MacMillan knew only one way forward: down into the depths of his own damaged personality and dark obsessions. Anastasia (1971) with Lynn Seymour (who had come home too) was an expanded and elaborated version of the ballet he had created in Berlin. Mayerling (1978), about the death in 1889 of the Austrian crown prince Rudolf, featured a double suicide, drug addiction, and prostitution. Isadora (1981) was a pantomime depicting the life of Isadora Duncan; the dancing was minimal and the ballet was dominated instead by its pretentious text and forays into high culture as soft porn—a lesbian pas de deux that deteriorated into rape, for example, and a scene of sexual awakening culminating in a dance of crotch-splitting lovemaking.
In the 1980s, MacMillan created Valley of Shadows (1983), inspired by Vittorio De Sica’s classic 1971 film The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, which moved from romantic love dances in a bland classical idiom (to music by Tchaikovsky) to a concentration camp setting (music by Bohuslav Martinu˚) with jackbooted SS men and prisoners performing spastic gestures, torsos contracted in gut-clenching agony. Different Drummer (1984), loosely based on Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, with music by Schoenberg and Webern, was another attempt to convey the dehumanizing effects of war: men with guns performed balletic leaps that ended in the mud or collapsed in fetal positions; soldiers were shot, and the dancers enacted incest and a cold-blooded stabbing.
In 1992, the year of his death, MacMillan created The Judas Tree, about betrayal and featuring a gang rape. The ballet had a commissioned score by Brian Elias and designs by the Scottish painter Jock McFadyen, whose gritty portraits of the working classes had made a strong impression on MacMillan. The ballet was set in a construction site at Canary Wharf in London’s East End, where a controversial urban renewal project had recently demolished the old docks to make way for a business and banking center; the men in the ballet were construction workers, the woman a provocatively dressed East End bint. This politically tinged setting, however, did nothing to redeem (or explain) the choreography. MacMillan had reached bottom: the ballet had no steps per se and consisted instead of hot kisses, clawing, kicking, loin rubbing, pawing, and violent manhandling, culminating in a series of thumping rapes and a hanging. It was, as the Times critic put it, a “nasty little shocker.”56
Not all of MacMillan’s ballets were this gratuitous. Requiem (1976), to music by Fauré in memory of Cranko, was a seamless blend of simple, earthy movements crafted into a lyrical ritual; at one point in the ballet there is a moving pas de deux in which the woman—an angelic figure—spirals, swirls, flies out into space but barely touches the ground, and is finally lowered by her partner in an arch gently onto his body, stretched across the floor, rocking. Song of the Earth (1965), to Mahler’s song cycle (written after his daughter’s death and as the composer faced his own terminal illness), was a powerful reflection on death, loneliness, and loss. MacMillan’s spare dances, which fused modern and oriental dance shapes with a fine balletic line, were among his best and evidence of his genuine talent. Many of the dances in Romeo and Juliet and Manon also showed craftsmanship and insight. MacMillan also had taste in dancers: Seymour was followed in the 1980s by Alessandra Ferri and Darcey Bussell, both superlative artists.
However, it remains the central fact of MacMillan’s career that he consistently sacrificed his talent to an obsessive desire to make ballet something it was not. He wanted ballet to be brutal and realistic, a theatrical art that could capture a generation’s disillusionment and chart the depths of his own troubled emotions. It was an understandable impulse, but MacMillan completely misread the tradition he had inherited; or perhaps he believed in it too much. Instead of pushing ballet in new directions, he revealed its fundamental limits—and then failed to recognize them. Classical ballet is an art of formal principles; take those away and it disintegrates into crude pantomime. This does not mean that ballet cannot portray inner pain or even social despair, but it can only do so in its own terms, within its own bounds. MacMillan’s ballets showed too many lapses in judgment and taste. By the end, he had reduced ballet’s eloquent language to a series of barely audible grunts.
