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.
The Expanded Moment
Narrative and Abstract Impulses in Ashton’s Ballets
It is easy, particularly when speaking of ballet, to think of the narrative and abstract impulses as opposed. The first demands that the choreographer tell a story, providing the audience with character, incident, motive and continuity - above all, continuity, to link the individual events of the story into a coherent sequence. The other requires structural logic, the work’s sense of wholeness deriving from the logical relationships of its constituent elements, not from narrative continuity. ‘What happens next’, the central question narration seeks to answer, is meaningless in abstract ballet, except as an aid to the notator. Consequently, narration seems to move us through a sequential pattern, whereas abstraction allows for concentration on the pattern’s constituent parts, taken in isolation, then considered together. Frederick Ashton, as one of this century’s most eloquent tellers of stories in dance, thus seems to be at odds with abstraction, on the side of continuity and sequence, opposed to abstraction’s lifeless reduction of human experience to pattern and form.
Our experience of Ashton’s narrative ballets, however, is quite different. As a storyteller, he is often cavalier when it comes to continuity, glossing over reams of discourse with a few casual gestures that leave the audience scrambling to catch up. And our sense of the lasting power of his work comes over and over again from those still points, of which he is master, when narration halts and his choreography opens out a single situation into an expanded moment of rapture, pathos or sorrow, fraught with emotional significance. Those expanded moments assume a weight and power disproportionate to their duration or their storytelling function, and focus all of our attention on their contemplation, like the most powerful moments of abstract ballet. Ashton forces us to abandon our conception of the narrative and abstract impulses as antithetical to one another and asks us to see them instead as reciprocal. He has found a way to fuse the pure abstractions of classical ballet form with the living, human concerns of narration, to the mutual enrichment of both. His narration gains artistic force through his use of abstraction; his abstraction is humanised by his reliance on narration.
The opening of The Dream demonstrates, in miniature, Ashton’s readiness to interrupt narration with an expanded moment of abstract contemplation. As the fairies enter in groups, each group freezes momentarily on the musical cue, its motion arrested in a backward glance of listening hesitation. (The same gesture is given to Titania alone, at the end of the pas de deux later in the ballet.) This freeze-frame effect, before the ballet’s story has got properly under way, acknowledges the abstract nature of the choreography (here we have a group of trained dancers assuming a carefully planned position) while simultaneously making a narrative point (here we have characters who are listening, fearful of being followed). The abstract moment of arrested motion interrupts the narrative flow, but also expands upon the narrative point being made. Without the pause, which momentarily distracts from the sequence and continuity of the action, the audience might miss the point which the action is intended to make. The abstract emphasis on the dancers’ frozen attitudes focuses attention on the narrative content being developed. Narration and abstraction have been fused.
The point, choreographically, is a tiny one, and must not be laboured. It accustoms us, however, to the method of operation that gives this ballet its haunting charm, for The Dream is interrupted by a much more extended ‘backward glance’: the pas de deux for Titania and Oberon that arrests the ballet’s action, yet expands the moment into the abstract culmination of the entire work. In order to see this technique at work, it is necessary to consider briefly Ashton’s treatment of his source material, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
A literary purist could accuse Ashton of playing fast and loose with Shakespeare’s text, of reducing a complex series of interrelated plots, each with its own thematic significance, to a simple romantic comedy. The Athenian context, with Theseus and Hippolyta its rulers, is gone completely. Gone too is the play-within-a-play intended to celebrate their wedding, and with it the complex commentaries on class distinction and the power of the imagination that conclude Shakespeare’s play. The rustics are mere shadows of their Shakespearian selves, Bottom’s famous soliloquy reduced to a few gestures. Inevitably, the play’s most characteristic feature, its youthful verbal exuberance, defies translation into dance terms. The story is truncated, its verbal splendour gone, its thematic complexities simplified.
But Ashton’s narrative daring is deliberate, not expedient. In choosing for his framing action the feud between Titania and Oberon, rather than the wedding between Theseus and Hippolyta, he shifts the focus necessarily to the mistaken infatuations of the Athenian lovers and to the arbitrary power of the flower, love-in-idleness, to misdirect their love. (It may have been the fact that the flower is the most easily visualised of the play’s metaphors that led Ashton in this direction.) Recognising ballet’s inability to deal with Shakespeare’s verbal and thematic complexities, Ashton concentrates instead on the emotional territory - equally a part of Shakespeare’s play - that ballet is uniquely equipped to portray. His one-act distillation of Shakespeare’s drama becomes a comic scherzo on the arbitrary power, the foolishness and ecstasy of love.
