In Tallulah’s autobiography, she talks about returning with friends from a Diaghilev performance in London—“Caught up in the graces of that artistic riddle we felt we should celebrate.”
Well, Laura had to get up early the next morning, so we didn’t go out for a drink after taking in the Sarasota Ballet’s all-Ashton program at the Joyce—playing through the weekend.
But we did rap about it the next day.
Valses Nobles et Sentimentales
LJ: Ashton loves ballet. He makes no bones about it.
JL: So refreshing in an era when ballet is tempted to apologize for itself.
LJ: He loves it down to its tiniest pieces—a tendu, a fourth position, a notch of epaulement. He loves these pieces just as they are and doesn’t feel the need to make them anything extra beyond what they are. He’s exploratory in the way he puts the pieces together, not so much in the way he stretches or distorts them.
JL: He wants to beguile us with beauty. He’s geisha-like almost. Valses Nobles et Sentimentales is one of the last in that long series of haunted-ballroom ballets, which began perhaps with Balanchine’s Le Bal in 1929.
LJ: Did Ashton see Balanchine’s Cotillon?
JL: Oh yes, the Ballet Russe did it in London all through the 1930s.
LJ: I’ve always loved Ashton’s commitment to croise and it’s everywhere in this ballet.
JL: What does it mean to you?
LJ: I guess there’s something quintessentially English about it. Propriety, containment, this not spilling yourself all over everybody—in efface and en face. And the wit of telling it slant, with a bit of shadow.
JL: Ashton arranges things that fit the music expertly, he heeds the mood of the music, but Balanchine choreographing La Valse in 1951, to the same music, seems to reach into its deepest, unspoken dreams, desires, anxieties.
LJ: Yes, Balanchine’s anxieties—the snake in his garden—the sense that death is always waiting. In this music Ashton plays with the lighter shadows of love; Balanchine goes for a more preying and expressionistic darkness.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee
LJ: This side of Ashton—the dance hall, pantomimes, folk dance—is pure joy. He just seems to toss it off, as if he never had to learn it because it’s in his DNA. And it really gives you the fun of dance, which is something that has gone missing from choreography today. Ratmansky tries sometimes, but it’s too self-conscious and comes off as faux or labored. This is light and true.
JL: A knockabout romp that is deliciously silly—let’s us laugh like kids again.
Paradise Garden
LJ: The Walk to the Paradise Garden duet is like MacMillan’s Romeo.
JL: Definitely Ashton’s gloss on MacMillan.
LJ: Was it Ashton who called himself lazy? Even if he was, his invention eventually kicks in, usually metaphysically. That Brahmin-esque Figure of Death, so William Blake with those outstretched arms and hanging panels, he’s like a bas relief chiseled on a tombstone. The lovers aren’t afraid of him, but attracted and curious, like they’re playing in a cemetery.
Friday’s Child
JL: “Friday’s Child” from Jazz Calendar was done originally for Sibley and Nureyev, and for me they are inscribed all over it—the toasts of London in 1968. They were integrated into the city’s cultural “elite”—that dreaded word in today’s cultural discourse—in a way that today’s ballet dancers might have a hard time comprehending. At the same time, they were accessible, because ballet was economically accessible. Sarasota’s young man should have worked his arabesque more, like Nureyev undoubtedly did.
The ballet steps don’t always sit organically on the bluesy score, but who cares? I don’t know Richard Rodney Bennett’s concert work, but he was a great soundtrack composer. Have you seen 1967’s Billion Dollar Brain?
LJ : No.
JL: You must.
LJ: Please explain why.
JL: Fabulous, haunting theme, and altogether a score that goes hand in glove with what the movie’s trying to say. It’s a seminal Cold War thriller. The arch-villain is a clearly insane Texas mogul who makes the very same noises that today are given credence as geopolitical pieties.
LJ: “Friday’s Child” made me think of Blow-up. The bedroom threesome with Jane Birkin, etc. I don’t exactly know why it made me think of that, something about sex and spontaneity and not caring that the act should be more than some physical manipulation and an orgasm—oh that’s nice, gotta go.
JL: There’s some romance there, too. So long as the warmth lasts, the affection is real. Of course Ashton knew company culture and he knew metropolitan culture. Furtivity may have had its own allure, but he was clearly pleased that what was once covert was now more moving into the sunlight. Yes, Ashton’s Mod exercises of the 1960s were a little self-conscious—but there’s a real appreciation there, a love for youth in its high season.
Sinfonietta
JL: In the Sinfonietta adagio, the multiple men lofting the woman around recall “Beauty Beauteous” in his Illuminations. Always interesting the way a great creator can return to the same themes or ideas and make them new.
LJ: It’s like “Lost in Space” or “Star Trek.” So it fuses spirituality with space.
JL: Lunar.
LJ: The patterns he makes with the 5 men and one woman are like one of those floating campuses in space that we get in the movies. But with Ashton, it always comes back to the woman and the pointe. Her supporting leg in arabesque is the axis of the universe.
Facade
LJ: I don’t love Façade. I should, given what I said earlier about Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Maybe it doesn’t add up for me.
JL: I’ve never seen it before, so it was exciting to see something that’s been written about so much. A suite of variety and exhibition dance numbers—fun, and a bang-up finale.
LJ: The Swiss Jodeling Song had me thinking about the “Two Ladies” number from Cabaret. Again, louche while innocent. But then, the primal/feral is very much in the system of ballet—“L’Apres-midi d’un faune” after all!—and it’s surprising that it doesn’t express itself more than it does. Ashton, though, is very much aware of this impulse.