The technical standards of the company plummeted: MacMillan’s ballets simply did not have the classical rigor required to sustain the once-famed Royal Ballet style. Other new choreography performed by the company in the 1970s and ’80s, about which the less said the better, was no help. Asked to revive Symphonic Variations in the early 1970s, Ashton refused, saying that the company was no longer sufficiently skilled to dance it. De Valois, seeing the company’s sharp decline, began “survival classes” for young dancers and in 1976 staged a new production of the old Sleeping Beauty—hoping, presumably, to reset the company’s course and push it back to its classical origins.
Nothing, however, could reclaim the era or restore the rigor of its art. Ashton, embittered but not creatively spent, retreated into an increasingly effete and artistically debilitating nostalgia that revolved around his beloved Fille-like country house and his connections with the royal family (he and the queen mother often led off the dancing at royal events: he would throw himself to his knees, “Magistée!”: she loved it). In 1976 he created Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora, a nostalgic evocation of the artist who had been such an important source of his own art. That same year he also choreographed A Month in the Country, inspired by Turgenev’s play. A cross between Enigma Variations and Marguerite and Armand, it was another if far less effective social portrait.
In 1979 Fonteyn returned for a final, farewell performance. Ashton paid homage with Salut d’amour à Margot Fonteyn, to music by Elgar. It was a short solo performed by the sixty-year-old Fonteyn that threaded gestures from her Ashton ballets into a seamless dance. At the end, Ashton walked gallantly onstage and took Fonteyn’s arm. They danced into the wings doing Ashton’s signature “Fred step,” which he was known to weave into his dances. The audience was so overcome that Fonteyn had to repeat the performance a second time. In 1984 the company staged their own loving birthday tribute to Sir Fred, and in 1986 Ashton choreographed his last ballet, Nursery Suite. It was another (and final) family portrait: the ballet depicted the ribbons-and-bows childhood of Princess Margaret and Queen Elizabeth.
By the time Ashton died in 1988 he was already a living legend. The public service at Westminster Abbey, with the royal family in attendance, drew a huge crowd of mourners who spilled out onto the street and into St. Margaret’s next door. They were mourning the loss of the man and his art, but also the passing of an age—“our age.” As one devoted critic and friend put it, “He was our youth, and our growing up, and our growing older.” Margot Fonteyn died three years later after a painful struggle with cancer, and Westminster Abbey filled again. De Valois, ever sturdy, soldiered on until 2001, dying at the age of 102, but by then the company she had created seventy years before was in a state of artistic and financial free fall.57
It would be wrong, however, to end on a sour note, for much had been accomplished. De Valois, Ashton, and Fonteyn, working with Keynes and several generations of British dancers, had built a national ballet company virtually from scratch. More than that, they had made classical ballet English—and in the process Ashton had created some of the most elevating and enjoyable ballets of the twentieth century. And if his best ballets have the quaint aspect of a family portrait, that is part of what made them so poignant and enduring. For ballet, perhaps more than any other art at the time, was entwined with the history and identity of modern Britain: it was a truly national art. It had come of age through two world wars, the Depression, and the emergence of the social democratic welfare state. Ashton’s ballets and Fonteyn’s dancing had seemed to hold a mirror to some of the best qualities of British national character as it emerged in those years.
If British ballet then fell victim to MacMillan’s grim and violent art—if ballet produced a troubled rebel rather than a true heir—this too was part of the story. The gentle, light-suffused worlds depicted in Ashton’s ballets had always coexist
ed, back in the real world, with deep social and political divisions that, when they finally forced themselves into art, produced a wave of futility and nihilism. A few artists working in theater and film managed to turn this anger into something productive, but ballet did not stand a chance; it just could not do what MacMillan wanted of it. Thus he blustered into ballet like the evil fairy Carabosse in The Sleeping Beauty, defiantly set on ruining the party (which he also desperately wanted to join) and ending an era.
It is no accident that MacMillan’s best ballets were also elegies—to Cranko, to the soldiers of the First World War, to love, to ballet itself. Nor is it surprising that his most brutally representative dances—created right up against our own time—have faded and appear today hopelessly dated and trite. Ashton’s ballets, by contrast, remain beautiful and uplifting. There are not many, and some of the dances he made were too delicate and tied to their time to last. But those that have survived intact continue to enchant. They are exactly what Keynes had hoped British ballet would always be: “serious and fine entertainment.”
