Frederick Ashton’s Symphonic Variations (1946) with Moira Shearer, Margot Fonteyn, and Pamela May. (10.1)
Symphonic Variations was a powerful aesthetic statement: in favor of a harmonious and unadorned classicism embued with natural forms—and firmly against the melodramatic theatricality represented by de Valois and Helpmann. Indeed, the pared-down lyricism of Symphonic Variations stood in sharp contrast to another ballet presented that year, Helpmann’s wildly expressionistic Adam Zero, which depicted bombing raids, a city in flames, and a concentration camp. Helpmann’s work cut too close to the memory of war, and his attempt to express its horrors onstage seemed to many in poor taste: how could ballet, one incredulous critic demanded, expect to describe “the writhing and the burning of a man in Belsen”? Adam Zero fell from the repertory; Symphonic Variations was widely acclaimed.34
Symphonic Variations was pristine and lyrical, but this did not mean that Ashton had lost his sense of humor. In 1948 he created Cinderella. As we will recall, this ballet, with music by Prokofiev, had originally been created in the USSR and performed at victory celebrations in 1945. A friend who had seen it in Moscow raved about it to Ashton, who took the cue and produced his own very English version, complete with hilarious stepsisters performed by Ashton himself with Robert Helpmann, also known for his riotous impersonations. It was a heartwarming romance, but also—and especially in Fonteyn’s hands—a tale of class distinctions erased by dint of sheer goodness and years of drudgery and self-sacrifice. This was no fable: thanks to the war and postwar social legislation, disparities in wealth really had diminished. With unerring instinct, Fonteyn set aside the original costume—a dowdy but respectable frock and scarf tied sweetly under the chin—and dressed herself instead in a soot-stained dress and kerchief tied around the back of her head, Balkan-style: it was a look distinctly reminiscent of London’s working classes, still suffering the effects of rationing, shortages, and wage freezes. Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose wore these sympathy scarves too.35
By now, ballet—Ashton and Fonteyn’s ballet, the classical ballet Keynes had so energetically advocated—stood firmly at the center of British public life. “Ballet-going, since the war,” reported one journal, “has become one of this nation’s new habits, like (and generally involving) queuing, or Spam.” In 1947, seizing the momentum and further affirming Sadler’s Wells’s new prestige, de Valois presided over the opening of an expanded dance school at Colet Gardens; now the British, like the Russians, had a full-scale training academy officially recognized by the state. Affirming ballet’s popularity, in 1948 Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made the first blockbuster ballet film, The Red Shoes, which ranked among the top ten films in Britain that year. Starring Fonteyn’s colleague (and competitor) Moira Shearer, the film tells of a beautiful young English ballerina who sacrifices love and life for ballet. As Powell later put it, “During the war we were all told to go out and die for freedom and democracy. After the war The Red Shoes told them to die for art.”36
In October 1949, the Sadler’s Wells company came to New York and performed The Sleeping Beauty to enormous acclaim. At a moment when many in Britain were feeling small and squeezed by their more powerful American ally, the company’s success was symbolically freighted: here was a homegrown British company taking America by storm with a Russian ballet. Writing in anticipation of the premiere, London critic Richard Buckle reflected on Fonteyn’s position: as she balances on one leg in the Rose Adagio, he said, “she supports the honour and glory of our nation and empire on the point of one beautiful foot!” There were twenty curtain calls, and when the clapping finally subsided, de Valois stepped onto the stage. During the worst hours of the Blitz, she told the audience, she had always comforted herself with the thought that “as long as there’s an America (if they come in), there’ll always be an England. And I say the same tonight. As long as there’s an America, there’ll always be an England.” The audience rose to its feet again and cheered.37
The Sadler’s Wells success was national news in Britain and across the United States. The crowds at the opening were so large that the police had to form a wedge to clear a path for the dancers to leave the theater and their buses were escorted by police on motorcycles and in squad cars, sirens wailing. Fonteyn was invited to the White House to meet President Truman, and in November she made the cover of Time magazine, which summed up the impact of the tour: “In four weeks, Margot Fonteyn and Sadler’s Wells had restored as much glitter to Britain’s tarnished tiara as any mission the English had sent abroad since the war. In London, cartoonists put Prime Minister Clement Attlee, Ernie Bevin, and Sir Stafford Cripps into tutus, and hinted that they might do well to make their next visit to the U.S. on tiptoe.”38
This kind of history does not easily fade from collective memory. In postwar Britain, ballet was recognized as a national art, a jewel in the (shrinking) British crown, and de Valois, Ashton, and Fonteyn were its justly celebrated leaders. For several generations of British audiences, ballet was not only beautiful and enjoyable, as Keynes had hoped it would be, but a passion rooted in their own sense of themselves as a people. Watching films and studying photos of Fonteyn’s early dancing, especially in Ashton’s ballets, one can see why. Physically, Fonteyn was delicate and beautifully proportioned, not naturally strong or muscular. Yet when she danced her back was a rampart—ramrod straight and perfectly aligned—and her balances on one toe a still point that never wavered. Her line was pure and unornamented: she did not arrange her fingers, for example, in what the Russian ballerina Alexandra Danilova called “flowers, not cauliflowers,” but extended them instead in a long and tapered line, Ionic rather than Corinthian. It was as if she had removed the jewelry from the Russian aristocratic tradition: entirely without pretense, she had made herself a dancer of the people.
