The Royal Ballet production of Sylvia by Frederick Ashton

The Royal Ballet's Sylvia, review for The Tablet, 13 November 2004

In 1952 the Royal Ballet premiered Frederick Ashton’s Sylvia, which he choreographed as a star-vehicle for the ballerina Margot Fonteyn, then in her prime. It was a curious work for its day. Only a year before, the Festival of Britain had proclaimed Herbert Morrison’s vision of “a new Britain springing from the battered fabric of the old." Instead Sylvia is a glance in a rear-view mirror at the Paris Opera’s traditions of the nineteenth century. Sylvia was wrong for Ashton’s audience, whose eyes were determinedly set on the future, and it did not long survive in the repertory.

More than half a century later, and forty years after its last performance, Sylvia has returned to Covent Garden and it turns out to be a gem. The ballet is a miracle of restoration. No choreographic score had ever been written down and the only reliable record was a grainy film of a rehearsal. Christopher Newton who staged this latest production supplemented the evidence of the film with the memories of dancers who had been cast in the original production. (Newton is one of the anonymous cultural heroes of our time. It is thanks to him that there is a proper record of Stravinsky’s and Nijinska’s masterwork Les Noces).

The plotline, it has to be said, is complete nonsense. Eros tricks Sylvia, a huntress and nymph sworn to chastity, into falling in love with Aminta, a shepherd. She is then kidnapped by the evil hunter Orion, but escapes and fends off the wrath of Diana, the huntress and goddess of chastity to marry her beloved. Curtain. But Sylvia transcends the slightness of its story. However archaic it seems on the surface, it breaks with the nineteenth century romantic ballet’s ethereal image of woman as fairy or sylph. Instead, the heroine is presented here as a maiden warrior.

At the performance I saw, Sylvia was danced by Zenaida Yanowsky, who is a coolly intellectual dancer, with a powerful stage presence. In some ways Yanowsky is the very antithesis of Fonteyn, Ashton’s original muse. Despite this she was believable, elegant in a dance style which is not native to her, and brought to it a combination of seriousness, musicality and contemporary wit.

What is principally striking about the revival of Sylvia is the cumulative aesthetic force of the performance - choreography, music and design. The musique dansant score by Delibes is a delight, in George Balanchine’s words, “a floor for the dancer to walk on”, and Tchaikovsky wrote of Sylvia, “If I had known this music before, I would not have written Swan Lake.” The score was first performed at the Paris Opera in 1876 with choreography by Louis Mérante. For Ashton’s 1952 version, the designers, the brothers Robin and Christopher Ironside, recreated an appropriate and luxuriant vision of antiquity, expressed in the style of the period of the original Paris production, that of the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Ashton’s choreographic style too owes much to the nineteenth century (his contemporary, the dance writer Richard Buckle, playfully – and with some truth – accused him of living in a nineteenth century dream world).

Dance is perhaps the most ephemeral of all the arts. It lives only in dancers’ bodies and is not easily captured either in dance notation or on film. If works are to survive, they must be performed and that performance tradition must be nurtured. Sylvia was very nearly lost, and it has been revived successfully, primarily because there are former dancers still alive who remembered the ballet in their bones. This is no threadbare exercise in archaeology. Although the Royal Ballet needs to settle into the work, Sylvia is theatrically credible and from its opening performances it has come alive as a striking evocation of the sensibility of another time.

Royal Opera House to December 3. http://info.royaloperahouse.org/

Nao Sakuma and Robert Parker of Birmingham Royal Ballet in Frederick Ashton's 'The Two Pigeons' 

Birmingham Royal Ballet - review for The Tablet, 6 November 2004

Birmingham Royal Ballet (BRB) ploughs a different furrow to that of its sister company at Covent Garden. It is a touring ensemble, which aims to reach non-traditional audiences. David Bintley, its Catholic artistic director, has broken with the more incense-laden aspects of ballet culture – and with notable success. BRB routinely packs such theatres as the Empire in Sunderland, where its Romeo and Juliet had such impact that Sunderland FC chose the Knight's Dance from Prokofiev’s score as its theme tune. Back home in Birmingham, the former Aston Villa striker Dion Dublin is one of Bintley’s noisier fans.

Bintley won this new audience (boosting attendances from 29% to more than 90% in Sunderland alone) without ‘dumbing down’ or compromising the repertory. He has kept faith with the Royal Ballet’s founding traditions, in ways unmatched by his counterparts at Covent Garden. Frederick Ashton, the Royal Ballet’s founder-choreographer virtually anointed Bintley as his artistic successor (“You’re the only one”). In his turn, Bintley took particular care with Ashton’s own ballets. When both the London and Birmingham Royal Ballet companies performed at this summer’s Lincoln Center Ashton season in New York, the New York dance critics warmed principally to BRB, and to its performances of Ashton’s Enigma Variations.

This week and last, Birmingham Royal Ballet has been in London and Plymouth offering two programmes, the first which included Ashton’s The Two Pigeons, loosely based on a fable by La Fontaine. High art Two Pigeons is not, with a score, by André Messager, that is even less demanding than the storyline. A pair of lovers (Robert Parker and Nao Sakuma) have a tiff. The boy, a young Parisian artist, then has a fling with a sultry gypsy seductress (Molly Smollen). Eventually, his girlfriend takes him back and the lovers are reunited in a rapturous pas de deux (“this is a truly Christian ballet”, a sceptical critic wrote after the first performances in 1961). At the final curtain, the lovers sit against a wicker chair, a pigeon perched on the back. Then the bird’s mate flies on-stage to complete the picture.

The Two Pigeons is almost a music hall entertainment - indeed British ballet has roots in the Victorian music hall. While ballet itself is high artifice, Ashton never loses sight of the human heart. He is very in love with the vocabulary of ballet, but this love is at one with his emotional purpose. With his use of the vocabulary, and, in particular with the touching little flutters of the feet for his lovelorn ballerina (a dance metaphor for a beating heart), Ashton lifts the story to another level. BRB’s cast members were spot on, dancing with the necessary sincerity. They got under the skin of the work and Ashton’s choreographic style looked right and unforced.

The following programme, in contrast, featured a suite of three David Bintley works to jazz scores, two by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn and the third by Colin Towns. Here again, Bintley harks back to a founding Royal Ballet tradition; that the artistic director should also be a choreographer. But the Covent Garden company has not had a director/choreographer since 1986 and it has a declining record in commissioning new work. Bintley, in contrast, has been prolific with a constant flow of symphonic and story ballets and – crucially – ballets plainly intended as crowd-pleasers. Nutcracker Sweeties is a case in point. Ellington and Strayhorn jazz up Tchaikovsky’s score, while the classical ballet characters mutate into American popular cultural fantasies. There’s an ‘Arabesque Cookie’, a ‘Peanut Brittle’, while the ethereal Sugar Plum Fairy here becomes the sultry ‘Sugar Rum Cherry’ (Monica Zamora). While the choreography has a contemporary demotic edge, there’s no doubt about its origins, with Bintley’s debt to Ashton’s style very clear. It’s all good fun – and an appetiser for Birmingham Royal Ballet’s more traditional Nutcracker (Birmingham Hippodrome from 3 December – the best Nutcracker on offer from any British dance company).

But – and it’s a big but – this second programme, as a whole, did not work. Dance programmes (story-ballets excepted), featuring works by a single choreographer, tend to lack necessary contrast. Here the offence was compounded by the jazz motif. The relentlessness of a single aesthetic meant that the night was less than the sum of its parts.