*When George Balanchine choreographed the film Dark Red Roses in London (featuring Lopokova) he spent time with the couple at their home. He and Keynes got along beautifully, and Keynes and Lydia were both great admirers of Balanchine’s dances.
*This was The Sleeping Beauty, but in a nod to music hall pantomimes de Valois called it The Sleeping Princess, just as Diaghilev had in 1921. In the 1939 ballet, however, the prince’s name was changed from Desiré (“this was a bit much,” Fonteyn later explained) to Florimund. Fonteyn hated the costumes, which were simple to the point of parody—unadorned tutus, cardboard crowns, no sequins or jewels.
*The reference was to the Anglo-Irish field marshal Bernard Montgomery, whose victory at El Alamein in 1942 marked a turning point for the Allies in North Africa. Montgomery also commanded the Allied ground force during the Normandy invasion.
*Uncharacteristically, de Valois initially hesitated: “It is a great theater, haunted by shades of exotic Russian ballet.” Ashton, however, had no doubts: “If you don’t, I will.”
*In August 1960, representatives from the Lord Chamberlain’s office attended a performance of Les Ballets Africains to determine if the production was ballet or theater. If ballet, bare breasts were permissible; if theater, strictly forbidden. The authorities agreed it was a ballet—and the press had a field day with photos.
*The American choreographers John Neumeier and William Forsythe both got their starts in Stuttgart. Neumeier went on to become director of the Hamburg State Opera in 1973, and Forsythe was named artistic director in Frankfurt in 1984. The Prague-born choreographer Jir˘í Kylián also danced there before becoming co-director of the Netherlands Dance Theater in 1975.
A religion simple in its forms of worship, austere and almost savage in its principles, and hostile to outward signs and ceremonial pomp—naturally offers little encouragement to the fine arts.
—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
There is no dilettantism in the professional ball player, pianist, or violinist.…Elite is a word to be fought for.
—LINCOLN KIRSTEIN
WAS everything America was against. It was a lavish, aristocratic court art, a high—and hierarchical—elite art with no pretense to egalitarianism. It had grown up in societies that believed in nobility, not only of birth but of carriage and character; societies in which artifice and fine manners—so different from America’s plainspoken directness—were essential and admired attributes. Worse still, ballet was Catholic in origin and Orthodox in spirit: its magnificence and luxe seemed sharply opposed to America’s simpler and sterner Puritan ethic. Likewise its sensuality and (at times) open eroticism: when the Ballets Russes arrived to perform Schéhérazade in Boston in 1917, the local authorities insisted the harem mattresses be replaced with rocking chairs.
But above all, perhaps, classical ballet had always been a state-supported art whose purpose—from its beginnings in Paris and Versailles to its later development in Vienna, Milan, Copenhagen, and St. Petersburg—had been, in no small measure, to promote and glorify kings and tsars. The American state, by contrast, had been founded to free its citizens from overbearing centralized power and to liberate them from the ceremonial pomp that had corrupted (as the Founding Fathers saw it) European political life. Anything resembling a national or state-sponsored art was widely regarded as either an immoral luxury (John Adams visited Versailles and disapproved) or suspiciously constraining and “unfree,” tethered to the interests of state—that is, propaganda. The arts in America were thus traditionally considered a private and commercial affair, and the state kept a distance.
