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.
Choreographers and Teachers
Panel Discussion
Angela Kane: What was the first experience the members of the panel had of seeing or doing Ashton work, and what were the elements that touched them?
Julia Farron: The first experience I had was extraordinarily exciting. I was already connected to the school through a scholarship, and went to a performance up in the gallery of Sadler's Wells to see the first night of Les Patineurs. That, I think, was my first experience of Ashton and an Ashton ballet. I might possibly have seen Façade before, but at fourteen I didn't really know much about choreographers. But Les Patineurs had an enormous effect because it was such wonderful dancing, and the cast, including Pamela May here, were all so brilliant. People at the time said this was a new move because he had used much more strength of technique in that ballet than he had perhaps been able to before, because, except for the great dancers of Rambert like Alicia [Markova], this was the first time the company had got strong and were able to produce a really technically good ballet with all Fred's style.
The first time I worked with him was Wedding Bouquet, which was also thrilling. I was fourteen, with no experience except for working with Dame Ninette on Prometheus. The very beginning of that ballet was a group of children playing ball, and Madame came to the rehearsal with it completely counted out: plan, pattern, shape, steps, everything. We learnt it in about half an hour then she said go away and practice, and she got on with the next thing. And, of course, working with Fred was different. You didn’t come in and learn a step. I remember he grabbed my hand and he walked around holding my hand. Being as young as I was, I was a bit nervous of this hand-holding, but at the same time he was thinking while he was doing this and I was getting some kind of strength from it too, so that I could start working - as Pépé the dog! I was very small, which is perhaps why I was chosen, and also I could work quickly, which he also liked. One of the great problems was that I was five foot tall, but he wanted me to be smaller and I couldn't. I had to curl up like a dog curls up on the floor, and I couldn't get tight enough. ‘You're not small enough, get smaller, get smaller’ - that was one of the strongest remembrances of that ballet.
Pamela May: I was asked to dance with Sir Frederick before I had actually worked with him on a ballet. This was again one of Dame Ninette's early ballets, Douanes. The part was usually played by Beatrice Appleyard, one of the original members of Dame Ninette's company. I think she was ill, and I was suddenly told that I would have to do this 'flapper' dance in Douanes, which was a sort of musical comedy, with hitch kicks and things like that, and wonderful rhythm and hip movements - which of course Ashton was brilliant at, especially in those days when he was still dancing. So I found myself on with Ashton, which was a tremendous thrill.
After that, I think the first ballet I worked on with him was Baiser de la fée or Apparitions. Baiser de la fée I remember very well. One of Margot’s [Fonteyn] first parts was the bride, and several of us were her bridesmaids. The work in that was terrific footwork, something that again I don't think Ashton had done very much of, but very quick work, which was very tiring for the bridesmaids but very interesting. The next ballet, very soon afterwards, was Apparitions where again I had the excitement of actually dancing with Ashton, because when he arranged the ballroom scene he said to me, ‘You've got to have me as your partner because we're short of boys and I'll have to be in it myself.’ So I said wonderful, I didn’t mind. You should have seen that ballroom scene. Ashton was always saying use your body, and that’s what he did in the gallop in Apparitions, he whirled me around. Although he was small and light, he was incredibly fast in those days. I had the time of my life. I think we all did, in fact, when Apparitions was first done.
After that I think it must have been Les Patineurs, where I was one of the two red girls; there were two blue and two red girls. I remember Elizabeth Miller and I, June Brae and Mary Honer all working as soloists in Les Patineurs; and what a wonderful ballet that was to work with Ashton on. I did many other ballets at that time. I did Les Rendezvous, which was again a beautiful dancing part for the corps de ballet. There were four little girls who did all the quick work, and six couples who did mainly pas de deux. When it was first done, there was Markova and Idzikowsky. After that was Horoscope, another wonderful ballet, in which all I had to do was try and make my body into a moon. Every arabesque had to be with a curved leg at the back, and arm fairly high, in line with your head. There was a drop curtain, and when it went up I was at the back, standing there as the moon before the music started for me to bourrée forward. Ashton came round after the first performance and said, ‘I don't like the way you stand there at the back on a flat foot, couldn't you be up on pointe?’ I said, ‘I don't think so, I can't stand there for half a minute on pointe’ - there was nothing behind, only a curtain, not even something to lean against. ‘What a pity,’ he said. He was always wanting these extraordinary things.
Richard Glasstone: As Robert Helpmann said in the film of Ashton's retirement gala, ‘the work is the man and the man is the work’. I actually met the work twenty years before I met the man. I was a very young dancer in South Africa, sixteen years old; in our little company we did Les Rendezvous and later Les Patineurs. I started off in the corps de ballet in the pas de trois in Les Rendezvous, which is the hardest thing I think I have ever danced. Looking back now, I had only been dancing for a year when I had to do the pas de six in Les Rendezvous, and I think one of the reasons I managed it was because we did the same sort of steps in class as were in the ballet. The class was full of very quick footwork, and I had to get my feet around the class from the very first day. So the ballet didn't seem like a different language: it was a continuation of that sort of footwork and port de bras.
