His marginality shaped Ashton’s role as a choreographer. He was never interested, for example, in building a school or codifying technique (de Valois tended to that), and his greatest debt, as he never tired of explaining, was to Anna Pavlova and Isadora Duncan. Yet Pavlova and Duncan were iconoclasts whose success depended more on personal magnetism than technique (classical or otherwise). Ashton too was an iconoclast: he began choreographing in the late 1920s, while he was still performing and studying, and films of his earliest works already indicate a bold, almost rushing style. Videotape excerpts of Les Rendezvous (1933), for example, show fleeting footwork and fast arpeggios of steps skimming the floor in light, evanescent movements. Even in the most lyrical passages, the dancers barely alight in one position before eliding into the next as if running full tilt through the classical lexicon, reluctant to take its full measure. The dancing tends to extended, breathless phrases filled with Isadora Duncan–like flourishes and feints, barely controlled by conventional grammar. Indeed Ashton became known for working with rushes of dramatically tinged movement which sent him flying across the studio; he would then turn to the dancers, asking, “What did I do?”25
Yet behind this apparent nonchalance lay a fluent and intuitive grasp of the mechanics of classical ballet. Ashton especially admired Cecchetti’s quick, filigreed steps and was known to lift whole enchaînements from the classroom, to be set like precious jewels into his ballets. Les Rendezvous, for example, is packed with intricate steps requiring a finely graded classical technique: the dancers move with mercurial ease from moments of physical relaxation to taut muscularity, from colloquial gestures to perfect classical poses. They break the rules as fast as they make them, racing through steps that are traditionally slow or allowing an upright arabesque to sink into a luxurious back bend. At times the steps double back or reverse on themselves with tricky changes of direction punctuated by generous bends through the torso, leaving the impression of pressing urgency and languid suspension at the same time. (When Margot Fonteyn first learned the ballet she complained that it was impossible to dance: too many “opposites.”) Ashton had internalized the grammar of ballet, but like so many of his contemporaries, he hid his learning in great waves of enthusiasm and wit, in clever inversions and stylishly fleeting poses.26
Indeed, many of Ashton’s early ballets were all wit and style: amusing impersonations and satirical portraits that showcased his dancers’ ability to reproduce, through subtle gestures and seemingly offhand inflections, the manners and spirit of an era. Façade (1931), to a score by William Walton, was a send-up of popular social and theatrical dances—tangos, music hall soft-shoe routines, waltzes, and polkas; Rio Grande (1931), with music by Lambert to a poem by Sacheverell Sitwell (Edith’s brother), was a depiction of low life in a tropical seaport, featuring prostitutes in skimpy costumes and an “orgy” of sailors. Les Masques (1933) was a jazzy trifle about a masked ball. Asked later to revive it, Ashton prudently refused: “It wouldn’t work … we were just acting being ourselves.”27
Perhaps the most enduring of these period pieces was A Wedding Bouquet (1937). With music and designs by Lord Berners and libretto by Gertrude Stein, it was a mocking portrayal of a country wedding, in which the guests include many of the bridegroom’s former lovers. The colorful cast of characters included the bridegroom, a suave lady’s man (danced by Robert Helpmann); Julia, a dark-haired, slightly crazed and saddened girl pulling nervously at her straggly hair (Margot Fonteyn); Josephine, an outrageous high-society lady whose pretensions dissolve into ridiculous hysterics as she becomes progressively soused (June Brae); Webster, a strict English maid scolding everyone (Ninette de Valois); and Pépé, a skittering dog who posed à La Sylphide in the final tableaux. Throughout, a chorus (later a narrator) recited Stein’s broken, half-nonsense text. Audiences loved it. But not all of Ashton’s early ballets were this successful: Cupid and Psyche (1939), a burlesque of the classic story created with Lord Berners over too much food and wine at his country estate, was a flop (George Bernard Shaw told Ashton: “You’ve made the same mistake that I once made—you’ve been frivolous about serious people”); and Les Sirènes (1939), with Berners and Cecil Beaton, was so embroidered with sly in-jokes that no one got it.28
Nonetheless, Ashton’s talent was clear, and when he threw his artistic weight behind de Valois in 1935, her newly forming enterprise began to cohere. Ashton’s ballets (along with her own) were to be one pillar of British ballet. The other—and de Valois was very deliberate in her planning—was to be the Russian Imperial classics of Marius Petipa. Today this sounds like an obvious strategy, but it is important to remember just how far-fetched it was at the time. Most Russian émigré dancers knew only sections or pieces of ballets (their parts); few had bothered to commit whole works to memory, and staging them was thus a haphazard affair at best. In 1932, however, de Valois located the former Maryinsky ballet master Nikolas Sergeyev and offered him a ten-year contract to stage Giselle, Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and later The Sleeping Beauty for the Vic-Wells company. Sergeyev, as we have seen, possessed that rare thing: a written record of the ballets. He had been present for Petipa’s last years at the Maryinsky Theater around the turn of the century and, working with several others, had recorded some twenty-four of the master’s ballets. The notations, however, were sketchy and incomplete. They were written in several different hands and never published; Petipa himself had disavowed them. Still, they were a record—the only record—and when Sergeyev emigrated to the West he shrewdly brought them with him.
