintz. The house is like the house of an old aunt.” Drawing on a 1789 French comic ballet scenario, which he had copied by hand at the British Museum, Ashton wrote his own version of the story of the young peasant girl Lise and her widowed mother, who promises her daughter’s hand in marriage to the son of a wealthy man. Naturally, Lise loves Colas, a local bumpkin, and after a series of misadventures she manages to convince her mother to bless their love.50
This might have been a quaint, sweet nothing of a ballet, adding fuel to MacMillan’s fire. Instead, it was a substantial work in a comic genre. Ashton’s voice comes through in an unabashed affirmation of innocent love and pastoral ideals. The lead roles were danced by Nadia Nerina and David Blair, fine performers unencumbered by world fame. Blair, born David Butterfield from Yorkshire, belonged to a generation of dancers bent on improving male technique. He had a bravura style but also a jaunty gait and carriage belying his humble origins; de Valois sniffed at his lack of manners, but Ashton knew better. He did not want a prince, and Blair was his everyman. Fittingly, Ashton chose Osbert Lancaster to design the sets. Known for his satirical “pocket cartoons” poking gentle fun at the foibles of the ruling class, Lancaster shared Ashton’s nostalgia for a lost Edwardian world, and he created a sunlit farmyard setting, complete with chickens that perform a silly but endearing chin-strutting act. There were ribbons galore: for cat’s cradle, maypole dances, pony rides.
The dancing was light and fluid, Ashton at his very best. He did not try to create a folkish or country idiom, but instead plied the dancers with a range of pure classical steps brimming with invention. It was a language they spoke so fluently that all strangeness and artifice fell paradoxically away—the Yorkshire lad performing jumps and turns seemed the most natural thing in the world. Yet the heart of the ballet lay in its character roles. Alain, the rich man’s son, was a daft but well-meaning half-wit with a quirky bowlegged walk, pony stick, and bright red umbrella. The Widow Simone, played by Stanley Holden in the tradition of a pantomime dame, was a comic portrait of a girlish old lady. Holden was also an accomplished hoofer, and at one point, “she” launched into a Lancashire clog dance, falling over her own feet in a virtuosic display that brought down the house. Fille was a very English ballet.
It was also a huge success, not just in London but abroad. When the Royal Ballet toured the USSR in 1961, Fille was warmly embraced, and the Soviet authorities hoped to add the ballet to the Bolshoi’s repertory. The following year Fille “went national” and was beamed into living rooms across England on the BBC. Ashton seemed to be reaching a new peak. Upon de Valois’s retirement in 1963 he became the sole director of the Royal Ballet, and in the coming years he firmly stamped the company with his vision, producing a string of glorious ballets in marked contrast to MacMillan’s “angry young man” art. In 1964 he made The Dream (from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream), a short, sweetly domestic ballet with finely drawn characters and charming comic touches, featuring the dancers Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley, paragons of Ashton’s English style. He did not try to catch the full sweep of Shakespeare’s play, as Balanchine would several years later; that was not what interested him. He focused instead on distilling each scene and character until he had created a touchingly intimate and fleeting ballet, ephemeral and gleefully playful as a dream.
Four years later, he produced Enigma Variations, a dance set to Edward Elgar’s lilting turn-of-the-century musical depiction of his own friends and their society. Anticipating a wave of popular nostalgia for Elgar—and for a lost pastoral era—the ballet was a fond portrait of an old-world country life, with dances sketched, like memories, in light ink from gestures and fleeting thoughts. Choreographically understated, Ashton’s steps blended into Elgar’s haunting phrases and Julia Trevelyan Oman’s designs, which evoked a misty-eyed Victorian twilight. Elgar’s daughter, who was by then an old woman, saw the ballet and was amazed: “I don’t understand how you did it because they were exactly like that.”51
Fille, Dream, and Enigma Variations have such a light touch that they can appear choreographically slight, but they are not. In these ballets Ashton re-created, through movement (not mime) and with pitch-perfect detail, the Edwardian social worlds he himself had only glimpsed as a child but which occupied a mythic place in his imagination and in British culture. It was an uncanny blend of realism and rose-tinted nostalgia, built from a lifetime of observation and absorption: of music hall and manners, of literature, film, and music, all reworked into the language of classical ballet. Ashton knew how to take the smallest of gestures—a turn of the head or a hand raised—and amplify it with ballet, making it read across the footlights and creating a theatrical portrait at once intimate and distant. Watching his ballets one has a sense of finely spun gossamer: fragile—ephemeral even—but also of real, tangible stuff, the props and poses of life. The physical calibrations involved in its creation were extremely precise: one off move or misstated pose could abruptly puncture the illusion.