Twenty years later, when I started teaching at the Royal Ballet School - I had never met Ashton; he was just the great choreographer - I did a little ballet to music by Vivaldi called Primavera [1970]. Ashton came back stage afterwards and said the nicest thing any one has ever said to me. There I was, a young teacher at the Royal Ballet School doing a little ballet for the kids, and he said, ‘I liked that you hear the music the same way I do.’ I don't think you could have a greater compliment. I don't think of myself as a choreographer in any sort of original sense, but it was nice to think at least that he thought I heard the music properly.
I didn't really meet him again until 1984. He came to the Royal Ballet School to rehearse Pas de légumes, and driving back in the car we got talking about Cecchetti. He said so many nice and interesting things, which I didn't know, that I said, ‘Won’t you put it down on paper?’ That is when he wrote me that letter which I referred to.
Richard Alston: The first live performance of Ashton’s work that I saw was just after I left school. I have long-suffering parents who allowed me to leave school early in order to go to art college (they sent me to an extremely expensive school, so I'm sure they regretted it). The whole family had come up to London. We lived on the edge of Hampstead Heath and I saw in the local paper that the second Royal Ballet company was at the Hippodrome in Golders Green. Since leaving school I'd had this weird, strong desire to go and see loads and loads of ballet performances. So I went every night for a whole week, and at the end of the week, on Friday night, Saturday matinee and Saturday night, they did La Fille mal gardée. That was the first ballet of Fred's that I saw. I was completely bowled over on the Friday and went again on the Saturday matinee. I took my parents on the Saturday evening, took a deep breath and said, ‘You know on Monday I’m supposed to be starting at art college? I actually want to be a choreographer; all hell broke loose. And it was Fred's fault.
Ashley Page: I've been racking my brains trying to think of my first experience of Ashton. I think it must have been the dress rehearsal of Enigma Variations. I went to White Lodge [the Royal Ballet Lower School] in 1968, when I was twelve, and I think that was probably the first thing I saw that I consciously knew was Ashton’s. We had Joan Lawson teaching both straight dance classes and also history of ballet. She was a great influence on all of us at the time, and she would go on and on about Fred in both the dance classes and history of ballet classes. After seeing Enigma Variations, Joan explained it all to us: where it came from, what the music was about. I remember being extraordinarily excited about seeing people like Anthony Dowell, Wayne Sleep and Alexander Grant dashing down the stairs. I think it was probably the first time I had ever seen anything like that; before I had only seen the classics, things on television, and had been in Nutcracker just a few months before as a soldier. So this was the first time I had seen a one-act ballet.
There was a day, actually, that Fred came to White Lodge - I think it was his birthday or something like that - and I remember him talking to me at the front door. He was this very calm, cool, benevolent gentleman walking around chatting to everyone like he was the father of this place. There is a very famous photograph of him, which I think was taken that day standing by the big cedar in the grounds.
Glasstone: I want to add one thing, which I forgot to say. Within one or two years of my dancing in Les Rendezvous as a very young raw student, the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet under Peggy van Praagh came on tour into Cape Town. That was very important, because I then actually saw Les Rendezvous performed as it should be - having just danced it badly myself — and also saw the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet under Peggy van Praagh, who was a great custodian of that sort of style. Older people than myself talk about the Diaghilev Ballet as their touchstone; mine was the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet under Peggy van Praagh. I remember the fourteen ballets they performed that season with wonderful dancers, including Kenneth MacMillan, who was a very young dancer at the time. But it was having danced Ashton first and then seeing it properly performed by that wonderful company which was very important to me for understanding the style.
Kane: Are there any particular aspects of Ashton’s work, which influenced your careers? Julia, I think you wanted to talk about the footwork and the fleetness of the feet in terms of the style influencing the teaching.
Farron:I am not at all sure about this exactly, because I think as dancers, our quick footwork came originally from Dame Ninette, who could never do anything slowly; she always wanted us to do class very, very fast. So I think our quick footwork came from Madame, and Fred was always very anxious to use it, and made the best use of it. In those days, I think, the techniques were nothing like they are today. Today they get better and better and better. I speak for myself, obviously, but what we did have was very fast work and very fast movement, and I think most of those early ballets of hers and of Fred’s made good use of that. We didn’t, perhaps, have the extensions or the elevations that are needed from dancers today. Fred obviously used quick footwork whenever he wanted, and he was able to use it. The more you see of his ballets, the more you realise that this is a very important part of his choreography.
Kane: And because that is an aspect of his style, does that influence the way you then try to teach and to coach the Ashton style?
Farron:I don’t think it influences the way one tries to teach; coach, yes -- coaching is a very different matter. Teaching students, you are trying to build and prepare the body, always in the classical form - whether it is Cecchetti inspired or Russian inspired or whatever - you are building bodies to be dancers for choreographers to mess about with; this is what is important. I wouldn’t say that I have taught a class thinking, ‘This is for Fred’s ballets.’ But rehearsal, coaching, teaching dances out of his ballets, yes – it is a very different scene.
May: I think the only time we might have given the students something of Ashton’s to do was if we chose something for a solo part, or even part of a solo or pas de deux, or prepared them for maybe the annual school matinee. Then we’d say, ‘This is an Ashton ballet.’ But I agree with Julia: it didn’t actually come into the curriculum that this is an ‘Ashton day’ for teaching his work and his craft. You build up to what Ashton was when you get them into the company.
