A chapter from Following Sir Fred's Steps - Ashton's Legacy, the published proceedings of the conference on the choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton and his work, held at Roehampton University in 1994, and edited by Stephanie Jordan and Andrée Grau.
Approaches to the
Revival of Les Masques
Research, Education and Performance
When the possibility of reviving Les Masques was first mentioned to us at the Dance Division of the Southern Methodist University, Texas, I thought how marvellous it would be to rediscover and restore a ‘lost’ ballet from the canon of Ashton masterpieces. The development and implementation of such a project, however, presented both myriad challenges and opportunities. Could we ‘recall to life’ a ballet that had not been performed in over forty years, and make the reconstruction process stimulating and meaningful for our students? How would we integrate the requirements of their education as young dancers and artists with the exigencies of research, rehearsal, and performance? Could we develop a coherent methodology for the process that could be enhanced and refined and used for future projects? The possibilities we divined in the experiment were greater than the perceived difficulties, and we embarked on the adventure.
Ultimately, our decision to proceed with the revival was based on consideration of four criteria: the quality and character of the ballet itself, its place in both the Ashton canon and as part of the larger frame of twentieth-century ballet, and the possibilities such a venture would entail as an educational programme. Les Masques (ou Changement de dames) was originally choreographed in 1933, a year that clearly marked a watershed in ballet history Two ballets that exemplify the currents of change that define the era, George Balanchine's Cotillon and Léonide Massine’s Les Présages, have recently been revived by the Jeffrey Ballet, and it seemed important to us to complete this trilogy of ‘lost’ works by restoring an Ashton ballet of the same period. In terms of Ashton's own work, Les Masques seemed a significant antecedent of more widely known ballets such as Apparitions (1936), or ballets still performed such as Les Rendezvous (1933). The ballet, designed in elegant black and white by Ashton’s close friend and collaborator Sophie Fedorovitch, is a scintillating comedy of manners; even its subtitle is wittily ironic, with dance as its subtext. A favourite Ashton theme, romantic love, with its vicissitudes and follies, was illustrated in the ballet's slight plot. Two masked couples meet at a ball or nightclub; they switch partners, and discover, deliciously, that the husband and wife have fallen in love all over again, and the lover has found his intended inamorata.
Les Masques is a chamber ballet for seven women and two men, set to Francis Poulenc's Trio for Oboe, Bassoon and Piano. It would therefore be possible to work with a small number of students as an experimental learning group without taxing the resources of the Dance Division. Peter Franklin White, a former member of Ballet Rambert and the Royal Ballet, was sufficiently familiar with the work to construct an initial staging of the ballet on the students. It was also feasible to perform the ballet with live music, which would be played by students in the University's Music Division. The ballet's emphasis on characterisation, stylization and narrative would provide an unusually rich learning experience for students, who rarely have the possibility of developing roles that require interpretation. Finally, the project would form an integral part of the graduate dance programme’s focus on dance direction and repertory. By placing the reconstruction of a work by a master choreographer at the centre of study, the students would have an active and compelling example of the working process necessary to carry a ballet from research through rehearsal to performance.
Research: the Sense of the Past
In the last ten years, a growing number of seemingly ‘lost’ ballets have been revived and reconstructed. These include Nijinsky's Le Sacre du printemps and Balanchine's Cotillon, both restaged by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer for the Joffrey Ballet, and Nijinsky's L’Après-midi d’un faune, which was re-envisioned and scored from the choreographer's own notation by Ann Hutchinson Guest, and which had its American debut at the Juilliard School under the direction of Jill Beck. The realisation of each of these productions has underscored the importance of contextual research as an indispensable component of the reconstruction process. The dynamic relationship of an artwork to its time is essential in decoding its significance in the cultural canon; problematic and elusive elements such as performance style (which in the case of Les Masques included manners, deportment and etiquette) can be more readily identified and described when placed in a specific historical framework.
I began the research for Les Masques by collecting and assembling source materials from reviews, photographs, programmes, costume and set designs in the archives of the Theatre Museum and Rambert Dance Company in London, and the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library. Both Rambert and the Dance Collection had fragments of film, with rehearsal excerpts from 1934 and 1938 respectively; the former would prove immensely valuable as a model for performance style, stage and costume design, and as an aide-mémoire for White in the reconstruction process. The immediate restrictions of time and resources, however, delayed our receipt of the later film, which we hope to incorporate into our performance research. Jane Pritchard provided a thorough and exhaustive catalogue raisonné of artists who danced the ballet from 1933 to 1953, which will serve as our primary source for the gathering of oral histories and further performance details, and many dancers who performed Les Masques continue teaching and coaching, and can actively communicate the élan vital of the Ashton repertory.
