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.
Interview with Alexander Grant
Julie Kavanagh: In 1946 you were a student taking class with the company and very soon found yourself dancing one of the Popular Song boys in Façade. Could you tell us how that came about?
Alexander Grant: It all started in New Zealand when I won a Royal Academy of Dancing Scholarship to come to London to continue my training. They put me at the Sadler's Wells School. I arrived on 1 February, after seven weeks at sea in a cargo boat around Cape Horn, which was quite an adventure. There was no school because all the older members of my age had been put into the newly formed company at Sadler’s Wells - the old company had been transferred to Covent Garden and a new company to take its place had been formed at Sadler’s Wells Theatre. As there was no school I was asked to do my classes with them and stand at the back during rehearsals, to watch what was going on and learn whatever I could. Then came the marvellous day when Frederick arrived to cast Façade, which was to be one of the first ballets to be performed by the newly formed company I was standing at the barre with a boy called Donald Britton. We were similar in height and physique, and I could see Frederick sitting with Peggy van Praagh, the new director, pointing to us and Peggy van Praagh saying ‘No, no, no, he’s only a student, he’s not in the company, you can’t really have him.’ But Sir Frederick got his way and I found myself learning the Popular Song with Donald Britton. So that was my first glimpse of Frederick and his work.
Kavanagh: That is a ballet that you now teach around the world and you coach. Can you talk about the qualities that you try and bring out?
Grant: It was a very special ballet, one of Frederick's earliest works. It was a music-hall kind of thing. During the war in New Zealand I was a member of a concert party, and had done that kind of thing entertaining the troops, so I was quite familiar with what was called music-hall and cabaret. This was just a balletic extension of it. I remember in one of the cabaret items I did in New Zealand - ‘By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea’, which I sang, to the horror of everybody - I wore a costume that was practically the same as in Façade, so I felt very much at home in it. I believe Ashton actually danced the Tango in those early performances, so I had wonderful tuition from him. It is not generally known what a great performer Ashton was. He wanted to be a great dancer. He wasn't really interested in being a great choreographer, which is what he became. I only managed to see him dance in his later years, but I saw him in many roles - Carabosse, in which he was terrific; Dr Coppelius, in which he was wonderful; Kastchei in The Firebird; and an Ugly Sister in Cinderella. There were many roles which he performed. I learnt a great deal from him, and worked with him in many ballets that I was lucky enough to be a part of. You asked me how many created works of Ashton ballets had I been associated with. I got out David Vaughan's fantastic chronicle [Frederick Ashton and His Ballets, A& C Black, 1977] and was able to count them up: twenty-two. I was rather pleased, as Alicia Markova said that she had created eighteen. I've also danced in nine other Ashton ballets which I didn't create, so altogether I've danced in thirty-one.
Kavanagh: You were pushed on in Symphonic Variations.
Grant: Yes, in the early days when I was a very green, new member of the company. They had been working together during the war as a team and hadn't had too many newcomers - male dancers were very hard to find in those days, particularly during wartime. I went on the very first tour of the touring company for two weeks only, to Exeter and Brighton, dancing in Façade and Celia Franca's Khadra.Then I was told to have a holiday and join the main company in September. So I’d arrived in February 1946 and joined the company in September. I found to my horror - or fright, really - that Brian Shaw, who had created one of the parts in Symphonic Variations, was called into the army and I was suddenly told that I had to do it. I had to learn it in a great hurry. Here I was, completely green, with three of the leading ballerinas: Margot Fonteyn, Pamela May and Moira Shearer. I will always be grateful to Pamela May and Michael Somes, who encouraged me tremendously, and of course Sir Frederick, but Pamela was very patient and tolerant with me. I often remind her of that fact, and I think she remembers it quite well.
Kavanagh: Was that a tremendously challenging role?
Grant: It was. You are on stage when the curtain goes up and you know you can't leave until it's finished. You can't go off and think what next if you haven't learnt it very well. So you can imagine how frightening it was. You also have to watch your spacing. You have to be in the right spacing because there are very few people on a large stage. It wasn’t just a question of learning the steps, you had to know exactly where you were on the stage, and also partner those ballerinas. I mostly partnered Pamela May, and even had to do pirouettes with Moira Shearer - so you can imagine this new young recruit from New Zealand suddenly being thrown on in this wonderful new work. It had been a great success, so it was a ballet that we looked on with great reverence.
Kavanagh: It was extraordinary that he followed that six months later with Les Sirènes, which was a resounding flop.