Alexander Grant:Would they have learnt chassé battements - backwards and forward and back?
Farron:Oh yes, of course, but that’s not an Ashton step though, it’s de Valois.
May:We had a de Valois syllabus to follow, which had every little step: assemblés, sissonnes, jetés coming forwards and then reversed going back, then coming forwards beaten, then going back beaten. That was the sort of thing we did in the class, which was more or less set down by Dame Ninette – which of course Ashton used very much. When you think back to those ballets, he always had a set of little girls who do quick movements, then there was a set of bigger girls, perhaps with their partners, doing the slower pas de deux adagios and getting their legs up. But in those days he nearly always divided into two groups, two kinds of dancers.
Kane:Richard, when we spoke a few weeks ago you mentioned the lyricism required in Ashton, that the boys had as an additional requirement for a male dancer. Did that influence your work as a teacher?
Glasstone:My own training and teaching have always taken for granted that boys have to be able to move quickly; I don’t see why boys have to move slowly all the time. How are you going to do the pas de trois or the pas de six in Les Rendezvous unless you can move extremely fast? So I think quick footwork is important for boys too. My training always said that boys had to be able to do lyrical work; it was quite natural to me. I have found over the years that some male teachers take a different attitude, but I can only speak for myself. I think that to equate lyricism with femininity is quite wrong: a man can be just as lyrical as a woman.
There is one more thing I would like to say about class. I think, and hope we would all agree - and certainly Ashton himself said - that his work was based on classical ballet. Nijinska said the same about her work. One of the things about classicism is balance. There is balance between the use of arms and legs for instance, there is balance in everything - and there has to be a balance in the shape of the class. And the balance of a classical class has, I think, become distorted and generalised over the years, for whatever reason; there is less time spent on quick footwork in the average classical class. You have to have barre work, a port de bras section, centre practice section, which is a repetition of what you did at the barre; you have to have a lot of adage of different types, small allegro and big allegro, travelling jumps and diagonals and round-the-rooms, jumps that are not beaten and then beaten. All that has to be fitted into an hour or two-hour class. Unless there is that balance within the shape of the class, whatever method you teach, to my mind you are not being true to classical principles. If you do maintain that balance, your dancer is equipped to dance any kind of ballet based on classical technique. And I think that has become distorted. Sometimes it is because a particular choreographer has the monopoly over the repertoire - there are lots of reasons, but I think if you are after classical ballet you have to have classical classes, and that classical classes of whatever method have to encompass all those things within each class every day.
Farron:I think it is perfectly true what Richard was saying that Fred was a classicist. His work was based on classical technique. But what he had was this marvellous way of taking steps and movements, and twisting them, turning them, altering them - face the other way, go at a different speed. But he was basically a classicist, and that is why he was such a wonderful coach to classical dancers: he knew what it was all about and he knew what he was aiming for.
May:The first time I did the Les Sylphides pas de deux, Ashton was my partner. Although the influence that Pavlova had on Ashton has been talked about a great deal, what I found in rehearsing this pas de deux was the tremendous influence of Karsavina; throughout the rehearsal and solos he was continually saying how Karsavina had done it. He later worked quite a lot with Karsavina, right up to La Fille mal gardée, when she gave him all the mime. As a classical dancer himself, he did that solo beautifully: light, with wonderful movement of shoulders, very lovely soft jumps. When he had given up dancing he often used to come and watch the end of class, feeding his brain with steps, reminding him of steps he could take out of class. He used to like to creep in and sit in the corner. It was wonderful: his brain was always alive.
Glasstone:Just to address your point about style. I think a great danger that you get with teachers, including, I have to confess, a lot of Cecchetti teachers (I’m sorry I’m criticising my own brethren here) - is that they think they have to teach a style. You don’t have to teach a style: you have to teach a technique. Style grows out of a technique, and it is the choreographer’s job and the coach’s job to draw out the style. The ballet teacher’s job is to develop musicality and technique, and the two must go together. But to say I am teaching ‘the Cecchetti style’ in the sense that I am teaching a nineteenth-century thing - that is not your job as a Cecchetti teacher or as a ballet teacher. Your job is to teach the dancer to understand the body, to control the body, to discipline the body so that it can do whatever anyone wants. If someone wants in a ballet to recreate the balletic style of Cecchetti’s day, then that is a stylistic thing for them to do. What I find fascinating about teaching Cecchetti is that the people who are interested and really understand it nowadays are contemporary dancers. People often think I’m mad when I say I think Cecchetti and Ashton and Cunningham are one. I think they are. I think it is contemporary dancers nowadays who understand all that off-balance business, which is so much a part of Cecchetti, but which has nothing to do with the Romantic period style.
Kane: Julia said very much the same thing when I was asking her about the way you need to train feet to dance Ashton ballets. She more or less said that you need a well-trained dancer - you don’t train the feet in a particular way, you need good feet.
Moving on to the two choreographers, Richard and Ashley. Has Ashton’s work influenced you in general terms, or are there particular technical, structural, or musical aspects that you have been informed by and have manipulated in any particular way?