Ironically then, it was against MacMillan and without Fonteyn that Ashton found his truest voice, a voice he had always had but which gathered newfound urgency and resonance in the overheated cultural environment of the 1960s. Ashton was working against the current: Dream followed closely on the Beatles’ first LP, and Enigma came on the heels of Hair. He was not wrong to feel that he was engaged (as he once put it) in a “fight.” Faced with a growing chorus of demands for a more democratic art that would be accessible and relevant to all, and surrounded by London’s racy scene, Ashton stood hi
s ground and kept classicism—the high ballet of Keynes, Fonteyn, and the Russians—alive and to the fore. It was no coincidence that in these years Ashton also staged a new Swan Lake and invited Bronislava Nijinska, who was by then teaching in California, to revive Les Biches and Les Noces (both from the 1920s), or that he imported the ballets of George Balanchine, who was creating his own neoclassical dances in New York.
What had begun, then, as a defensive move had opened out into a golden age. It was a poignant outcome: Ashton wove his most original ballets with the threads of a bygone era. His dances were neoclassical in the sense that they stuck firmly to classical principles, but they were above all very, very English: close studies of social style. And although Ashton could seem at times backward-looking and old-fashioned, he also had plenty of fans. The men and women of “our age,” after all, were at their peak, and they had been reared on ballet and shared both Ashton’s ideals and his nostalgia. In 1969, for example, the art historian Kenneth Clark, an old friend who had also known Keynes and supported the ballet since the 1930s, created and hosted a hugely successful thirteen-part television series entitled Civilization, making the unabashed case for an elitist high art. “Popular taste,” he scolded his public, “is bad taste.”52
Kenneth MacMillan, meanwhile, pushed relentlessly on. In 1962 he created his own version of The Rite of Spring with skintight and paint-spattered unisex costumes and vaguely apocalyptic overtones. Then in 1965 he choreographed a new Romeo and Juliet for Lynn Seymour. He and Seymour had both seen and admired Franco Zeffirelli’s stage production with Judi Dench and John Stride, and they were determined not to reduce Shakespeare’s drama to a romantic melodrama (as the Bolshoi had). Instead, MacMillan fixed on the idea of a troubled and strong-willed young girl experiencing a sexual and psychological awakening. In the bedroom scene he had Seymour sit completely still on her bed facing the audience for several minutes, thinking and feeling her emotions well up from within as the music washed over her; and when she died MacMillan instructed her, “Don’t be afraid to look ugly. You’re just a lump of dead meat.” At the last minute, however, the Royal Ballet board got nervous: they wanted a commercial hit, and (with Ashton’s support) Fonteyn and Nureyev were given the premiere. Predictably, they made the ballet into yet another vehicle for their ongoing stage romance. To MacMillan’s disgust, they hid the rough texture of his dances in the plush folds of their distinctly old-world style: Fonteyn died prettily with her feet pointed.53
MacMillan and Seymour left the company—and the country. They moved to West Germany, where MacMillan took up the directorship of the ballet at Berlin’s Deutsche Oper. Germany had a web of state- and locally supported opera houses, many with ballet companies in residence: the working conditions were excellent and financially generous, making the country a favored postwar destination for English and (especially) American choreographers in search of security and a platform for experimentation. The Germans were happy to have them: prosperous and eager to rebuild their cultural life after years of fascism and war, they offered rich subsidies and few aesthetic constraints. Ballet was especially in demand. The Germans had a history of ballet reaching back to the courts and principalities of the eighteenth century, but no sustained style or tradition of their own. Importing artists from Britain and America promised to help put the country back on the cultural map.
Indeed, MacMillan had already worked in Stuttgart, where his friend and colleague John Cranko directed the Stuttgart Ballet. Cranko was a South African–born dancer and choreographer who had trained and worked at the Royal Ballet; his early choreography had been poorly received in London, and he had moved to the Stuttgart Ballet in 1961, successfully turning the company from a provincial backwater into a thriving international center of dance.* Cranko, like MacMillan, was set on making dance relevant to a new generation, and in Stuttgart he created several highly successful modern evening-length ballets on literary themes. Cranko made his own Romeo and Juliet for La Scala in 1958, long before MacMillan tackled the ballet himself, and mounted it in Stuttgart four years later; in 1965 he created a beautiful and emotionally gripping Eugene Onegin. MacMillan was a close friend and frequent visitor; he had created Las Hermanas, inspired by Federico García Lorca’s play The House of Bernardo Alba, about mourning, tense sexual encounters, and suicide, for the Stuttgart Ballet in 1963—after the Royal Ballet rejected the subject as inappropriate.