Grant: Yes, my first created Ashton role was in Les Sirènes. I played a little boy, with a girl called Pauline Clayden; she held hoops which I jumped through. We also had another part in it. I was an attendant to Sir Frederick, who was King Hihat of Agpar (a kind of Shah of Persia). It was set on the beach at Trouville. Sir Frederick devised a most spectacular entrance for himself: he came down onto the beach from a balloon. But of course he never rehearsed coming down in the balloon, and he had forgotten that to come down in the balloon he had to be up there at the beginning of the ballet, and he didn't come down until halfway through it. And he hated heights. So there he was, cowering at the bottom of the basket until his entrance. When he came down he was so frightened that he couldn't remember what came next. I was an attendant behind him with a boy called Kenneth Melville, and here he was saying ‘What comes next?’ all the time. Everything had gone out of his head. Luckily we were all doing the same step, so I knew what came next for him. So he said, ‘No more, I'm not coming down in the balloon any more. I'm going to devise an entrance where you carry me on in a bier’ - which we then had to do. But it couldn't be wasted, and Robert Helpmann said, ‘This is a wonderful entrance. I will come down in the balloon’. And he did. He was a tenor in the ballet too, actually sang in a tenor voice.
Kavanagh: And then in 1947 Massine came to Covent Garden and had a galvanising influence on the company.
Grant: I was very fortunate that I had been chosen by Massine in a ballet that he was reviving, Mam'zelle Angot. The principals were Margot Fonteyn, who was my partner, Moira Shearer and Michael Somes. It is generally known that Ashton’s first teacher was Massine. Working with Massine and performing a Massine role - he was always interested in that kind of work; and having made a success of this role brought me to Ashton's notice.
Kavanagh: He tended to give you quite a few of those wild jumps which you did in Mam’zelle Angot.
Grant: Yes. I think that was why Massine picked me. The one thing I could do in those days was jump. Massine was in Manchester in a musical play called Bullet in the Ballet. De Valois heard that it was not a great success and was not being brought to London, so she asked him to come and do some ballets for the company when the show closed. He could only spare a Sunday because he was still in the production in Manchester. We all had an audition class on Sunday afternoon in the rehearsal room at Sadler’s Wells. I can remember jumping myself silly - so much so that I was chosen as the Poodle for La Boutique fantasque. Then I was lucky enough to get the role of the Barber in Mam’zelle Angot.
Kavanagh: How would you say that Ashton's choreography was influenced by Massine?
Grant: Very much. You mentioned Façade. I always think that the finale in Façade is tremendously Massine-like.
Kavanagh: The hands as well?
Grant: No, the hands are very much Ashton. Ashton was born in South America and had this Latin American/Peruvian background of the tango, for instance. The use of the arms, the Spanish use of the hands, that comes into his work.
Kavanagh: People tend to associate you with gentle creatures like Alain in La Fille mal gardée. It is difficult for us to imagine that you had a kind of dangerous quality, on and offstage. You told me that you once ran the bulls at Pamplona, for instance. I was thinking of the Pirate King in Daphnis and Chloe. I think you told me that Fonteyn was terrified of you.
Grant: She never complained. She was like a lamb to the slaughter every night. I had to run on with her on one hand. I used to run on with her around the stage, then put her around my neck (I see this movement has now been cut), and swing her around my neck horizontally, and then around my body, and throw her onto the floor and then jump all over her. I was very pleased on one occasion, because after Daphnis and Chloe there was a big crowd at the stage door for Fonteyn, as there was every night after the performance; I came out and I heard somebody say, That’s Alexander Grant, the Pirate Chief. Then: ‘He's so small!’ I was terribly pleased, because it meant that I looked enormous on stage.
Kavanagh: You also brought a hint of danger to the Jester in Cinderella. Edwin Denby used that wonderful phrase ‘the beautiful suspense of an animal pounce’ to describe your quality of the Jester.
Grant: Ashton had this wonderful ability to bring special qualities out in people. I think he knew that I was willing to try anything, and he was willing me to try anything. You had this wonderful confidence in him, which he gave you, that you could try anything. He did not like an artist who just came into the room and said, ‘Tell me what to do.’ He didn't tell you: he gave you an idea and a clue from the movement of what he wanted, and hoped that you would contribute and work on it until he said, ‘That’s right, that is what I want’, or ‘That is not what I want.’ That’s the way he worked. You were never inhibited in his presence - he put you completely at your ease and you were able to attempt anything.