Alston: There are loads of things, but I have singled out three things I want to address briefly; they all connect with what has already been said. You talked a lot about fast footwork. When I think about those kinds of steps, particularly in Fred’s work, I think more of the ‘power’ of small steps. Small steps: it’s not necessarily that they are fast. I feel that techniques are getting stronger and stronger, people can lift their legs higher and higher, choreographers want to wrench dancers into stranger and stranger shapes, the language gets in a way broader and bigger. That’s why for me Fred was such an important influence, because there was, until recently, a living artist who used the full range of volumes, if you like. So you could actually say something incredibly personal with a tiny little flick of the ankle. Sometimes small steps could express lightness of heart, something troubling the heart, all sorts of things. I have become increasingly interested in how he used the language to express all these different things.
Also, personally, I find there’s a sort of physical empathy - as a dancer who makes dances. I can’t explain why, but I really love to use my back and to get the body into soft diagonal positions so it’s not all square; and again the choreographer who does that most for me is Fred. I just love to use space, to feel space through the back, so you can actually feel the twist around the spine, which gives a three-dimensional aspect. In Fred’s characters this often gives some kind of softness or vulnerability or it becomes very expressive.
The third thing ties in with teaching. My work as a choreographer has often been with quite strident contemporary music, but my work as a teacher is very much concerned with linking the harmony of movement with melody. The connection between movement and music is immensely important. Fred sometimes chose what might be considered quite light-hearted music, but it gives the most wonderful clarity and framework in which, working every day you learn to dance. There is dance in Fred’s ballets. There is not always dance in choreographers’ ballets, but he makes people dance.
Fred talked to me a little about Nijinska teaching. One of the things that impressed him most - when he was in Ida Rubinstein’s company and Nijinska was his teacher -was that she would come in with a huge wedge of sheet music, dump it on the piano, and say ‘Today Mozart’; and the next day ‘Bach’. She had worked out the class according to one sort of musical style, one sort of feeling in music. She actually wanted the dancers to work with that music specifically; she wanted the feeling that a particular composer gave that day. I remember Fred talking about it at quite some length, and it obviously really impressed him - this in a way very intuitive approach to teaching, but still marvelously connected to music. It was that connection with music that was always, always there in Fred’s work.
Page:As a performer, I was lucky enough to be rehearsed by Sir Fred in several different roles. One was the poet in Illuminations, which was revived for the Royal Ballet in 1981. I was taught the role by John Taras, who was Balanchine’s lieutenant (Fred had made the ballet on New York City Ballet in, I think, 1952). Taras was a pretty hard taskmaster, and he really got me moving in this role. Then Fred came in for the last week or so of rehearsal. That was quite an extraordinary experience: I thought he was going to break me completely. Once we got on stage I had to wear this jacket that I felt very restricted by and consequently I was getting less fullness of movement than Fred had managed to get out of me in the studio. He made John Taras take me back to the studio that afternoon and put on a very thick motorbike jacket that I had with me at the time. He then made me do an hour or two’s work on the role in this leather jacket. He said, ‘You’ve got to dance and come out of that thing.’ It was exhausting, having just done a dress rehearsal in the morning, but the next night - the first performance - the difference was just amazing: just the feeling of having worked that hard and having to dance through this and out of this costume. I remember Fred coming back afterwards and saying, ‘I don’t ever want to see you dance in another way, it has to be that way you have to tear your guts.’ ‘Tear your guts’ was one of his most favourite expressions.
Kane:And that’s what you expect from your dancers now is it?
Page:Oh, it is! In fact, I use similar phrases, without actually realising until I’ve said it. As a choreographer everything that has been said so far applies. The whole thing about small steps is very interesting. A lot of choreographers these days don’t seem to want to use small steps - it’s all very big broad movement, which is also interesting. But it was the range of Fred’s work: he could, within a phrase, move from very broad expansive movement to something very small, and change speed, thereby deepening the textures of his movement phrases.
Having the good fortune to be rehearsed by Fred and danced in a lot of his ballets, there was the whole thing about not doing enough: it is never enough, you can always do more. That’s not to say that you’ve got to go for the top, of course; but you can always do more than you think, get more out of the smallest movement or phrase. That was always a great influence.
I think we are going to move on to the other question about which particular group of works is a favourite. Certainly my favourite is around 1946-48 - Scènes de ballet, Cinderella, Symphonic Variations, particularly Act II of Cinderella, which I think offers almost an abstract ballet, certainly once Cinderella has arrived. That whole stylistic phase of his work has been the major influence on me as a choreographer. Talking as a choreographer, I remember things like his fascination with a particular line of arabesque, which was what I call the downward ‘V’ — most of the time I think Fred hated arabesques which were ‘up’, he always wanted the absolute pure, straight arabesque with the finger in front of the nose. Quite often in Ashton ballets the legs didn’t have to be high, you were required to think of keeping them below hip level, below 90 degrees. Particularly in Cinderella and Scènes de ballet, the downward ‘V’ and low arabesque line are favourite things of mine. The difference between Symphonic Variations and Scènes de ballet is that Symphonic Variations is much more lyrical. I suppose in some ways people think of Scènes de ballet as being uncharacteristic of Ashton because of its hard edge and geometric shapes, and a lot of people think of it, perhaps because of the Stravinsky score, as being much closer to Balanchine. But there is, for me, a quintessential Ashton flavour in there. I know Scènes de ballet much more than Symphonic Variations because I have been in it. Symphonic Variations I know obviously very well, but only visually. I have actually learnt it, but never performed it. Symphonic Variations is always put on a pedestal as the ‘great’ work I suppose, but that group of three works made very close together has had the biggest influence on me as a choreographer. Plus, I suppose, there is such a strong flavour about it, it was very much a period of work.
