A 1972 rehearsal photograph of Sir Frederick Ashton with Antoinette Sibley of the Royal Ballet ( BBC)

 

A choreographer in Carmel (The Tablet 11 September 2003)


Frederick Ashton’s ballets have strong roots in the Catholic world into which he was born a hundred years ago.


FREDERICK ASHTON, the Royal Ballet’s founding choreographer, brought to his art a distinctly English accent, arch and witty. He had an entertainer’s instinct, a gift for storytelling, and he made his masterwork, Symphonic Variations, after he discovered the writings of the Carmelite mystics. Next Friday the Royal Ballet celebrates the centenary of his birth.

He was not Catholic but grew up in a Catholic world. His family lived in the Peruvian capital Lima, where as a child he was taught by Dominicans and regularly served Mass for the city’s cardinal archbishop. That experience, he told his biographer Julie Kavanagh, taught him “the whole rightful measure of things and the ecstasy of ritual”. In later years Ashton visited the Brompton Oratory in London to pray and light a candle each time he started work on a new ballet. He created small altars to St Anthony at his homes in London and Suffolk. While these observances might be dismissed as affectations, the evidence of his ballets suggests otherwise – that Ashton’s artistic identity had authentic roots in a Catholic imagination.

When Ashton was 13, he saw a performance by the great Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova in Lima. From then on he was determined to dance, an ambition from which he never wavered, despite a miserable English public school education and an unhappy first career in the City of London. He took ballet classes, but although he was an able dancer, Marie Rambert encouraged him to explore his true gift – the ability to make dances.

In 1934 Ashton went to New York to choreograph ballet sequences for Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, based on the lives of Teresa of Avila and Ignatius Loyola. Remembering the Catholic processions of his childhood, he decided that the production should have an entirely black cast. There were few black dancers with ballet training and so he recruited a cast at a Lindy Hop club. Despite the drawbacks, Ashton was pleased with the work. “I did Four Saints well. I say this though I made it, because I am devout and the Negroes are devout and I am plastic and they are plastic.”

Twelve years later Ashton again sought Carmelite inspiration. In the meantime, Ninette de Valois had brought him to the Vic Wells Ballet, the Royal Ballet’s predecessor company. During the Second World War he was a singularly ineffective intelligence officer with the RAF (a posting arranged by John Maynard Keynes). He discovered the writings of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. Under their influence, he became, in his words, “contemplative and almost mystical” and reconciled to the idea of sudden death. Out of Ashton’s dark night came his Symphonic Variations (1946), a triumphant affirmation of the post-war light and – arguably – the finest British ballet of the century. Choreographed to César Franck’s score, its starting point is John of the Cross’s meditation on quiet detachment: “The soul waits in inward peace and rest”. As the score unfolds, the ballet explodes into joy. Although it is a “plotless” work, Ashton told his biographer that in her hypnotic stillness, Margot Fonteyn (who led the original cast), represented a soul in a state of grace, in that state of suspension during which, according to St Teresa, “visions so sublime” can appear.

The Royal Ballet will perform Symphonic Variations towards the end of its Ashton season (http://info.royaloperahouse.org/). Before then, there will be a revival of his 1953 ballet Sylvia and a programme including his Scènes de ballet (also to be shown on BBC4 on 11 December). Scènes, set to Stravinsky’s score, is a celebration of mathematics, an exercise in pure dance, based on Euclid’s geometry, which seems to parallel Symphonic Variations in its post-war optimism for science and the future.

The hallmark of Ashton’s style is intricate footwork in combination with épaulement, the rotational use of the upper body. This style can variously suggest wit, strength, in the case of Scènes an almost glacial distance, and – just as often – goodness and love. Ashton’s upper-body language derives from his early fascination with Pavlova’s style, and his emphasis on detailed footwork from the fact that he had to perform on tiny stages in his early career.

Ashton (from 1963 Sir Fred) is perhaps best loved for his story ballets such as La Fille mal gardée (to be shown on BBC2 in the new year) and Cinderella. Both have characters, in the case of Fille the Widow Simone, and in Cinderella the Ugly Sisters, danced en travestie by male dancers. Ashton cast himself as one of the Sisters, one of the roles for which he is best known. Joan Acocella, the dance critic of the New Yorker magazine, finds a note of charity in many Ashton ballets. “At the end of Ashton’s Cinderella, the wicked stepsisters aren’t just sent packing. They apologise; they’re sorry they were mean. Cinderella kisses them and forgives them. The world is made whole again.”

Central to any Catholic reading of Ashton is his Enigma Variations (Birmingham Royal Ballet, 13-16 October http://www.brb.org.uk/). Like its score it is a set of portraits of the composer Edward Elgar – himself a Catholic – and of those close to him, which explores the sustaining qualities of love and friendship. The ballet is tinged with melancholy and a sense of the separateness of the artist. Its hero finds peace in his membership of a community of friends. Enigma, ostensibly about Elgar, reveals something too of its choreographer.

Ashton emphasised community to a degree not often found in classical ballet. This may have had something to do with his homosexuality, his sense of being an outsider, and his yearning for acceptance. What is also true is that this sense of community was in the weft and warp of the Catholic world into which Ashton was born. He had lived and breathed Catholicism in his formative years. That experience was woven into his creative identity. Without it he would have been a very different artist.