Kavanagh: There were wonderful steps he got you to do that weren’t in any classical lexicon.
Grant: Ashton had a phenomenal memory, though he had no memory for recreating his own choreography. If he saw one of his own ballets he would know what was wrong, but he could never put it on, he would never remember every step. But he had a wonderful memory: he had a store of steps and movement that he had seen. He could bring something out of a ballet that he had seen twenty years before and suddenly think: well that would fit.
I would also like at this stage to say something that is not generally known. I was rather disturbed with everyone calling him Fred at this conference. He really disliked Fred. He liked to be called Frederick or Freddie. I never called him Fred and he never called me Alex, always Alexander. I am very surprised that my colleagues, who were very close to him, did not know that. It was not really the ‘Fred Step’, but ‘Freddie's Step’.
Kavanagh: Didn't Sophie Fedorovitch start calling him Fred?
Grant: Maybe. He adored Sophie and maybe even the Dame, and that's where it all came from in the company - but he didn't really like being called Fred.
Kavanagh: His mother used to call him Freddles.
Grant: Twenty years ago I wrote a poem about him:
Ever ready Freddie
Always entre nous
In any situation
Knew exactly what to do.
Kavanagh: Can you tell us about the Jester, an enigmatic figure, part Harlequin and part Buttons. How did this conception come about?
Grant: Always you got the character of what you were supposed to be from Freddie himself, in the movement that he gave you. He was so in tune with the music that after any role that he had created on you, you felt that you couldn’t possibly do a different movement to that music But he wanted you to see what you could bring to a role. The Jester, being not a role really but a character, 1 decided that he was there to entertain the Prince and be his companion. When the Prince meets Cinderella he would lose a great deal of that companionship, as it would be transferred to Cinderella. Being a Jester, he was never going to have the good fortune to find a Cinderella of his own. I tried to convey that, and was amazed that quite a few people got it.
Kavanagh: That slight sadness, the wistfulness.
Grant: The wistfulness, particularly when he found Cinderella at the ballroom, with the train. I don't know whether you saw the television film that we did in America. We were sent to New York for one week and filmed a live performance of Cinderella at the Brooklyn Studios, the old Chapman Studios. The ballet was cut, including the solos for the Prince and Cinderella, a great deal of the ballroom scene and mime for the Jester. I suppose it had to be condensed for television.
Kavanagh: Was the character you played in Variations on a Theme of Purcell, the Master of Ceremonies, rather similar?
Grant: I suppose it was. It was a tremendously enigmatic character. All the dancers were instruments in the orchestra and I was a sort of enigmatic conductor, dressed half black and half white.
Kavanagh: Didn't you have a sort of jazzy, soft-shoe shuffle dance?
Grant: Yes, because I did the drum solo. Ashton had a wonderful variety and versatility of movement.
Kavanagh: What about your atypical roles? You had a sort of Ashtonian love pas de deux in Madame Chrysanthème.
Grant: Yes I did. Madame Chrysanthème was really Madam Butterfly. Pierre Loti had written the book Madame Chrysanthème, which was made into the opera Madam Butterfly and given a tragic ending. Ashton used the original ending, which was an ironical one. Pierre is an ordinary sailor, not the Captain; when his ship doesn’t sail, he comes back and finds her counting out the money she has managed to save from his stay.
Kavanagh: Were you happy with the role?
Grant: Yes, again I was playing a character, a sailor. And always after my seven weeks at sea I thought if I never made it as a dancer I was going to go to sea.
Kavanagh: You danced the Young Man in The Two Pigeons didn’t you?
Grant: Yes. The role was originally meant for Donald Britton, who was very like myself physically. We were more mature than Christopher Gable. Ashton’s original idea was that a mature artist was having a liaison with a young girl and trying to paint her. She was playing up, by being restless, and he got very irritated with her, walked out and found someone else, then realised that the grass was not greener on the other side, and came back. When Donald Britton injured himself, Christopher Gable was put in and the whole idea changed: it was young love from the start. When it was transferred to Covent Garden and Lynn Seymour came into the main company we did it and took it to New York. Ashton went back to his original idea by giving me the part. However, people had got used to the young romantic thing, and I don't think they took to the version.
Kavanagh: What about roles that you would like to have done?
Grant: I always missed Mercutio. I always feel that if Ashton had choreographed Romeo and Juliet for the company I might have been lucky enough to get it. I was in Ashton’s ballet when I was past my Mercutio stage, as Juliet's father.