There is another question about how the work changes over the years. I suppose Fred developed as the dancers were able to do more, as they became stronger technically. I am not sure whether that was Fred pushing them in the rehearsal studio, or whether it came from the class and just the ever-evolving physicality of dancers being able to do more.
Farron:I don’t think it was that way at all, I don’t think Fred ever demanded of dancers technically what they couldn’t do, he demanded the way they did it. But if they had those technical abilities he would use them.
Page:But with each succeeding generation of dancers I think you can see great jumps in the way he used classical technique. Like when Anthony Dowell came and did The Dream. Nobody has ever really done Oberon the way Anthony did. Obviously, in every choreographer’s work there are certain aspects of things that were made on a particular dancer, and no one else will ever do it like that - like probably David Blair with La Fille mal gardée, and obviously the whole Fonteyn thing.
Farron:I think even right back to Les Patineurs, no one had ever done it in the way Harold Turner did.
Glasstone:Why are we always saying that dancers are so much better today? There are many dancers today who couldn’t do the Turner variation.
Kane:Ashley you mentioned Scènes de ballet and its Stravinsky music. Given the sort of music that you have worked with, was that an influence - the way the choreography is set on the music?
Page:I suppose unconsciously it must have been, because I’ve been in Scènes de ballet and it’s inside me. You could say the way I hear and think of music as a dancer and as a choreographer must have a lot to do with being in the repertory that I’ve danced in, and also going to see things like Enigma Variations dress rehearsals you can see how the music is being used. As Richard Glasstone suggested when he mentioned Fred saying ‘you hear the music the same way I do’, there are different ways of hearing music, and certainly I can’t imagine Scenes de ballet being done any other way.
Kane: I was thinking of your Carmen Arcadiae, the structural relationship between the dance and the sound.
Page:Yes, absolutely. There is a not entirely unconscious relationship when I sit down and think about using a piece of music, particularly for Carmen and Pursuit - certainly Pursuit was a very conscious homage to Scènes de ballet, with the tutus and the geometric shapes and that very terse music; Scènes de ballet is pretty terse, although there are some more lyrical moments. Fred got inside that score and revealed it as another subject altogether; choreographers can reveal more about the music by the way they use it.
Kane:Richard, is there a particular group of Ashton’s ballets - the plotless works, or the demi-character, or the romantic style works from the 1930s - that you’d like to talk about?
Alston:I keep finding new things every time I go back and see a work of Ashton’s, so perhaps at that moment that particular work becomes a favourite. I love all the obvious ones - nothing very subtle I’m afraid - Les Rendezvous, Les Patineurs, La Fille mal gardée, Symphonic Variations, Scènes de ballet. One ballet that always astonishes me in a particular way is The Dream, because I find the economy and the speed of the narrative absolutely breathtaking - what he manages to get into a very, very short version of a very, very long Shakespeare story, which other choreographers have spread out over a whole evening. And the particular sensibility that he got out of the Mendelssohn music, particularly I think when it was first done with the Henry Bardon set and David Walker costumes, it really was about a particular group of characters, and it moved through this whole range of comic characters to the pas de deux, which is just astonishing. The speed of all the fairies suddenly stopping dead in their tracks and making these little romantic print images and so on - there are so many moments. It is certainly one piece that I love to go back to many times.
Kane:Does experience of his working process reveal anything about Ashton and his choreography for you?
Glasstone: I have to take a slightly different angle if I may. First of all, if I can choose three ballets, I would choose Les Rendezvous, Symphonic Variations and A Month in the Country.WhenI watched Dowell and Sibley rehearsing The Dream, the thing I felt was Ashton’s humanity. I am glad you used the word ‘plotless’ ballet and not ‘abstract’, because I don’t think there are any abstract Ashton ballets: they are all about human feelings, and that comes across so strongly for me, and I think is characteristic of Ashton. It comes across in quite different ways in those three ballets. Symphonic Variations, which seems to be abstract, is actually about human beings; Les Rendezvous is very flirtatious; and A Month in the Country is very moving. My poor wife was in hospital the day of the dress rehearsal of A Month in the Country and I was so moved by the dress rehearsal that I went to the hospital and said, ‘You have to let her out for three hours tomorrow because I’m taking her to the ballet.’ I took her to the ballet; she watched the performance and then went back into hospital. It was just so incredibly moving. By dancing in Les Rendezvous one was moved, and by watching it performed. And Symphonic Variations, when it is well danced, I find an emotional experience, not a geometric, plotless experience. Even with Scènes de ballet you can get that feeling if it is well danced.
Kane:Pamela, did you observe any changes in the working process, the way he made the ballets? What we have found increasingly during this conference is that he went in with a blank page - was that the case in the very early stages?