Our first studio rehearsals with White were not scheduled until the fifth week of the school semester, which allowed the graduate dance students to prepare the ground with some initial contextual research. For these four students, the 1930s are as remote as the nineteenth century, but as Les Masques is a ‘comedy of manners’, they needed to develop ‘a sense of the past’ to begin to capture the mood and atmosphere of the ballet. Each student was assigned to prepare an annotated bibliography and short narrative summary on one of four topics: the music, theatre, film, and art and fashion of the early 1930s in England and America. They had read David Vaughan's Frederick Ashton and His Ballets (1977) and excerpts from Mary Clarke's Dancers of Mercury (1962), and various shorter works to give them initial historical background and information; but I wanted them to begin to dig deeper. What information could we glean on the fashion and art of the thirties that would help the dancers with their body posture and deportment? What were the popular themes in the plays and films of the period, and how were these reflected in the ballet? Had Ashton's work in the musical theatre, especially his collaborations with the black American dancer and choreographer Buddy Bradley, influenced his choreography for Les Masques, and if so, would we be able to see these cross-currents in the ballet? The information the students gathered was then shared with the group as a whole, so that a broad picture of the ballet’s milieu began to emerge. This process also gave the students immediate and productive investment in the ballet's eventual re-creation.
Our joint investigations yielded interesting (if not entirely surprising) results. The students became acquainted with the stylistic conventions of art deco, with its emphasis on sleek, angular lines and sculptural form; this background gave them references for the beautiful period look of the ballet. The fashion mannequins and starlets of the thirties provided models for the sophisticated and glamorous look of the women who perform the roles of the Wife and His Lady Friend. They discovered the felicitous nature of creative synchronism. Ashton's gift for devastating parody is well documented, yet the scenario of Les Masques, with its ironic commentary on the morals and mores of cafe society, prefigured many parallels plots and devices in the early Astaire-Rogers movie musicals. The students found this both remarkable and strangely satisfying; it was almost as if they had reinvented history to valorise the achievements of the ballet stage over the popular cinema.
The act of research into the past brought both historical and contemporary social issues into high relief. The contribution of African-American culture to the development of twentieth-century music, dance and theatre has been an important theme in recent dance scholarship. In her article ‘Balanchine and Black Dance’, Sally Banes notes that Balanchine, like Ashton, worked with Buddy Bradley during the early thirties, and states that the former’s collaboration with Bradley was ‘a crucial one’ (1994, p. 59). As a choreographer, Bradley brought together the dynamic body movements of African-American vernacular dance with the tap-dance steps and rhythms of jazz improvisation to create a bold and inventive style. Ashton also worked closely with Bradley, and the fruits of this association were evident in ballets such as High Yellow (1932) and Les Masques. While the blending of material from black dance with the ballet idiom was clearly manifest in High Yellow, with movements such as ‘snakehips’ being readily recognisable, Ashton’s use of black vernacular forms in Les Masques seemed both more subtle and more theatrical. In the course of their investigation, the students discovered, for example, that there were indications that the role of Her Lover, originally played by Walter Gore, was meant to be a black man (Vaughan, 1977, p. 86). In an oral history session with the graduate students, White stated that he thought that, in Ashton’s conception of the part, the emphasis should be placed more on the manner in which the character appropriated black vernacular movement as part of his effort to disguise his true identity. He believed that if there was anything ‘shocking’ for audiences about the original production of Les Masques, it came from the frisson of eroticism rather than miscegenation. Nevertheless, it became clear that in casting and teaching the ballet, we would need to be sensitive to the social climate of both the 1930s and the 1990s, and make clear Ashton’s great admiration and respect for Buddy Bradley and the black vernacular dance tradition.
Education
Although the contextual research was a crucial element of this early part of the process, we were anxious to begin the next phase of the project: White's initial restaging of the choreography. Although many of the Division's students were already committed to a strenuous rehearsal schedule for the fall repertory season and were unable to audition for Les Masques, we assembled a cast of seven undergraduate and two graduate students to be the experimental group for White. All of the students involved in the project had access to the file of critical and historical material the graduate students had developed on Les Masques, and were encouraged to add appropriate new material as they discovered it. In addition, each student was asked to keep a personal journal or diary during the rehearsal process. They were asked to record not only details of steps and stage action, but their impressions of the ballet, a description of their character and their reflections on the reconstruction of the ballet as they experienced it. This was, in a sense, a trial run for the second phase of this project, which will take place in the spring semester. We hope to organise the cast of Les Masques into a co-operative learning group, using multimedia technology as part of the reconstruction process.