I would like to tell you about Ashton's love and success in America. These were the early days at the old Met. Coming out of the stage door you stood on a high step with the public below, so that they could see you. You went down the step and straight across the road to Bill’s Bar. One year a number of Frederick's ballets which had not been seen in America before were shown, and each work was more successful than the last. When we went into Bill’s Bar members of the public would say, ‘Mr. Ashton, it was wonderful tonight, can we buy you a drink?' He would say –‘Yes’. They would say ‘What are you drinking?’ and he would say, ‘Dry martini’. He took very much to American martinis. Sometimes eight or nine would be lined up on the bar waiting for him. We then went on tour. We used to have our own train, and this was a very long tour to Winnipeg. Frederick was never ill, but on this occasion he was clutching his abdomen and saying that he was in pain. I said, ‘Directly we get to Winnipeg you will have to call the doctor to the hotel’. The next day I asked Frederick if he had seen the doctor, and he said, ‘Yes, he asked if I had been drinking.’ He told the doctor, ‘Some people drink when they have been a failure, but I drink when I’m a success.’ The doctor diagnosed martini poisoning. True story.
Kavanagh: What was the private Ashton like? Was he a melancholy person?
Grant: Yes. He had long bouts of melancholy. I used to visit him in the country. We had this special thing between friends. He would sit day-dreaming. As many of his dancers will tell you, Ashton used to come into the rehearsal room saying that he dreamt movements. It wasn’t, I don’t think, that he dreamt them, but he day-dreamed them. He would sit and listen to the music of the ballet that he was doing for hours in a quiet way, and the style that he wanted would come into his mind. We had a kind of rapport where we did not have to speak; we might spend whole days when we hardly spoke at all. We could communicate without speech. Of course, he was a communicator with body movement. This was the great thing about his work, that he spoke with his body and was able to communicate what he wanted to say in movement in such a way that it even conveyed an emotion. It was this emotional content in his work, and the way that he was able to put it into his artists, that I think was so important.
Kavanagh: I would like you to recap a riveting conversation with Pamela May in which you discussed what was being lost from Ashton’s work, the dynamics were going, and details like the chassé.
Grant: One of Ashton’s favourite steps in all his ballets was the chassé. In fact he did a whole ballet based on them: Les Patineurs. The dancers were supposed to be skating on ice - and the chassé, you know, is a sliding movement on the floor. No longer do people do this chassé. I think it’s the Russian influence.
Kavanagh: Richard Glasstone told us that they had stopped teaching them.
Grant: Which is terrible, as he had them in all of his ballets. They are now turned into a posé, without the chassé. Maybe it is to do with floors - in our day we had wooden floors.
Richard Glasstone: It is nothing to do with the floors.
Grant: I don't know why they have been cut out. When I danced, each of the enchaînements at the end of nearly every class was chassé, coupé, jeté. You chassé along the floor and got down to it and pushed off so that you got up into the air, so you had the contrast of being down and being up. Completely disappeared. Little details like that go. What has also gone, which may also be the Russian influence, is the quick footwork. In de Valois’ day the company was famous for quick footwork. De Valois herself was famous for it. Her step when she took class, which everybody hated, was jeté battement forward and back. Ashton sent it up slightly in my role as Alain in La Fille mal gardée - Alain tries to do it and can’t. Ashton also incorporated a lot of quick footwork into his ballets, and now they don’t really concentrate on that. It is a much slower attack, which is a broader Russian movement. When we first went to America in 1949 one of the things that was remarked on was the wonderful quick footwork of the company. Some of the older ballerinas, like Lesley Collier still have it.
Kavanagh: Can you talk about Alain?
Grant: I never knew when I was going to be in an Ashton ballet, and I think one of the reasons we had such a close friendship was I never asked if I was going to be in his ballets, so he was never embarrassed not to put me in. In those days we were not told the cast before we started rehearsing - sometimes we’d be half way through a ballet and then your name would go up to be in it. I wasn't very keen on La Fille mal gardée at first. I’d seen a one-act version by Nijinska, I think, in which Alain ran around trying to catch butterflies with a butterfly net.
People used to say to me what is your favourite role, and my pat answer, in my dancing days, was that it is the next one I'm going to be asked to do, as it will be a new challenge. But looking back, I suppose I have to say my favourite role is Alain, simply because what one was trying to say with one’s body and one’s actions seemed to be understood by the public. And after all, every artist, if they can convey what they are trying to say to a public, is very grateful. Even now people say that is the role they remember, because that is the role that speaks to them.