The principle of selection at work in Ashton’s scenario, then, is already one of reducing or eliminating narrative complexity in order to achieve concentration on emotional situations that can easily be portrayed in choreographic terms. Once his pared-down scenario is complete, the choreography itself follows the same principle, moving the action along tersely in order to dwell on the expanded moment of the pas de deux. The reversals of affection, the petty bickering of all the lovers, the silly, arbitrary power of fairy meddling in matters of love, all are subsumed in the pas de deux, which is at once specific to Oberon and Titania (in its narrative function) and universalised as a formal exercise in pas de deux (in its abstract guise). Specific narrative references remain, in the fluttering, fairy-like port de bras for Titania, and in Oberon’s languorous rocking of her to sleep at the end of the duet; but the pas de deux itself does nothing to advance, clarify or embellish the narration. The point of reconciliation has already been made; the pas de deux is simply an expansion on it.
But ‘simply’ is the wrong word, for here the point is in the expansion, not in the forward motion of the narration. The Dream achieves its focus in this pas de deux, not in the truncated narration of Shakespeare’s plot that precedes it. Ashton uses the pas de deux to give substance to the relationships that have been developed through the story but those relationships quickly become secondary to the abstract quality of the pas de deux itself. The exquisite mirror-image arabesque for Titania and Oberon, their joined hands encircling the entire gesture, moves us both as an expression of their characters and as an abstract moment of dance. Narration and abstraction support each other at the heart of the ballet in a fashion both specific and general, both narratively eloquent and abstractly satisfying.
A Month in the Country poses an even greater challenge, which Ashton meets with even more radical means. Turgenev’s play has almost no real action of the kind that can be conveyed in gesture or dance. It is, instead, made up of conversations - conversations interrupted, half-understood, evasive, or beside the point - out of which the emotional lives of its characters emerge by implication. Ashton prunes characters, situations and entire subplots (the marriages of Vera to Bolshintsov and Shpigelsky to Lizaveta) in order to focus exclusively on Turgenev’s primary interest, the tortured relationship of Natalia Petrovna to those around her, and to the tutor, Beliaev, in particular. Ashton salvages just enough narrative incident (or, as in the search for the lost keys, fabricates it outright) to hold together the solos, duets and variations that make up the ballet. As in The Dream, these culminate in a pas de deux, this time for Natalia Petrovna and Beliaev. The pas de deux is an abstract form given emotional significance by its narrative content as the expression of the thwarted passion between the two lovers. The brief narrative preparation (again, an invention of Ashton’s) of Natalia Petrovna’s placing a rose in Beliaev’s buttonhole summarises all the preceding context and allows the abstract, classical conventions of the pas de deux to generate their expressive emotional power. Once again, Ashton has managed to impute emotional, narrative significance to a basic dance vocabulary that is, in itself, abstract and without content. Furthermore, his narrative ballet has moved the story forward, not by literal dramatisation of events (there are so few to dramatise in any case), but by presenting a series of such expanded moments of emotional abstraction, linked by the briefest of narrative strokes to provide their context.
The ballet’s famous conclusion, in which Beliaev enters unknown to Natalia Petrovna, lightly kisses the ribbons of her dress and, as a sign of his farewell, drops the rose she had earlier given him, illustrates powerfully the reciprocal relationship between the narrative and abstract impulses in Ashton’s work. The narrative purpose of the gesture is clear. Another invention of Ashton’s (to replace the passing of the note in which Beliaev bids farewell in Turgenev’s play), it is necessary to confirm Beliaev’s reluctance to depart and Natalia Petrovna’s belated awareness of her loss. But the gesture of kissing the ribbons confirms also our memory of the pas de deux that went before. In so doing, it moves into the realm of abstraction, as the final element in the architecture of the entire work and gives the moment an expanded significance far greater than its narrative function, Narratively, the gesture is simply a sentimental tearjerker; abstractly, it elevates sentiment and gives it substance.
Ashton has described his method of operation as operatic, and the comparison is apt. Just as, in opera, recitative moves the story along expediently, while the arias and ensembles expand upon the emotional situation in a vocabulary at once narratively effective and abstractly satisfying, so too in his ballets Ashton recognises the reciprocal nature of the narrative and abstract impulses. His narration concerns itself less with sequence and continuity than the literalist might like; his most powerful moments of abstract construction always operate within an emotional context that humanises them and gives them life.
Two brief contrasts with other choreographers may help to clarify the point. As the twentieth-century’s pre-eminent exponent of abstract ballet, George Balanchine has isolated the formal vocabulary of ballet movement for our contemplation and pure enjoyment. In The Four Temperaments, for example, the dancers are bodies in motion, not characters expressing emotion, not even, despite the programmatic titles attached to each section of the ballet, concepts given human form. Balanchine’s approach in this ballet allows for no confusion, no mixing of motives. The emphasis is on dance movement as abstract form, and the full appreciation of his style rests on our apprehension of the movement’s mathematical, almost geometric purity in relation to the musical score.
