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A master storyteller
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Joffrey celebrates choreographer Frederick Ashton’s
flair for drama and detail
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By Sid Smith
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Tribune arts reporter
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Published February 15, 2004
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Here in the U.S., his name is not as instantly recognizable as those of George Balanchine or Jerome Robbins.
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Indeed, his enormous contributions to the art of ballet are connected to the land where he worked: Great Britain. “His main achievement,” argues Christopher Newton, retired ballet master who worked under Frederick Ashton, “was to create what we call the English style.”
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But Ashton did accomplish a great deal more. Probably no other 20th Century choreographer rivals Balanchine for longevity, output and stylistic innovation. Both were born a century ago this year, both died in the 1980s and both boast incomparable legacies, masters of just about every aspect of their fields.
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“He created through the narrative itself; that’s his great genius,” says Joffrey Ballet of Chicago artistic director Gerald Arpino, who knew Ashton personally. “No one could tell a story through dance like he could.”
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Balanchine’s centennial has so far won more attention in the U.S. The Russian-born choreographer, after all, did so much of his work here, with the New York City Ballet, while Ashton toiled for most of his career with the Royal Ballet of London.
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But Ashton’s centennial is now getting its due, especially here in Chicago, thanks to the Joffrey’s ongoing engagement through Feb. 22 at the Auditorium Theatre. It features three of his classics: “Les Patineurs,” “Monotones, I & II” and “A Wedding Bouquet.” The Joffrey’s lengthy association with Ashton makes the troupe one of the most, if not the most, important American repository of his works.
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In April, TV viewers will get public television’s version of “The Dream,” Ashton’s highly original take on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” danced by American Ballet Theatre.
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Even some balletomanes, especially younger ones, may have only a vague knowledge of Ashton’s life and work. For all his Britishness, he was actually born, in 1904, in Ecuador, and raised in Peru, where his father was a British diplomat. Fatefully, in 1917, he saw Anna Pavlova on tour and became a dancer. Two years later, he was in England working in an office when he enrolled in classes taught by Russian genius Leonide Massine.
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Later, he worked with Marie Rambert, who encouraged him to try his hand at choreography. At 21, he did, working with her for a time and also with Ninette de Valois and her company associated with the Sadler’s Wells and Old Vic theaters.
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Meager pay in those days led him to moonlight in the theater, and this exposure to musical comedy revues, tap and pantomime influenced his evolving style as a theatrical storyteller. But, like Balanchine, Ashton from the first displayed astonishing versatility. He made his American debut, for instance, at the invitation of avant-gardists Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, providing the dances for their “Four Saints in Three Acts” in 1934.
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Ashton stayed with the Sadler’s Wells company when it became the Royal Ballet in 1946, serving as artistic director for a time and an international choreographic beacon until his death. He could do everything: conventional full-lengths (“Cinderella,” in which he danced the part of a stepsister in drag); quasi-narrative experiments (“A Wedding Bouquet,” another Stein collaboration); and formal abstractions (“Symphonic Variations”).
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As a narrative genius, he was expert at drama, detail and colorful gesture. As a formalist, he mastered the upper body. “His is a distillation of the French and Italian, especially in the use and suppleness of the arms,” says Newton, in town to stage “A Wedding Bouquet” for the Joffrey. He had an inimitable empathy for music. “His work is incredibly married to the score,” says Anthony Dowell, veteran dancer who created the role of Oberon in Ashton’s “The Dream” and who restaged the ballet for ABT and PBS. “As years go by, and someone else uses the same music, they never outdo him. You can’t imagine it with any steps but his.”
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Everyone agrees that, like Balanchine, Ashton was the choreographer as collaborator, in the sense that he relished the dancers’ contributions and sculpted his works to fit each performer. That makes reconstruction challenging, of course.
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“I was ballet mistress at the Royal Ballet school, and he’d come to check out the works of his I’d staged on the students,” recalls Lynn Wallis, who helped in the revival of “Monotones” for the Joffrey. “It’s the small things, really, the way a movement is phrased with the music, this seamless flow of bodies and shapes. It’s the purity that’s so beautiful, the simplicity. He never padded.”
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“Physically, his work is always a challenge,” says Ethan Stiefel, the ABT star who portrays Oberon in “The Dream.” “The steps are unique in how they’re put together. Whole stretches of movements and turns seem backwards in a sense, as if you’re executing in a reverse direction. With all the jumps, it’s also quite vigorous.
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“But you’re not just dealing with steps, either. There are all these human qualities. Non-ballet fans can relate. I’ve heard he was always interested in the reaction of, say, the ushers. He tried to appeal to a wide range.”
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If he avoided anything, in life and art, it was despair. “Romance, glamo r, allure,” Dowell recalls. “He could be dramatic, but he didn’t like to show too dark a side of life. Offstage, he was incredibly convivial. An evening at his house in London went on very late.”
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“Always with a double martini in his hand” is how Arpino remembers him. Possessions, like the artistic impulse, were for sharing.
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“I used the washroom in his London home once and complimented him on his beautiful soap,” Arpino recalls. “‘I love it,’ I told him. He replied, ‘If you like it so much, well, by all means, take it with you. It’s yours.'”
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