Although the performance and analysis of masterpieces of dance repertory are central to the tradition of dance history, we have not fully explored the educational potential of the process of reconstruction and revival. The reconstruction process should be accompanied by critical learning activities that can enhance the dancer’s performance, enrich contextual information on the ballet and help both performers and directors develop critical insights that will make the performance experience more meaningful. We see this programme taking place in four phases. In Phase I, the dancers would engage in historical and textual research, aided by multimedia information on the ballet's history, choreographer, music, and design, as well as any supplementary material available for the reconstruction. Information can be shared and ideas discussed on a community 'bulletin board' for the learning group. In Phase II, during the rehearsal process, the dancers could share their feelings and impressions about learning their roles, the task of mastering and interpreting the ballet physically and musically, so that the bulletin board becomes ‘a collective diary of responses'. By giving the dancers a formal arena in which to share and analyse their responses to the ballet and to their roles, they literally share in the ballet's re-creation. This type of process also allows the dancers time for thoughtful reflection and consideration, learning activities too often curtailed in the course of a busy academic schedule. While the performance section of the project Phase III, is often a self-contained activity, the dancers and the ballet's director could use the technologies already developed to hone details of execution and interpretation. In Phase IV, audience reactions and comments could be added to the performers' own final commentaries and a concluding analysis of the ballet would be written by the director. (For discussion and further examples of this type of co-operative learning process, see Beck, 1991; Beck & Bowers, 1994.) Although the Masques project does not yet have all the components of an ideal interactive media project, the historical research and the dancers’ journals of their thoughts and experiences have helped provide a contextual and analytical framework with which to learn and view the ballet. The reconstruction process to date has enabled us to plan a research and restaging model, fully integrated with interactive multimedia, for use in future restagings of Les Masques.
Rehearsal: What is Les Masques?
We began the rehearsal process by listening to the music for the ballet while White described the stage action. The idea that the ballet had a plot, a development and a dénouement (and wasn’t Swan Lake or Giselle) came as a surprise to some of the dancers. The students taking part in this restaging found that they had to think about performing a ballet in a new way. They would be required to tell a story, to relate a narrative through movement and, most especially, gesture. Their dancing not only had to be accurate, it had to be evocative. Each dancer would need to develop a character with a distinctive personality, a personality that had to be convincingly conveyed to the audience. For most of the dancers, it was a challenging, and at times even frustrating experience. In today’s dance culture, it is usually execution rather than interpretation that is paramount; the current pre-eminence of technique sometimes threatens to destroy the subtleties of style and meaning in ballets that rely heavily on the dancers’ dramatic abilities. In learning Les Masques the dancers made a commitment to explore new and often unfamiliar ways of thinking about performance, and in doing so gained confidence in their abilities as both dancers and nascent artists.
Our rehearsal schedule was concentrated and intensive: we worked together three hours each evening and on Saturday mornings for two weeks. White often spent much of the day preparing material for rehearsal: listening to the music, making notes, and watching the snippets of tape from the original production to revive his own memories of a ballet last seen over forty years ago. As the dancers began to perform the steps and to try and recreate the ballet's action, he would often remember and describe a detail or a pose. Each tiny fragment illuminated more of the picture. The two young girls were all ‘fuss and bother’, with ‘eyes that they knew how to use’, and who giggled at every opportunity. The three ladies with fans were the epitome of youthful sophistication, too grand really to join in the action, but ‘terribly with it and rather bored’. The four principal dancers had more emphatically drawn characterisations, which seemed clearly delineated by their movement styles and qualities. The roles created for Alicia Markova and Pearl Argyle, as Ashton himself noted, were ‘complementary but opposing’ (Vaughan, 1977, p. 86): while Markova was brilliant, vivacious and exotic, Argyle was quietly compelling and elegantly soignée. For Walter Gore's character of Her Lover, Ashton incorporated the sinuous gait and jaunty ebullience he extracted from his work with Buddy Bradley, while in his own role as the Personage, the choreographer emphasised sophistication and charm with just a hint of jaded boredom. We found that as the ballet took shape, the characters took on a life of their own, and we often knew instinctively if their gestures and actions lacked sufficient justification or motivation.
