Steven McRae, Federico Bonelli and Johan Kobborg in Frederick Ashton's Symphonic Variations.

Review for The Tablet 11 June 2005


While Frederick Ashton was serving in the RAF during World War II, he made sketches for a new ballet. Symphonic Variations (to Cesar Franck’s score) is a hymn to classical beauty. It asserts values that people were desperate to reclaim in peacetime.

It had its premiere in 1946 and was Ashton’s first ballet for Covent Garden. He had never before made a work for such a large theatre. Every step, every gesture had to be thought through, so that it could register with the most distant members of the audience. In the circumstances there is something counter-intuitive about Symphonic Variations. It is spare, almost a chamber work, with just three couples in Greek-inspired versions of white practice dress, who are on-stage throughout its eighteen minutes. Despite the economy of its scale, it is a major artistic statement, in effect Ashton’s credo, and perhaps the truest reflection of the Royal Ballet’s founding style. It is the centrepiece of the company’s final programme of the season (Royal Opera House to 18 June).

Although Symphonic Variations is plotless, Ashton was influenced by the Carmelite mystics Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, whom he had read during the War. He had considered a ballet about ‘dedication’ and absorption in divine love, perhaps about the experience of a nun taking the veil. Further sketches suggested a fertility rite with an ecstatic union (“Art and faith united in one unseverable bond.”) In the end, most of the working ideas were stripped away, surviving as subterranean layers in the eventual ballet. But the suggestion of mystical experience survives with choreographic sequences etching a progress from watchfulness to joy, and on to the stillness at work’s heart.

Symphonic Variations is demanding on its performers, who have few rests and are never off-stage. Costumes and lighting design expose cruelly any lapses in dancers’ technique. The work was new to most of the opening night cast. While they danced it well (and I was hugely struck by the young Steven McRae, recently graduated from the Royal Ballet School), what I missed was a certain quality of abstraction which is very important to the work. Ensemble was also lacking at times, though this might have been an opening night problem.

The programme began with Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Biches (to Poulenc’s score). Nijinska was Ashton’s mentor (they had known each other in Paris in the 1920s) and, as director of the Royal Ballet, he made sure that Les Biches, along with Nijinska’s other great work Les Noces, were preserved in the company’s repertoire. Les Biches (literally ‘hinds’, female deer) is best translated as ‘the little darlings’. Set at a rather louche house party, its novelty in its day (France in 1924) was the use of the language of classical ballet to comment on contemporary chic and sexual mores. Its designer, Marie Laurencin, was commissioned for her “ambiguous blend of innocence and corruption.” But Nijinska’s choreography, with its unsparing depiction of narcissism, voyeurism and sheer sexual opportunism removes any lingering doubts. Darcey Bussell as the treacherous hostess and Leanne Benjamin as the icy androgyne danced the principal roles knowingly. But for the satire to work, the entire cast must be in on the game. Some seemed a shade naïve.

A Month in the Country, which ended the programme, is Ashton’s ‘free adaptation’ from Turgenev’s play and a classic of dance storytelling, the Royal Ballet’s strongest suit. The ballet distils the love triangle between Natalia Petrovna, her ward Vera, and the newly arrived tutor Beliaev. Sylvie Guillem, who danced Natalia, showing that in late career she is still a highly distinctive performer with delicious technique.

The programme completed the company’s year-long homage to Ashton, its founder-choreographer on his centenary. A new generation of dancers have learnt his distinctive style, and works not seen for many years in London have been dusted off and given handsome new productions. But questions linger over the company’s creativity. The Royal Ballet made its name through the works of three choreographers - Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan. Today it no longer has a resident choreographer and new works are a rarity. Dancers need to be nourished by having works created on them. Ashton’s work affirmed generations of dancers as artists and memorialised their careers. Most of today’s dancers will never know similar fulfilment. There is a more profound underlying question: whether ballet still has the confidence to comment on life in a new century, as Ashton and Nijinska did in the last, or whether its future is one of slow decline and as a museum art.