Even with notes, however, reconstructing the old classics was fraught with difficulties. Sergeyev was rigid and irascible, and spoke very little English (he carried a Malacca cane to prod the dancers); he often depended on a retinue of Russian colleagues for help, including Lydia Lopokova, who bustled about rehearsals, calming Sergeyev, instructing the dancers, and generally trying to make peace. De Valois found Sergeyev frustratingly unmusical, and she would watch in horror as he took out his large blue pencil and wiped whole passages from the score of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake—passages she and Lambert would later quietly restore. Indeed, Sergeyev often seemed to de Valois more interested in the sets and costumes than in the steps, and she took to holding secret rehearsals to iron out problems in the choreography.
Nonetheless, the Vic-Wells got its classics and “wrote” them into the bodies and memories of a generation of British dancers. Initially, de Valois depended on the Russified English ballerina Alicia Markova (Lilian Alicia Marks from London’s Muswell Hill) to dance the technically demanding lead roles. But Markova already had an international career, and de Valois wanted to develop dancers in a new and “plain British” style. Taking the lead, the South African–born ballerina Pearl Argyle deliberately chose not to Russify her name. “I am British, and more than proud of it,” she told the tabloid Daily Mirror, “why should I have to change my name to something with an air of the Ghetto or the Boulevard to achieve success? I believe the day of the ‘Inskys’ and the ‘Ofskies’ is dead, and in the face of what some of the critics say I feel that my public like me plain British.”29
Argyle’s self-consciously nationalist pride signaled the dancers’ growing desire to break free of the Russians (and Lilian Marks), but also to liberate themselves from anything too fancy or high-minded. British ballet’s debt to music hall was ongoing, and the tension between classicism and more popular theatrical traditions would be one of its most distinctive features. Argyle herself had weak technique but plenty of stage glamour, and her impulse to trump the Russians (her teachers) with native plainness (even when she was anything but) would shape British ballet for decades to come. In 1934 Margaret Evelyn Hookham, a gifted but scarcely trained fifteen-year-old girl—“plain British” if ever there was one—joined the Vic-Wells company. Rechristened, she quickly became the company’s leading ballerina: Margot Fonteyn.
Margot Fonteyn was born into a lower-middle-class family in England in 1919. When she was nine, her father, wh
o was an engineer, was posted to Shanghai, via Louisville, Kentucky, and Seattle, Washington. Her brother was shipped off to boarding school, but Fonteyn, being a girl, stayed with her family and was increasingly bound to her mother, a savvy but eccentric woman of Irish and Brazilian descent. Fonteyn’s education was spotty at best, but she had always studied dancing—ballroom, tap, calisthenics, Greek, and ballet—and vaguely hoped to perform in musical theater. In Shanghai, of all places, her mother found the Russians: Vera Volkova, a student of Agrippina Vaganova, who would later teach in London and at the Royal Danish Ballet, was there performing in cabarets alongside George Goncharov, formerly of the Bolshoi Ballet. Both had left Russia in the wake of the Revolution, and it was from them that Fonteyn received her first serious training. In 1933 her mother took her back to London to study with Serafina Astafieva, another Russian émigré teacher (she smoked Balkan Sobranies from a long cigarette holder and taught in a turban-style scarf, white stockings, and a pleated skirt tucked into black silk bloomers). Once in London, however, all roads led to de Valois, who immediately spotted Fonteyn’s talent and took her under wing.