In keeping with this emphasis, no extraneous distractions are allowed to interrupt the audience’s concentration on the abstract purity of form. Any hint of acting, of facial expression to invest the movement with specific emotional significance, would distort the intention of the choreography. Yet in Ashton, the presence of such emotional ‘distraction’ is fundamental to his effect. To imagine the pas de deux of Oberon and Titania, or of Natalia Petrovna and Beliaev, without the expressive acting that anchors them in their narrative contexts would render them pointless.
At the other extreme stands the storytelling technique of John Cranko. His two Shakespearian ballets, Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew, concern themselves first and foremost with getting the story across in all its detail. Cranko’s ingenuity at finding gestural vocabulary to convey the events, sometimes even the language, of Shakespeare’s dramas knows no bounds. But the emphasis in his ballets is so relentlessly on sequence and continuity — on answering the question, ‘what happens next?’ — that they rarely pause to explore the emotional significance of what has just happened. When they do pause, they don’t tap into the abstract power of ballet’s formal movement vocabulary to explore their new-found emotional terrain. The balcony pas de deux in Romeo and Juliet, for example, is more a series of postures that give scope to the mimetic abilities of a dance actress than an opportunity for a ballerina to invest the classical dance vocabulary with the emotional significance of the drama engulfing her. Telling the story is central and sufficient to Cranko’s purpose; Ashton, by contrast, uses story to gain entry to a corner of the country where Balanchine has planted his flag.
But Ashton, though he inhabits a part of Balanchine’s country, does so on his own terms. Enigma Variations illustrates the fundamental dependence on narration that separates Ashton decisively from his great contemporary, and gives him his own inimitable character. Though Enigma Variations, essentially an abstract ballet, has no narrative source, Ashton finds it necessary to provide a minimal narrative framework in order to give his abstract choreographic ideas their full expression. In this ballet, the reciprocal nature of the narrative and abstract impulses provides the foundation for Ashton’s choreographic structure. Far from being opposed to each other, the two are essential to his work.
Ashton’s constructed storyline for Enigma Variations is vestigial at best. A number of friends are presented through variations characteristic of their temperaments; human relationships, particularly those binding Elgar, his wife, and his friend Jaeger, are suggested; a telegram arrives; a photograph is taken. The narration concerns itself more with the ‘Englishness’ of Victorian country life than with specific events in Elgar’s own experience. We are disinclined to ask what happens next, content to contemplate on its own terms whatever movement Ashton chooses to put before us. In this sense the ballet, as evocatively costumed and decorated as it is, isan abstract suite of dances, not a sequential narrative construction.
Viewed in this way, the ballet’s most telling moments are pure abstraction. In the Nimrod variation, Elgar, his wife and Jaeger stand upstage, their backs to the audience, then turn and move slowly forward. Their progress is mesmerising, barely dance; yet movement so carefully judged that it becomes in itself an object of fascination. In the same variation, at the end of a lift, the wife, supported by Elgar, reaches her hand out to Jaeger and brings him back into the dance. Again, our concern for narrative sequence is obliterated in the grace and beauty of the movement itself. Moments like these have the power to arrest the forward motion of the ballet and, although the movement is not actually stopped, to freeze it momentarily in our consciousness, like the fairies’ hesitant glance at the beginning of The Dream.
But once again, the experience of the ballet, particularly if one remembers the original cast, either in performance or in the 1969 film, belies any attempt to isolate its constituent parts in analysis. My own memory of performances seen in 1973 is dominated by the presence of Svetlana Beriosova, as Elgar’s Wife, and particularly by the luminous serenity of her face. The moments in the Nimrod variation, which I remember as particularly satisfying in an abstract vein, are also the moments in which Ashton, inspired by his narrative framework of human relationships, gave to a particular ballerina a set of gestures particularly suited to her personality and temperament. Abstractly, the role of Elgar’s Wife is central to the conception of the ballet, as mediator for all of its action. But narratively, the character of Elgar’s Wife, especially as danced by Beriosova, gives this abstract role the narrative substance required to allow it to perform its central function in the ballet’s construction.
So Enigma Variations, though essentially an abstract work, could never be taken for a Balanchine ballet. Its narrative line, however slight, is necessary to make its abstractions humane. Ashton is fully fluent in the abstract language of classical ballet, but he speaks it in order to engage the human spirit in response, and thus, inevitably, engages his narrative impulse. David Vaughan may have had these double gifts in mind when he spoke of the Ashton of Enigma Variations as a poet who uses the resources of classic ballet ‘to achieve a nobility of discourse and carry a weight of metaphor that many would say are beyond its scope’ (1977, p. 363). For Ashton, the discourse and the metaphor, narration and abstraction, are inextricably linked; that linkage is the source of his eloquence, the inspiration for his poetry.
References
Vaughan, D. (1977). Frederick Ashton and His Ballets, London, A & C Black.