There were other reasons MacMillan and Seymour might have felt more at ease on the Continent. Germany, as we have seen, had been a crucible for experiments in more expressionist forms of dance as far back as the 1920s, and since then dancers and choreographers across Europe (and in the United States), inspired in part by the German innovators, had been pushing ballet in new directions and toward more difficult themes. Now, in the 1960s, a new wave of dancers and choreographers emerged and pushed further still, making ballet more relevant, but also more popular and more booming than ever before. Seen from across the Channel, Ashton really was an island of classicism: ballet in the rest of Europe was moving fast into the murky waters of sex and violence that MacMillan had been charting all along.
Foremost among this new wave was the French choreographer Maurice Béjart (1927–2007). Béjart had worked briefly with Roland Petit and gone on to create his own explosively popular brand of youth-movement dances. He made his name in 1959 with a writhing, sexually charged, and atavistic remake of The Rite of Spring—three years before MacMillan’s own eroticized attempt—and in 1964 he created Ninth Symphony to Beethoven’s music. The ballet featured 250 musicians and singers and 80 dancers, and included readings from Nietzsche and movement inspired by gymnastics, ballet, and Indian and African dance. The main ingredient, however, was sex and the spectacle of masses of scantily clad dancers performing suggestive movements and sweaty athletic feats.
Béjart was based in Brussels, where from 1960 to 1987 the generously funded Théâtre de la Monnaie housed his company: he called it Ballet for the Twentieth Century. In these years, Béjart seduced a burgeoning baby boomer audience across Europe with a meretricious blend of Eastern religions, revolution (his Firebird was a fist-clenching Viet Cong), philosophy (from Buddha to Jean-Paul Sartre), and, above all, homoerotic display. His company had eighty dancers, half of whom were men, and they played to huge crowds in stadiums and outdoor venues (fans wore buttons: “Béjart is sexier”). It was the balletic equivalent of “let it all hang out” and if many found it refreshing and liberating, others were more skeptical. As one despairing critic put it, Béjart represented “escape with a capital E: be it to India, Revolution, Buddhism, or art nouveau. For the despair of our anger with the world and ourselves he offers the sincerity of insincerity.”54
Béjart was not the only one. In the Netherlands—like Belgium and Germany a country with little past tradition in classical dance— a similar if more earnest trend was developing. There the Dutch-born choreographers Hans van Manen and Rudi van Dantzig sought to create a new hybrid form of dance by merging classical ballet with American and Central European modern dance. Too often, however, the result was a watered-down version of each, buoyed by pressing social and political themes. Van Dantzig’s Monument for a Dead Boy (1965), to an electronic score by Jan Boerman, for example, was a semiautobiographical dance about a man on the brink of suicide struggling to face his homosexuality and memories of a childhood scarred by rape and war. Van Manen’s Mutation (1970), to a score by Karlheinz Stockhausen, used film, lots of red paint, and dancers cast in cross-gender roles; it ended with a nude pas de deux.
MacMillan might have been in his element, but he was not. He was more complicated and nihilistic than his peers, but also more ingrained with classical values, thanks in large measure to his sterling Royal Ballet training: he admired Ashton and revered The Sleeping Beauty even when also opposing them. Following Cranko, and in an effort to lay a classical foundation in Berlin, he staged updated and psychologically probing versions of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty, alongside (among other
works) Anastasia, a bleak study in insanity set in a stark mental institution. But his time in Berlin was difficult: artistically torn between his roots and his desperate impulse to destroy them and feeling culturally disoriented and depressed, he fell into alcoholism and finally collapsed in physical and mental breakdown. It was in the midst of all of this that the Royal Ballet’s board of directors, supported by de Valois (who was still active behind the scenes), made the extraordinary decision to bring home the son—and depose the father.
In 1970 Frederick Ashton was effectively ousted from the Royal Ballet and replaced by Kenneth MacMillan. It was a critical moment. Ashton’s all but forced retirement marked the end of an era, and it was no accident that it came just as the confident Keynesian consensus that had shaped Britain in the postwar years unraveled and the country began to spin into confusion and self-doubt. The Royal Ballet’s move to cut itself off from Ashton showed excruciatingly poor judgment, fueled no doubt by an ill-considered but powerful desire to keep up with the times and not let British ballet, as one of the nation’s standard-bearers, fall behind. Together with the board’s overinvolvement in artistic matters and inept managerial style, this boded ill for the future of the Royal Ballet, and sadly exemplified the malaise seeping into British cultural life. In the prelude to Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s “revolution,” the character and quality of public discourse noticeably fractured and deteriorated, and ballet was no exception. MacMillan’s tenure at the Royal Ballet, as director from 1970 to 1977 and then as principal choreographer until his sudden death from a heart attack in 1992, heralded a sharp decline in aesthetic and technical standards, but above all in the sustained commitment to high art that had underpinned the Royal Ballet since its inception.55
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