Fonteyn’s timing was perfect: she arrived just as de Valois’s company took off. She threw herself with abandon into the classics and into Ashton’s ballets—and plunged headlong into the world of London’s high bohemia. She met Karsavina, Lopokova, and Keynes, and fell in love with Lambert, with whom she had a passionate and enduring affair (he was married and twice her age), in spite of his drunken forays and her mother’s stern disapproval. Audiences loved her: she was dark and exotic (the other dancers called her “the Chinese girl”), sexy but girlish, and she had none of the airs of the old Russian ballerinas (or of Markova, who by then had left to form her own company). In 1939 she danced the ballerina role in de Valois’s pared-down and low-budget—but proudly British—production of The Sleeping Princess.*
Fonteyn’s real breakthrough, however, came during the Second World War. When war was declared in September 1939, London’s theaters briefly closed and the ballet disbanded. A reduced troupe eventually gathered, however, and performed in London and toured the provinces. With them Fonteyn danced for the troops and the people, in theaters and parks, through the Blitz and the doodlebug bombs. Performance times were adjusted to curfews: there were lunch, tea, and sherry ballets, and Fonteyn was known to give as many as six performances a day. She performed Giselle, Swan Lake, and Les Sylphides as well as contemporary works. In Ashton’s 1940 ballet Dante Sonata, to music by Liszt, Fonteyn (partnered by Michael Somes) portrayed the forces of good in a confrontation with evil (Robert Helpmann with June Brae). With its sentimental theme and dramatic freestyle movement—barefoot dancers with hair flowing and borne aloft, and somber images of good and evil nailed to a cross—Dante Sonata was one of the company’s most popular wartime offerings.
Fonteyn’s fame grew. She was universally admired for the beauty of her dancing, but also for her steadfast endurance and courage. Conditions could be harrowing: the war took more than thirty thousand civilian lives in London alone, and from the earliest days of the Blitz a sign was placed in front of the footlights and would light up: air raid alert and ALL CLEAR. And when the terrifying pilotless doodlebugs came—one never knew where these “bombs with slippers on” would fall—most theaters closed and over a million people were evacuated from the city. But the dancers stood their ground, even as the bombs fell hourly over the area. Like the queen, Fonteyn never flinched nor fled the capital city; she was their leader, but also “one of us,” her girlish face wrapped in a scarf peering out from under countless adoring headlines: “Margot, the ballerina.” As a sign of her enhanced wartime stature, Fonteyn’s photo was mounted in the officers’ wardrooms of at least one naval battleship. But it was not just Fonteyn: ballet itself was experiencing a wartime “boom.” By 1943, performances in London were in such high demand that tickets had to be rationed, along with almost everything else: queues formed up to ten hours before the precious seats were distributed.30
Performing was not always easy. Dancers faced shortages of toe shoes (no glue), tights (no silk), and material for costumes, but especially of male dancers, most of whom had left the ballet to serve. Keynes, whose support for ballet was undiminished by his heavy governmental responsibilities, tried to secure exemptions for male dancers, arguing that Russia and Germany had released dancers from service in the First World War and “we ought not to be less civilized than they were then.” The Minister of Labour, Ernest Brown, however, was unmoved and Keynes finally gave up: “I am afraid he is a savage.” Thus, except for brief intervals, Ashton was gone from 1941 to 1945 (he spent much of the war behind a desk in London), and most of the company’s leading men also disappeared. Only the dancer and choreographer Robert Helpmann, who was Australian, was allowed to remain. Ever resourceful, de Valois, who would be made a Commander of the British Empire after the war and was celebrated in the press as the “Montgomery of the ballet,” applied herself to the discipline and training of new dancers.* The Sadler’s Wells Theater had been converted to a refuge for the homeless (the company performed at other theaters), but on its upper floor she and her teachers did their best to produce a new crop of young dancers. It was an uphill battle: boys no sooner learned to point their feet or partner than they were gone to fight. Thus as Fonteyn and the company’s ballerinas grew stronger and more skilled, the level of male dancing plummeted. It would take a generation to recover.31