May:Well, no I don’t think it was, though I don’t know about all the ballets. In The Wanderer, when we rehearsed the pas de deux with Michael Somes, in 1941-42, the theatres had all closed, the company was disbanded for a short time, and we were all over the country. We were all called back to Dartington Hall, the home of Kurt Jooss, where there was this lovely grass quadrangle, dancers’ flats, a dining room and a little theatre. It was a world of its own. We were advised that Ashton wanted to start on one of his new ballets. We were there for about a month, and on Christmas morning there was a knock on my door. It was Fred saying, ‘Are you going to church?’, and I said I probably was. ‘I felt like doing your pas de deux this morning,’ he said. So I said I would go to church later - we had our own chapel too. We went up to this rehearsal room, and lying all over the floor were pieces of paper. On them were beautiful drawings, with lovely positions, bodies, heads - some were just heads and arms, some were whole bodies. I said, ‘Fred this is beautiful, what is it?’ He replied, ‘Just a few little positions I thought we might use.’ Of course, Constant [Lambert] was there, and I said, ‘Why don’t we do one after the other with the music?’ He said, ‘Yes, that’s what I thought.’ So, you see, he thought a lot of ideas.
Funnily enough, I never asked him if he had drawn these positions himself, or if he had copied them out of books, until a year before he died. Suddenly I don’t know why I said, ‘You remember those positions that you used in my pas de deux in The Wanderer, all beautifully drawn out, were they your own or had you copied them?’ He said, ‘Hmm, I’m not sure, I often did them myself and I also often copied them out of books.’ Even walking along the road in France or Spain or Italy he would just scribble little drawings, so in a funny way he was doing so many preparations. He wasn’t like Dame Ninette, who had every bar of music with every position of even your little finger. But obviously in his brain he had all these ideas, it was just forming them musically. The minute he saw you move in a position he would say ‘That’s what I want’, or ‘That’s not what I want, your arms are in the wrong sort of position, put them somewhere else.’ He would know what he didn’t want very quickly. We had a wonderful time; we thought we were practically doing the choreography in the end — but we weren’t, believe me!
Farron:I think a lot of people who didn’t work with Fred as much as perhaps we have, used to say ‘Well, you did all the steps yourself.’ But, of course, you don’t: you give him a sort of spark and then he takes over. I was thinking of what Pamela said about the drawings. It’s not that he hadn’t thought about it, because one knows that for months and months he has thought, the music is within him, what it’s going to look like, the designs, the costumes - everything is there when he starts work. It took me back to working on The Wise Virgins, which we did during the war. Before we started, he brought books for us to look at on the Botticelli paintings that he wanted. With The Wise Virgins especially the very specific positions and groupings that we had to take (there was not a lot of dancing in it) were very clear when he came. But the steps that we did were not there; he didn’t walk into the room with them, that’s true.
May:It was exactly the same with Dante Sonata.
Kane: Was there a big difference in his working process between those one-act ballets of the l930s and early l940s and when he started with Cinderella and later with Ondine, when he moved into the bigger, the longer form?
Farron:I don’t know. When you work with someone for so many years, you don’t see the difference in the process; but I am sure there must have been development in some way. But the actual process of making a ballet was the most exciting thing one could possibly do. For me, my career was built on doing Fred’s ballets, especially creating the new ones, and it didn’t matter if you had a soloist role or the leading role or if you were in the corps de ballet (which was a dream, because you went to rehearsal knowing you were going to have fun apart from anything else). The one thing I haven’t heard anybody mention is Fred’s wit. He was the most witty man, unbelievably witty. It comes out, of course, in his work, and his characterisation and marvellous mechanicals in The Dream, Cinderella, Wedding Bouquet, La Fille mal gardée - wonderful wit.
Kane:Could I ask both Julia and Pamela another question: could you comment on your work as teachers setting Ashton choreography extracts on students and then Ashton coming in and coaching?
Farron:I didn’t go through that process myself, but I used to teach in the repertory classes - with his permission always. You couldn’t just go and teach a Fred ballet or a Fred dance; you had to go to him. I asked him if I could teach the Façade Polka in my class. He said, ‘Do you remember it?’ and I said, ‘Well, I did it for a long time, Fred.’ He said, ‘Oh, all right – don’t change it!’ - which, of course, I wouldn’t have dared to do. When I had the graduate class I occasionally used to teach that fabulous Les Rendezvous solo which I love so much - I never did it, but it is a simply wonderful variation, and Pamela did it wonderfully. There is a simple exit step; the first time I ever taught it I was very new to teaching. I showed them what to do. They couldn’t get it. I explained that it was alternate arm and leg forward with one shoulder forward and one back, but they still didn’t get it. It suddenly hit me, so I said, ‘Put your hands behind your backs and do it with your body. Not épaulement, but the torso. You can’t dance Fred with a stiff torso. Put your hands behind your back and lead with your shoulders, release the arms and let them be completely relaxed and the shoulders are moved by your own torso’. It’s difficult to do or teach that variation, or any other Fred variation, because they all use that same thing: they don’t just use épaulement or just bend - they twist!
Kane:Pamela, you’ve talked about the work that Sir Frederick did on the Solo Seal. Have there been other teaching situations where you’ve actually set some of his choreography and then he’s come in and added additional comments?
May: No. He did teach those two solos from scratch. There was nothing that I could say to him. There was a body and a piece of music, and off he went. I would coach the rehearsals and he would come back the next week, and we would go through the dances and he would correct again, like I had done with those children.