It is hardly surprising, then, that in America ballet was generally regarded as a foreign art, a fact that constantly dismayed visiting Europeans for whom it was a second cultural skin. When Paul Taglioni (Marie’s brother) arrived from Berlin with his wife to perform La Sylphide in 1839, for example, he found to his surprise that the women of the corps de ballet—local gals hired on the spot for the occasion—were poorly trained and thought nothing of lounging indecorously onstage between steps and dances. Forty years later, not much had changed: one critic described the dancers in a production he had seen as “an awkward squad of overgrown girls, with gauze-garnished limbs and dissipated-looking blond wigs.” “In the old country,” an Italian ballet master bitterly lamented, “the ballet is everything; in this, it is … nothing.”1
Not nothing, just part of the popular culture mix. Ballet came to America through vaudeville, variety shows, musicals, and (later) film, through kick lines, gymnastic routines, and spectacles of beautiful girls. This was nothing unusual: until the late nineteenth century, theater and opera performances typically mixed and matched Mozart with local popular songs, Shakespeare with acrobatic acts and interludes. Ballet was no different. Thus in 1866, to take just one early example, the Kiralfy brothers (Imre and Bolossy, from Pesth, Hungary) produced a bloated but extraordinarily successful theatrical production packed with spectacular dances entitled The Black Crook at New York’s Niblo’s Garden Theater. It featured a company of more than seventy ballet dancers from Europe, and ran for so long (on and off for some thirty years) that many of them never went back. The show’s star, a ballerina trained in Milan at La Scala, later opened a dance school in New York, and others moved on to theater and vaudeville.
Indeed, by the late nineteenth century, Italian dancers in particular were much in demand: reared on Manzotti’s brazenly populist pageants, their technical bravura and sensational tricks were enthusiastically welcomed by American audiences who saw ballet as little more than a fun entertainment. After The Black Crook the Kiralfy brothers went on to produce Excelsior—Manzotti’s extravaganza and a predecessor to Ziegfeld’s Follies, the Rockettes, and Busby Berkeley.
In the early twentieth century all of this changed with the arrival of the Russians, the tsar’s Imperial dancers. Some came with Diaghilev; others followed in the wake of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Diaghilev booked his company into the Metropolitan Opera House, but most, including the renowned ballerina Anna Pavlova, toured the vaudeville circuit. By then, vaudeville was a tightly organized syndicate of theaters and booking agents, run out of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, and like her French and Italian predecessors, “Pavlova the Incomparable” appeared alongside minstrel shows, baseball-playing elephants, and other popular acts. If the theatrical fare tended toward the light, however, Pavlova and her audiences had no doubt about the seriousness of her art. Her natural charisma and ardent commitment left a powerful impression on an entire generation of American and European performers. “She half-hypnotized audiences, partaking almost of the nature of a divinity,” the choreographer Agnes de Mille later recalled, “my life was wholly altered by her.” De Mille was not alone: when Pavlova died in 1931 scores of dreamy American girls reportedly fell spontaneously into a state of hysteria.2
Pavlova was the most famous, but there were dozens of Russians like her:
they toured America in various Ballets Russes spin-off troupes between the wars (some carried on into the 1960s), introducing—and converting—several generations of audiences to classical dance. The work could be grueling. One tour of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1934–35 took the dancers to ninety cities and towns in just six months: the artists covered some twenty thousand miles, with countless one-night stands and stops at “Voolvorts,” where the dancers could order ham and eggs and stock up on toiletries and extra costume jewelry before getting back on the road. Nonetheless, like Pavlova, these performers were Imperial subjects and saw themselves as standard-bearers for an aristocratic art: they may have dined at “Voolvorts,” but they presented themselves in furs and silk stockings, and they never lost sight of the sanctity of their art. “They are bound together in common need like Blitz victims,” de Mille would later note, “they are bound together by training and heritage. They are bound together, poor, deluded fools, by pride.…They think they are doing the most difficult and interesting work in the theater.”3
When they were too old or tired to perform, many of these dancers opened schools: they fanned out and set down roots in cities and towns across the country. (One even started a mail-order business: for a modest sum, customers could receive a practice tunic, music, a barre, and a weekly lesson. If they worked hard, advertisements suggested, they might join a famous Russian ballet troupe and make millions.…) It was these Russians who seeded ballet in America, just as they had seeded it in England, and it was they who trained several generations of American dancers—many of whom, like de Mille, would become prominent artistic leaders in their own right. Performance by performance, class by class, over many years, these itinerant Russians passed on their tradition. Not only steps and techniques: they brought to their lessons the entire Imperial orthodoxy of Russian ballet, and it was in their sweaty encounters with students that the long process of transplanting ballet to American minds and bodies began.4
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