On May 8, 1945, Winston Churchill announced the surrender of Germany. Several weeks later a new Labour government swept to power and in the ensuing years formalized what the war had already begun to enact: the British welfare state. Henceforth, government would play a central role in health, insurance, employment, housing—and the arts. The people had won the war; now it was up to the government to secure for them a fair and just peace. It was a moment, however brief, of national consensus, and Keynes was determined to ensure a central place for the arts. Since 1942 he had been chairman of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, which became the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1946, shortly after his sudden and untimely death. Uncompromisingly highbrow and dismissing calls for state-funded amateur art, Keynes insisted that support should go only to professionals whose rigorous standards would feed the growing demand for “serious and fine entertainment.” It was a characteristically ambitious vision: he wanted nothing less than to make London the cultural capital of Europe.32
Ballet was an important part of Keynes’s plan. In 1946 he arranged for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet to become the resident company at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.* The theater had been converted to a dance hall during the war, but after a series of negotiations spearheaded by Keynes, it was restored to its former grandeur. For the opening gala performance in February that year, the company danced Ashton and de Valois’s The Sleeping Beauty (produced by Nikolai Sergeyev after Marius Petipa), with lavish sets and costumes by Oliver Messel (pieced together from parachutes, draperies, and whatever they could find) and starring Margot Fonteyn. Keynes explained: “We shall be over a limited field declaring peace, so to speak, by restoring again this fragment of civilization.” Indeed, the performance, attended by the royal family, Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and the full cabinet, was widely seen as a metaphor for Britain’s awakening after the horrors of two world wars. Keynes himself later reflected in a letter to his mother, “Many people had come to fear in their hearts … that all the grace and elegant things from the old world had passed permanently away, and it caused an extraordinary feeling of uplift when it was suddenly appreciated that perhaps they had not entirely vanished.”33
Ashton’s own stature was secured with Symphonic Variations, which premiered later in 1946 with music by César Franck and designs by the Polish émigré artist (and one of Ashton’s closest friends) Sophie Fedorovitch. In sharp contrast to Ashton’s previous works, Symphonic Variations (which is still performed today) had no story, no mask, no amusing impersonations or wit
ty repartee. It was abstract and has often been taken as Ashton’s testament to the power of neoclassical dance. But Symphonic Variations was much more than a dance for dance’s sake; it had a message, which is still crystal clear today. The ballet features six dancers (three men and three women) in simple white leotards and short skirts, antique in tone. There are no star performers, tricks, or technical feats: instead the dancers move lyrically and in unison, breaking into pairs, solos, and duets, but always weaving back together, their steps and dances tightly coordinated and entwined. Their movements are restrained and sculptural: flat hands, skimming lifts, and low-tilt arabesques. The close-stitched steps nonetheless carve generous shapes through the space, creating a sense of freedom and openness (Ashton’s earlier dances had been measured to very small theaters, and he reveled in Covent Garden’s large stage). The dancers, moreover, never leave the stage: they are a community of individuals bound together by discipline and a common pursuit. Symphonic Variations was practically a social democratic ballet.
The ballet had other resonances too. Ashton later recalled that during the war he had been obsessed with mysticism and ideas of dedication and divine love. More to the point, perhaps, in 1944 he had also studied intensively with the Russian teacher Vera Volkova, who had opened a studio in London, and later worked with her on his ideas for the ballet. She came to rehearsals, and together they worked to purify and refine the steps. While he was preparing the ballet, moreover, he and Fedorovitch often cycled together in the Norfolk countryside, and the seasons emerged as a theme: he filled his notebooks with ideas about darkness and light, the sun, earth, and fertility, and her abstract, light-suffused designs owed something to these discussions. All of this went into the ballet.
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