In each rehearsal, the unusual combination of performance problems in theory, dance ‘archeology’ in practice, and ballet history in action, presented a series of intriguing puzzles to be solved. The early entries in the dancers’ journals demonstrate their commitment to the experiment, and, on occasion, their confusion and frustration with the process. One of the two young girls declared: ‘It’s all in feeling the characters work off each other. We're not supposed to think so much ... I am trying to visualise feelings instead of thinking of one movement after another.’ Tina Curran, who undertook to learn the part of His Lady Friend, noted that the ‘gelling together’ of the oral history material from White, the discussions of the ballet’s historical context and the choreography gave the ballet ‘more content and weight’ for her: 'I completely see the value of developing a character study and revamping it as the reconstruction process continues,' she wrote. The dancers noted choreographic details that improved their execution of the steps. The three ladies observed that the lines of their movements were always extended by their fans, and this made them more aware of the shapes described by their arms and hands. Tina saw that the high, prance-like walks of His Lady Friend limited her movement through space, but gave her an important tool with which to define strongly her character’s flirtatious gaiety. The two Young Girls realised that their bourrées had different meanings in different sections of the ballet, and they began to experiment with varied dynamics and attack in each sequence. Scott Warren, essaying Ashton's own role of the Personage, decided that the choreographer would never strike a pose without assuming an attitude to complement it, and he began to explore transitions between steps and phrases to give them greater continuity and coherence. In ‘deconstructing’ a work such as Les Masques these student dancers came to understand the value of artistry and virtuosity as holistic concepts, that the meaning of a ballet can be embedded in its choreography, if only they know how to look and to learn.
For the dance historian, Les Masques offers a compendium of Ashton’s choreographic devices. There is, of course, the ‘Fred Step’, woven so poignantly into the trio for the Personage and the young girls. The stage action the choreographer devised as counterpoint in this section, for the Wife and the three ladies with fans, sets off the moment like a delicate, faceted jewel. The vivacious allegro dancing for the two young girls foreshadows the virtuoso roles Ashton would later create for similar pairs and quartets of ‘little girls’ in ballets such as Les Rendezvous and Les Patineurs (1934). His use of contrasting styles of movement for the mismatched couples in Les Masques is particularly ingenious: the Wife (Argyle) and the Personage (Ashton) share an elegant, stylised formality of movement, while His Lady Friend (Markova) and Her Lover (Gore) were more flamboyant, extroverted and devil-may-care. This device makes the final unmasking and pairing off of the couples all the more delightful and believable. The three ladies with fans work together as a chorus – ‘like the Andrews Sisters’, as White remarked - and comment on the foolish and sometimes scandalous behaviour of the principal dancers. Each dancer makes a vital contribution to the choreographic design and the coherence of the story; to watch this ballet being re-created once again is, to paraphrase Ashton on Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty, like having a private lesson in the craft of choreography.
The first stages of this challenging project have left us with as many questions as answers. We know that there are significant details of the choreography still to be identified and incorporated. There is, for example, an overhead lift shown in a photograph of Walter Gore and Sally Gilmour; where is that located in the ballet, or was it performed solely for a photo shoot? Were there changes to the choreography in later versions of the work, and, if so, how were they assimilated? How did later casts learn the ballet? Mary Munro, who danced the roles of one of the Young Girls and the Wife, notes that the dancers who performed Les Masques in the late 1940s were urged to read Stanislavsky's methodologies for creating a character; when was this rehearsal strategy added, was it helpful to the dancers, and how should we include it in our reconstruction techniques? Although we may use a panoply of resources available to us, from multimedia technology to oral history and anecdote, can we ever really recreate the ‘aura’ of the ballet's almost mysterious original quality? We believe that if we have the right ingredients to cast the magic spell, this sleeping Ashton ballet will have a beautiful awakening.
References
Banes, S. (1994), ‘Balanchine and Black Dance’, in Writing Dance in the Age of Postmodernism. Hanover NH, University Press of New England.
Beck, J. (1991), ‘Recalled to Life: Techniques and Perspectives on Reviving Nijinsky’s Faune’, in J. Beck (ed.), ‘A Revival of Nijinsky’s Original L’Apres-midi d’un faune’, Choreography and Dance: an International Journal, Vol. 1, pp 45-80.
Beck, R & Bowers, D. (1994), ‘Education in the Performing Arts: Repertory, Reconstruction Groups and Multimedia’, Proposal for Meadows School of the Arts.
Clarke, M. (1962), Dancers of Mercury, London, A & C Black.
Vaughan, D (1977), Frederick Ashton and His Ballets, London, A & C Black