Kavanagh: You have said that you have to be very careful not to make Alain maudlin.
Grant: Yes, because you can exaggerate it too much. It should also be danced correctly. Because he’s a sort of clumsy thing some performers think it can be danced badly but it can’t. None of Ashton’s works should be danced badly: the movements were precisely given in order to convey the character of the artist. They have to be danced correctly and well. Even if it’s eccentric character dancing you can’t just slop around.
Kavanagh: Did you have a model in mind?
Grant: In a way yes. Not that Frederick said anything to me. I happened to see Tommy Steele in She Stoops to Conquer, and I thought that the role could have a certain charm, because Tommy Steele was very charming. He’s not an idiot, he's a child-like creature who has been kept from everything. His father has kept him away from everything, given him everything and looked after him. In the first act he wears a suit, which he has grown out of. He’s still very child-like; it’s too tight for him. In the second act he has a suit, which is too large for him – his father has bought him a suit hoping he’ll grow into it. He’s let down by the fact that his father has promised him something and hasn’t been able to deliver the goods. He's not stupid, just child-like through not being out in the world. That's often misunderstood by artists who perform the role.
Kavanagh: Can you tell us about Bottom?
Grant: There again I didn't know that I was going to be in The Dream until my name went up as Bottom. I happened to see a postcard of an actor who was playing Bottom at Stratford-on-Avon and he was already transformed into an ass. He had the ass’s head on and you could see that he wore leggings and had little black hooves and gloves. He looked as though he was standing on pointe. Ashton looked at me and said. ‘You can’t go on pointe, not with your feet.’ I said that if my trousers covered my feet, you wouldn’t see that I haven't got a beautiful arch. Nothing was said. I'm called for Bottom’s first rehearsal and Ashton asks. ‘Where are your pointe shoes?’ He choreographed Bottom’s little pointe dance in one rehearsal, as though I was on pointe, although I was in character shoes. At every rehearsal he then asked, ‘Where are your pointe shoes?’ I hadn’t been able to find any wide enough, so eventually I squeezed into some shoes, and by the time I had to do my pointework I didn’t know I had feet. When we were in America, I did manage to find some wide pointe shoes in Capezio, the line was called ‘Pavlova’ - which seemed like an omen.
Kavanagh: He put you on pointe again in Beatrix Potter.
Grant: Yes, my brother Garry, another boy and I were pigs on pointe. The whole film was choreographed in the studio. He made me his assistant on the film. Ashton also played Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. He hadn’t choreographed the finale when we started filming, and was worried that they would say: next day we will film the finale. Ashton always had a horror of being asked to choreograph in a hurry. When he was in revues, including Cochran’s, very often you would get a big number and Cochran would say, ‘Not good enough’, and he would have to choreograph it by the next day. So he always had a horror of working in a hurry. Anyway, he was asked, made an enormous fuss, and we learnt the finale in a hanger on the lot one afternoon.
Ann Nugent (critic): Which of the twenty-two roles that were created on you, and the ballets that are no longer performed, do you think would come back to life today if they were recreated?
Grant: That is one of the dilemmas that artistic directors have. I always remember Dante Sonata, which was performed barefoot, during the war. It had some wonderful moments in it, but whether it would be considered old-fashioned today is a very difficult question. One of Fonteyn's favourite ballets was Apparitions. Once, when she had had diphtheria, it was revived for her comeback. I used to think, with the music, that it was a wonderful ballet. Then when it was revived, when I was with English National Ballet, it didn't work - even with no less a person than Natalia Makarova.
I would like to finish with a story about the music for Ondine. Covent Garden moved a baby grand into my house for Hans Werner Henze to use while he composed Ondine. Henze used to orchestrate from the piano version. Ashton used to phone every day to enquire whether I had heard a tune. One day Frederick rang and Mrs. Griggs, my cleaning lady, answered. In response to Frederick’s question whether she'd heard a tune, she answered, ‘Yes, he’s been playing very pretty music all morning.’ That evening Frederick phoned me and said, ‘Henze’s at last written a tune.’ I said, ‘I can’t believe it, I’ll ask him.’ I informed Henze that Frederick was happy because he’d written a tune. Henze expressed surprise, and said, 'I didn’t feel like composing this morning. I played Mozart all morning.’ I believe Henze conducted Mozart at Frederick's memorial service.