Kane:Were there any elements that he emphasised again, apart from the bend and the épaulement, other stylistic aspects that he stressed?
May: He always had something to say. You might think it had been beautifully done, perfectly - but there was always something!
Farron:There are so many small details. For instance he would say ‘Don’t show the audience the palms of your hands, that’s ugly.’ You didn’t think about that until you looked in the mirror, and now I’m continually correcting that point - fifth position of the arms with the hands not quite turned inwards. He used to say that certain dancers had ‘housemaid’s knees’ - that they weren’t always fully stretched or pulled up.
May:My arabesque foot was always a ‘flatiron’! He used to say ‘What’s that flatiron doing there?’
Glasstone:I was fascinated by what Julia said, because struggling to teach Cecchetti ports de bras (some of which are very complex) to younger students at White Lodge was very difficult. I eventually cracked it when I said, ‘We’re going to do port de bras without the arms.’ In fact you can do port de bras with your arms behind your back or hanging by your sides, and you then discover what your body is doing and the arms go after that.
The thing I want to say about the early experience I have had: I was involved with the students who were going to dance Pas de légumes at White Lodge, and Ashton came down to that rehearsal. He was extremely nice to the kids. He corrected certain things - what Ashton wants to see, always, is every position absolutely clearly but you never stop moving. I want to read you what he said in a letter after that rehearsal. It was extremely complimentary. (When he says ‘you’ it was not addressed just to me, but to the whole staff at White Lodge and the people who were putting on Pas de légumes.) It reads: ‘I thought your boys and girls were delightful in the old veg pas. You do wonderful work on them and they are so youthful and fresh and well-mannered, which is a joy to see these days.’ So he obviously thought we didn’t do it too badly. But it’s not me, it’s us at White Lodge who did it.
Kane:Ashley, did Sir Frederick come and coach you before the performance of The Two Pigeons?
Page: This was the school matinée, the students’ performance in 1975. In January we’d been learning the ballet for a few weeks, just bits of it, and then Fred came in to choose who should do the performance. Always in the school year that’s a very nerve-wracking time, as so much importance is placed on the school performance. At the same time, Kenneth [MacMillan] was coming in to choose people for Danses concertantes, also on the programme. The next day the cast sheet went up, and I was very excited to see that I was doing the gypsy lover. Fred came to rehearse us more meatily - again, it was all about everything having to be bigger, more than you think you can do, and again, as Richard was saying, he was very charming and very nice to us, which gave us confidence. It immediately relaxed us and made us focus on the work, and not on being rehearsed by the great Frederick Ashton.
Kane:How much did you realise at that time - or reflect later on - the links between the Cecchetti training that you’d had through the school?
Page:No. Richard Glasstone hadn’t got that quite going at that time.
Glasstone:There’s something that I’ve never talked to Ashley about before. When Ashley was at White Lodge, he was an extremely bubbly warm boy. At the Upper School, he went through a stage when he became very withdrawn. He wanted to be a pure, classical dancer, like Anthony Dowell, and we got quite worried about him. At one point we thought we were going to have to send him to a shrink! When his name went up to dance in Pigeons, we thought: this is not what Ashley is going to want, because he wants to be the pure classical dancer, he wants to do Symphonic probably. In fact, dancing that role changed you completely. I don’t know if you were aware of that, but it brought you out, back to what you were. You obviously gained confidence, whether it was him or the role or whatever.
Page:Well, I think, both. The fact that I had been chosen and I’d actually got through this thing. The other people down to learn this role for him to choose from were physically much more suited to it, and I actually went to Lynne Wallis, who was directing the school performance, and said, ‘I can’t do this because there are all these other people that are much more suited than I am.’ Coincidentally later that year I did grow a lot, and I did feel more as though I were right for it. Getting into the studio and having been chosen gave me the initial confidence. Then you could relax and just focus on the work, and get as much out of his personality as you possibly could.
Farron:With La File mal gardée, not long before I retired from the school (I didn’t have anything to do with the teaching of it), there were two girls prepared for Fred to come in and choose. His choice was extraordinary, and it made me realise he had a wonderful eye and knowledge of dancers. He chose the one that nobody expected, but it was such a successful choice: Sandra Madgwick. She was a lovely little girl whom I absolutely adored teaching, but she spent most of her time behind the piano because she couldn’t bear to look at herself. She didn’t like the look of her feet and she didn’t like the look of herself as a dancer; she wouldn’t come in front of the mirror, or me. She learnt the role, but she didn’t think she was going to get it. She did, and she’s had the most enormous success ever since. It was like a little miracle.
Kane:Richard, did you observe Sir Frederick at Rambert when he was setting Five Brahms Waltzes on Lucy Burge, and then the Mannequin Dance from A Tragedy of Fashion for a gala performance?
Alston:I think the clearest thing to say about the Mannequin Dance was that Fred was petrified. It was very generous and courageous of him to allow something from way way back to be remembered. Diana Gould (Lady Menuhin) remembered the beginning and the end. Basically Fred had to fill in the bit in the middle.
Kane:So it wasn’t coaching, it was rechoreographing.