In the 1950s Margot Fonteyn was British ballet. She was at her peak: her technique grew stronger and more generous, and Ashton produced ballet after ballet showing off and developing her skill. Reviews of her dancing were ecstatic and audiences adulatory. Her glamour knew no match: she wore Dior, toured internationally to sold-out houses, and in 1955 married a Panamanian playboy and self-styled revolutionary and established herself as an ambassadress and scion of London society. In 1953 she danced for the queen’s coronation and in 1956 was dubbed a Dame of the British Empire. She was the country’s undisputed mascot, the confident face of Britain’s “New Elizabethans,” and living evidence of the country’s inner resources and postwar recovery, at home and abroad.
For Ashton, however, things were more complicated. The first sign of trouble came in 1951, when he created Tiresias for the Festival of Britain, a celebration of the country’s achievements in art, industry, science, and engineering. The festival was billed as “the Autobiography of a Nation” and designed to present a proud “family portrait”—Britain in her Sunday best—with hundreds of concerts, exhibitions, plays, and commissions in London and across the country. Ashton’s new ballet was greatly anticipated and performed before royalty in a grand gala performance. It was an unqualified disaster. Ashton, working with Constant Lambert, who wrote the libretto and the score, had created a dance about orgasm and bisexuality, cloaked in mythology and featuring copulating snakes and shimmying, shuddering pas de deux. The queen (mother to Elizabeth II) was none too pleased, and the critics scathing: the ballet, they concluded, was “repulsive” and in poor taste. One observer disapprovingly noted that “the parades and prancing of barbaric soldiers with bamboo lances and shields, and the acrobatic women all in an Egyptian setting recall music hall spectacles of the late twenties.”39
Tiresias was indeed a burp from the past. But it was also perhaps an indication of Ashton’s deep ambivalence toward his newly acquired stature. He had always stood at a tangent to power and authority: he was a loner and an outsider, ill-suited to represent anything but his own ideas and sensibilities—much less “Britain” or “British ballet.” The smugness of the festival sits uncomfor
tably with what we know of his artistic character, and (Lambert’s own poor judgment aside) one can’t help but sense an unconscious barb, an arrow launched from a more gleefully irreverent past. In the years to come Ashton nonetheless did his best to conform: he fit himself—awkwardly, pompously—into the suit of a nineteenth-century grand maître. He made evening-length “classics” such as Sylvia (1952), a lumbering confusion of gods and goddesses, sylvans, dryads, and naiads. The dancing alternated between music hall camp and conventional classical combinations, with tantalizing glimpses of Ashton’s quicksilver style. He himself thought the whole thing terribly flawed and reworked it many times before letting it lapse.
