Ashton Exchange is a series of public lectures and other 'stimulating events' at the Royal Opera House, which are part of the Ashton centenary programme. So far announced are 'The Search for Sylvia' on November 30th, 'Whose Style Is It Anyway' on December 15th and last Thursday's introductory 'Dance Theatre and Contemporary Perspectives'. These are ticketed events, but free. The first event was not well attended (I counted 50), partly because of poor advertising, perhaps too because of a clash with a Ballet Association meeting, and horrible weather. The descriptive blurb on the website says that the series is 'aimed at an informed audience, especially dancers, choreographers, critics, dance students, writers and scholars' – slightly off-putting for those like me who don't quite fit any of the categories.Chairing the meeting was Stephanie Jordan, Research Professor in Dance at Roehampton University. In her introductory remarks she commented that Ashton might well have been bemused by academic interest in his work, perhaps feeling that interrogating dance in this way was an irrelevant activity, and to the detriment of the art. She attempted to lay to rest this canard. (After all the whole aim of Ashton Exchange is to look at the works from a variety of academic viewpoints.)
The first speaker was David Vaughan, known to most as the author of the indispensable 'Frederick Ashton and his Ballets', recently seen in London alongside Merce Cunningham as storyteller in 'How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run'. His starting point was the neglect into which the Ashton ballets fell after his death in 1988. An obituary categorised him as having 'a light but sentimental talent', and Ashton himself didn't think that much of his work would survive. In the last 10 years, and especially now at the centenary, this situation has changed and audiences and administration are giving him his due.
Ashton was, and is, criticised as being out of touch with modern life and lacking in seriousness. In his own defence he wrote in 1958: 'ballets about current social happenings date as quickly as yesterday's newspaper'. His wartime ballets, especially Dante Sonata, showed that he could respond to contemporary events, but post-war he revealed himself as a classical choreographer par excellence.
In a digression Vaughan talked his work with Merce Cunningham and his interest in Ashton – two very different directions of 20th Century choreography. He reconciles them, saying that Ashton is a classicist who can be modernist in being concerned with 'the purity of the dance expressing nothing but itself', and Cunningham a modernist whose art can be classical. He sees both men's 'abstract' works having 'a personal fount of emotion from which the choreography springs'.
In discussing Ashton as story-teller, Vaughan quoted WH Auden: 'The subject of the poem is the peg to hang the poetry on'. The same could be said of Ashton's narrative ballets. To paraphrase (and Vaughan didn't say this) 'It's the steps, stupid!'. Ashton's most important contribution was the extension of the poetic language of ballet, not its narrative language.
'Modernist, classicist, romantic, wit' was Vaughan's summary and he finished by quoting Joan Acocella who compared the traits in his work to those in the English novel from Jane Austen to Penelope Fitzgerald, authors who can 'unearth feelings that we barely know we have but which, once you show them to us, we realise we've been living on for our whole lives'. This, in Ashton's case, by means of the dance itself.
Alistair Macaulay, dance critic of the Times Literary Supplement, and seemingly ubiquitous these days at teaching events at the ROH, after ranking Ashton as the greatest British choreographer, started his talk with a list of apparent limitations. Ashton said 'the trouble is I have such good taste', but to our eyes he often seems conservative, close to kitsch, his works weighed down with rose petals, pink ribbons and little animals, showing an English regression to the nursery. And what about the women who exist only for romantic love?
Compared to Balanchine who 'makes time and space more fluid' with the prospect of change and transcendence, Ashton's works seem to exist in a closed world. Of his story ballets, The Dream, more perfect than the play, is nonetheless smaller in conception than the Shakespeare, or Balanchine's version. In A Month in the Country he softens and blurs the sharp edges of the play. 'If Kenneth MacMillan hadn't come along, someone would have had to invent him.'
'But, and a big but', Ashton was a great lyric dramatist in the way he used steps to elucidate his stories. Macaulay gave a series of detailed examples from Cinderella, Fille ('my poor man's Pastoral Symphony') and other ballets, of intricacies in the choreography which illuminate the whole. Compared to some others, Ashton used the steps rather than gesture and costume to characterise his dancers and get his meaning across.
(It's difficult to discuss and analyse ballet without showing examples: Macaulay is a dancer manqué, tries hard with his demonstrations, and does remarkably well!)
Margot Fonteyn in an memorial tribute to Ashton wrote 'he once said that he could not remember innocence, that he had always seen through people to their hearts, their motives, their characters', the mystery being how he came to translate his insights into movement. Paradoxically Macaulay feels that innocence is one of the main characteristics of Ashton's work, showing a 'dewiness' and blitheness in his characters.
Some loss of Ashton style is almost inevitable with the passing of time, but it is encouraging that the current polyglot Royal Ballet is able to dance as if brought up in the Ashton tradition. (All the speakers mentioned the Ashton Trust as most important here.)
The final element Macaulay drew from Ashton's work was his ability to involve the audience kinaesthetically – that is to make them feel the steps in their own bodies. He mentioned particularly the 'walking on air' sequences as having that effect on him.
Questions and discussion were wide-ranging, from the use of the stage of the Linbury theatre to keep some of the smaller works in repertory, to American attitudes to Ashton then and now. This was a good introductory session of what should be a fascinating series.
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