Alston: He did - he made it up. It was obviously very influenced by the dance of the girl in blue with the gloves in Les Biches. He remembered the images. The fascinating thing about him working with Lucy was his tremendous memory for a dancer. It’s often spoken about when talking of Pavlova and so on. The things he said to Lucy about Isadora were crystal clear. He would have seen her when he was a young man in South America - and it wasn’t just a picture or a shape, it was a memory of physical things. I think when he first started that dance, when he was making it for Lynn [Seymour], he made just the last section first for a gala, and the image he first remembered was when she came forward from the back with those petals. There was a great deal of detail in how to let these petals go, how to hold them, and how they would come out. It was extraordinary memory for movement, for images and for a dancer’s particular style, which I can’t help feeling must have dovetailed, if you like, into his sensibility about young dancers. His memory had a tremendous sense of a dancer’s particular physicality, be it Fonteyn, Pavlova, Isadora, or a young dancer whom he chose from behind the piano.
Kane:I think we ought to open this discussion to the floor.
Anon:What was the Mannequin Dance?
Alston:This was the solo which Diana Gould had performed as a separate item, but it was actually a solo from A Tragedy of Fashion.
Joan Seaman (Ballet Association):Something that hasn’t been touched on at all: Ashton lived through six years of an absolutely horrible war. Did it affect his choreography in any way?
Farron:I don’t think so. I think the only thing, perhaps, one could say was that when he had been called up and he was given that three months’ leave to come and do The Quest: it wasn’t one of his most successful ballets, purely because, as Beryl Grey said, the music arrived in dribs and drabs, one page at a time. Some of the ballets that we did during the war were wonderful ballets. Dante Sonata was inspired by Poland. I don’t think it had any bad effect; in fact, I think it inspired him.
Seaman: The war affected most people in some way.
Farron:Well, in a funny sort of way it didn’t affect the Vic-Wells Ballet, because it thrived and grew and developed at that time, and a lot of that was, of course, what he did for us.
May:It brought in audiences that we had never had before at the New Theatre. We had nine performances a week.
Alastair Macaulay:He made some more serious ballets than he had ever made before, and yet in the middle of the dark time of the war he added to Façade the Foxtrot, my favourite dance in the whole of that style. The wit still bubbled up in the middle of all that darkness.
Geraldine Morris:I think the war did affect him quite a lot. Certainly when he choreographed Symphonic he talked about the amount of mysticism he’d read during the war which influenced Symphonic. And the whole trend from Dante Sonata to The Wanderer and The Quest shows a lot of the neo-Romanticism of the painters of the era; and like the neo-Romantics he wanted an end that responds to the event. His work did change quite a lot, and I think you can see it in the pas de deux from The Wanderer and in Dante Sonata right through beyond Symphonic. It would be true to say that it did affect him.
Farron:I took it that the question meant did it affect him adversely which of course it didn’t.
Julie Kavanagh:We’ve heard so much about épaulement and fleet footwork and so on - is this technique being taught at the Royal Ballet School? Is Cecchetti taught at all?
Monica Mason:I’m not at the Royal Ballet School, but I am very closely connected with it, and I know that Merle Park’s aim is to produce a very rounded classical dancer. The training goes from White Lodge to the Upper School, and although I think a lot of people have talked about the change of syllabus and the change of emphasis on the work, I think that the aims are still to produce a classical dancer at the end of the seven years of training. I do think that an enormous difference comes from the repertoire class. It is extremely important that the person who is teaching repertoire, in this case Julie Lincoln, does an absolutely brilliant job. She worked very closely with Sir Frederick and knows his work very well from being a dancer in his ballets and from when he came along for the final rehearsals before a school performance. She has a wonderful memory. She was party to many little ‘Fredisms’ and can quote them very easily and freely and does so when she is rehearsing the children now.
Glasstone:I have heard Julie complain that she would like certain things taught differently, because they would make her work easier. I don’t know if that’s a controversial thing to say.
Mason:She did complain about the lack of chassé when she came to do Les Patineurs. She had to start to teach the chassé, and I think it is important that she also noticed changes in the use of the head. But I have to say that when the students come into the company Julie has done such a brilliant job that we don’t notice the difference.
Anon:There is a name that I have not heard mentioned here, unless I missed it: Constant Lambert. I was thinking about the closeness of the years when Lambert and Sophie Fedorovitch died - were you conscious of any difference in Ashton’s approaches after that? He must have felt a terrible sadness over both those deaths.
May:There was tremendous collaboration between the three - not just Ashton and Fedorovitch - from the Ballet Club days through Sadler’s Wells and later. Constant and Fred worked tremendously together. They used to discuss what music they would use, how much, what could be cut, and so on. Right from the word go when Rio Grande was put on - which was Lambert’s music, first done, I think, at the Camargo and later at Sadler’s Wells - practically every rehearsal one went to Lambert was there playing for us, though not the whole time because we had an excellent pianist in Hilda Gaunt. Throughout the war we had no orchestra. We had two pianos played by Constant Lambert and Hilda Gaunt, and we did all those ballets. A lot of them sounded wonderful - particularly Les Sylphides - on two pianos. In that last year, when Constant got so ill and died, it was obvious that Ashton was very very sad; he missed him greatly. I can’t help but think that today with younger choreographers coming along, they must miss terribly not having a musical director as dedicated as Constant. I don’t think there could be another one.