He had personal difficulties too. Lambert had died in 1951, depriving him of an important friend and collaborator, and in 1953 Sophie Fedorovitch was found dead in her home from a gas leak. His relationship with the dancer Michael Somes, with whom he was enamored, faded. “Michael was Fred’s Ideal,” as Lincoln Kirstein noted, “the personification of a young Englishman, very refined, with enormous charm—a throwback to Brideshead, if you like.” Ashton was an incurable romantic and inclined to wallow in yearning and grief when bereft of a love object—an “ideal one” (Ashton)—to inspire his art. Professional pressures and the responsibility of upholding the Royal Ballet’s international stature must also have weighed, especially as Britain’s wartime isolation ended. In 1951 George Balanchine’s recently formed New York City Ballet performed in London; more important still, five years later the Bolshoi Ballet came with Romeo and Juliet, causing critics and observers to wonder if British ballet would ever have the confidence and gravitas to rival the Russians.40
In 1958 Ashton created Ondine, an ambitious but overstuffed production inspired by an early nineteenth-century French novel, Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, about a water sprite who falls in love with a man, and by two old Romantic ballets drawn from the same theme. Ashton set his ballet to a newly commissioned and self-consciously modern score by the composer Hans Werner Henze. But Ondine was another broken-backed ballet, a jumble of pantomime and processions interspersed with beautiful dances for Fonteyn, clear testimony to Ashton’s keen insight into her personality and dancing.
Fonteyn adored water and the sea and all her life harbored fond memories of childhood summers on the beach; pictures of her in the 1950s working in Greece show her free and at ease, in sharp contrast to her customary chic image. The strains of fame and her quasi-official position representing Britain in dance were real for her too, and she experienced water and the sea as a liberating release, a place where the wilder and more bohemian side of her character could flourish. Film footage of Fonteyn’s “shadow dance” in Ondine shows her disarming spontaneity and sensuality: utterly unselfconscious, she dances with fluidity and ease, as if she were alone and immersed in a joyful reverie. The intimacy and direct, first-person voice of this dance were strikingly original, and a great credit to Ashton. In spite of Fonteyn’s success in the role, however, the ballet met with a wave of hostility: one critic quizzically noted its similarity to Soviet dram-balet (too much pantomime), and another called it “aesthetic taxidermy,” predicting that “ballet will sink altogether if it does not shed its cargo of Victorian clichés.” And so they were shed—but not by Ashton.41
By 1958 Ashton was under direct attack from a new and angry generation, led by the Scottish-born choreographer and dancer Kenneth MacMillan (1929–1992). Like John Osborne, whose play Look Back in Anger shook the British theatrical establishment in 1956, MacMillan grew up in a family hard hit by depression and war. His father was a miner who had been gassed in the First World War and struggled to support his family, finally moving them to Great Yarmouth in 1935, where he worked as a cook. During the Second World War, MacMillan was briefly evacuated, lonely and disoriented. Then his mother died.
Dance was a way out. Inspired by the films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, which presented a bright world so different from his own, he began tap and ballet, begging for free lessons from a kindly teacher who finally sent him to London—and de Valois. MacMillan was self-consciously rebellious, an “angry young man” who wanted to tear down what he took to be ballet’s polite, old-fashioned façade and build a new, realer kind of art. He admired Pinter, Osborne, and Tennessee Williams. “It would be nice to go to the ballet,” he once complained, “and see something as adult and stimulating as ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.’ ” He and his dancers were against the establishment and liked to refer to Ashton and Fonteyn as “the Royals.” They had come of age with the H-bomb. As the critic Kenneth Tynan put it, “How could they revere ‘civilization as we know it’ when at any moment it might be transformed into ‘civilization as we knew it’?” These debilitating uncertainties were only exacerbated by the humiliating debacle at Suez in 1956, the end of Britain’s postwar illusions.42
In 1958 MacMillan created The Burrow for the Royal Ballet Touring Company (a small, experimental branch of the Royal Ballet) about police-state terror. The ballet had an air of intense claustrophobia: “It seems as if we’re living on an island that has outgrown its use,” MacMillan explained to the dancers, drawing out the ballet’s theme. “It’s rather like being trapped, isn’t it?” In 1959, MacMillan worked with Osborne on a satirical musical, and in 1960 he presented The Invitation (once again with the Royal Ballet Touring Company), with a gruesome rape fully enacted onstage. Critics called it the “X-Certificate ballet” after a recently introduced film industry rating, and indeed the idea that a sexual act might be depicted onstage was quite shocking to many at the time. (De Valois asked if “it” could take place offstage, but MacMillan refused.)43
This was not just prudery. The state still exercised wide-ranging moral authority: film, theater, and book censorship were an accepted part of life, and sex, along with any sign of disrespect for the royal family or religion, were strictly off-limits. Divorce was difficult, and homosexuality and abortion were both illegal and carried heavy prison sentences. Ironically, ballet (like music hall before it) technically fell outside the censor’s purview, which may account in part for MacMillan’s boldness.* But the moral strictures were also beginning to loosen, and MacMillan’s ballet premiered just as the ban on D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was lifted after a highly publicized trial that put sex and censorship on the stand.44
The Burrow and The Invitation both featured Lynn Seymour, a young Canadian-born dancer who would become MacMillan’s closest collaborator and most celebrated interpreter. Seymour’s dancing could not have been more different from Fonteyn’s. She was classically trained and had a beautiful technique, but her body was not muscularly honed and had none of the taut certainty and centered poise of Fonteyn. Instead, she was sensuous and flexible, less interested in control and artifice than in gut-wrenching movements that described troubled emotional and psychological states. Her autobiography shows a woman plagued by crippling depressions and wild mood swings, and indeed the ongoing drama of her own inner life was a primary source and subject of her art. (Confronted with yet another Seymour crisis, a friend once threw up her hands: “It’s a goddamn scene from a Pinter play.”) In her dancing, classical steps melted and gave way to tense movements filled with anguish: back collapsed, crotch held, arms broken, and neck thrown back. Where Fonteyn demonstrated the discipline and the resilience of classical form, Seymour showed its disintegration into frank expressions of sexual desire and despair. Her gritty and emotionally gripping performances in MacMillan’s darkly violent dances seemed to open a new path for ballet.45
Even Margot Fonteyn seemed to be moving on. After Ondine, her close collaboration with Ashton ended: he made only one notable ballet for her in the next twenty years. In 1959 she became a “guest artist” with the Royal Ballet, juggling international star appearances with intermittent performances at Covent Garden. Two years later she launched a second career based on her soon-to-be-legendary dance partnership with Rudolf Nureyev, recently defected from the USSR. At first glance, they seemed a
n unlikely match: he was twenty-four and had a sweeping Soviet style, while she was forty-three and the paragon of English restraint. Yet together they created a potent mix of sex and celebrity that made them icons of the 1960s and “swinging” London’s permissive scene. This had nothing to do with MacMillan and Seymour’s earnest and grim innovations and searing 1950s style. It was pure populism, ballet for the youth generation and a mass consumer age: in one of the more unlikely cultural makeovers of the decade, Fonteyn and Nureyev fashioned themselves into balletic rock superstars.
How did they do it? The onstage chemistry between them has often been explained by sex: that they had it, wanted it, or suppressed it (they never told). But their partnership also stood for something much larger. In their dancing, East met West: his campy sexuality and exoticism (heavy makeup with teased and lacquered hair) highlighted and offset her impeccable bourgeois taste. Nureyev played his role to perfection: even in the most classical of steps, he flirted with the image of a virile Asian potentate, and his unrestrained sensuality and tiger-like movements recalled a clichéd Russian orientalism (first exploited by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes), which also linked to the escapist fantasies of 1960s middle-class youth: Eastern mysticism, revolution, sex, and drugs.
The East was one thing; age was another. Nureyev had a gorgeous, youthful physique; Fonteyn was old enough to be his mother. And although her technique was still impressive, she looked her age. But this was not a strike against her. Indeed, as Fonteyn’s proper 1950s woman fell into the arms of Nureyev’s mod man, the generation gap seemed momentarily to close. Class also figured: the regal Fonteyn slumming in Le Corsaire with (as one critic put it) Nureyev’s “great Moslem whore.” Not everyone was happy with the result: the prominent American critic John Martin lamented that Fonteyn had gone “to the grand ball with a gigolo.” None of this meant, however, that Nureyev was disrespectful. To the contrary, when he partnered Fonteyn he did so with supreme respect and perfect nineteenth-century manners. To the British, this mattered: Fonteyn, after all, was still “like the queen” and during the curtain call of their first performance of Giselle, Nureyev accepted a rose from Fonteyn and then instinctively fell to his knee at her feet and covered her hand with kisses. The audience went wild.46
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