by Leigh Witchel
In a curtain speech before the premiere of the first Ashton Celebrated program, Kevin O’Hare, the Artistic Director of The Royal Ballet, mentioned that the programs were part of a five year Ashton Worldwide festival, from what would be his 120th to 125th years. A triple bill of works spanning the length of his career is as good a place as any to look at where Ashton is at The Royal Ballet.
Les Rendezvous was brought back after almost 20 years, with new designs from Jasper Conran that seemed to set the dance in a park on a hazy afternoon. He dressed the dancers in takes on 19th century formal outfits; men in jackets with abbreviated tails, the women in bouffant skirts, that for all their elegance, didn’t work. Even though the overly whimsical designs by Anthony Ward were panned in 2005, Conran’s outfits had an air of respectability that drained some of the boisterousness from Daniel Auber’s music. Some elements, particularly the men’s ponytails and the hazy backdrop that made it seem as if a cloudburst could send the dancers scattering, seemed incongruous.
Reece Clarke’s part was originated by Stanislas Idzikowski, a short virtuoso, and the much taller Clarke had to fight for the nonstop tricks. Conran didn’t make Clarke’s debut any easier, as the jacket and vest rode up when Clarke tried to do anything with both his arms overhead. He almost lost a double saut de basque.
Marianela Nuñez has lovely, seemingly indestructible technique; she was whom I saw dance the role almost 20 years previously. Treacherous steps weren’t treacherous for her; hard turns and jumps weren’t hard. She knew exactly how she wanted something to look, she knew where she wanted things to land musically and she had the control to make it happen. She was immaculately prepared.
She did a gloriously etched solo of turns into turns. But the most beautiful happened in the finale, when Nuñez managed 180° changes in her head spot with perfect elocution. When what’s required is warm clarity, she shines. If Reason could dance, it would dance like her.
Stylistically, though, is that Ashton? Nuñez used her torso, and she did one lovely series of swivels with a roll through her upper chest and shoulders, but it was controlled, reined in to something without any eccentricity. It’s not not-Ashton, but it isn’t Ashton either. It almost felt as if, like Emily Howard from Little Britain, Nuñez was always trying to be a lady, and do ladylike things. Her duet with Clarke felt too perfect; when they arrived in layers on layers all in white, it was as if they were figurines on a wedding cake.
For all its pretensions as a topical, candyfloss divertissement, Les Rendezvous made serious demands on the cast from top to bottom. The secondary soloist, Isabella Gasparini, came flying out in sautés, later joined by Leo Dixon and Harrison Lee. Then there was a grueling moment before the main pas de deux when four women ended their dance each pressed into the air by a partner. And stayed there. For what felt like a week. Finally a musical change and the men could slooowly lower the women to the floor. Ungh.
The Spanish dance was inflated to ten men in 2005; it’s back down to the usual six. This is also jammed with technique: beats changing places to turns with arms overhead. The men’s technique could not be faulted. But instead of fun, it was perfect.
A quartet of four ladies in yellow punctuated the ballet, ending it with one of Ashton’s signature gestures, a shrug. It was again lovely, but ladies, bend! And sometimes one woman would really bend, and then stick out.
Asking London friends who to watch for in Ashton’s work, the consensus was Francesca Hayward. They were right. Along with the treat of seeing her paired with Marcelino Sambé in The Dream, the cherry on the sundae was having them coached by the original Oberon, Anthony Dowell, along with Lesley Collier.
Hayward was a minx of a Titania, who along with Sambé understood what was happening. With her chin raised and set, she was in the middle of a lover’s spat with Oberon. She pushed and bent herself consistently beyond academic positions. It looked like a style.
Sambé did four stunning turns on the calls in the music, all finishing perfectly. He stuck every one, slowing down and squeezing out his ending pose like the last bit of toothpaste. He can also act; you could see him plotting how to get Titania back for her refusal of the changeling boy.
The biggest misconception about British ballet, though perhaps it’s more prevalent in the United States, is that Ashton and MacMillan are a dichotomy: one prurient and the other virginal. An added misconception: The Dream, being British, might be more straight-laced than Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The reality is that Balanchine’s version is the more formal. Keeping in Theseus and Hippolyta and weaving them into an act-long wedding divertissement, his work concentrates on the parallels and hierarchies in the fairy and human world, using those as the matrix of order and disorder arising from lover’s quarrels. Ashton, by removing the human rulers, made his shorter work more focused on love itself.
And sex. When Hayward, under the influence of Oberon’s drugged flower, caught sight of Joshua Junker as Bottom, she made it clear. She was into him. Ashton’s monologue for Bottom makes it clear enough what they did together.
By contrast, the human lovers are where Ashton pokes fun at Victorian respectability. Romany Pajdak as Hermia refused a kiss from Nicol Edmonds’ Lysander, before making him go and lie down on the other side of the stage. Her comeuppance shortly followed.
The lovers were full of detail, but small-scale, as if this were a television broadcast. Pajdak and Edmonds didn’t push the jokes. When American Ballet Theatre performs The Dream at the Metropolitan Opera House, it’s much more broad and slapstick. It’s less subtle, but it travels farther back in the theater. Olivia Cowley’s Helena was prim and droll, with a look that said “this is not going at all the way it should.” But you had to be close enough to see her surprise, calculations or disappointment.
By the point both couples were fighting decorously, Sambé imperiously told Daichi Ikarashi as Puck to FIX IT. Ikarashi was an astonishing technician, who rocketed into the air and did countless turns, but with weedy lines. His performance felt like a series of eye-popping tricks.
As the forest filled with fog, Sambé again slowed his turns down to stillness before squeezing into a low penchée. When Oberon woke up Titania, we saw the focus Ashton placed on this as a lover’s quarrel. Hayward, led by Sambé, stepped right over Bottom as she realized that yes, she slept with a donkey. She handed Oberon the changeling boy as penance. In the human world, Cowley wouldn’t believe everything was all right until she saw things were back to normal with the other couple.
In their final duet, Sambé and Hayward maintained the extravagance of the movement. Sambé reached way up and over before taking Hayward’s waist; she folded, jerked and yanked herself in his arms or alone. When jumping on a diagonal, he jack-knifed forward with his arms curved in front of him and his legs kicked front, going for an extreme position. He took the same risk plunging into another penchée. Both left academic correctness behind.
At their bows, Sambé and Hayward parted for a final bit of stage magic. They revealed behind them Antoinette Sibley and Dowell, the original king and queen of the fairies, who came forward to receive the audience’s adulation.
To close the program, Taisuke Nakao made his debut in Rhapsody. He is a soloist with the company, coming to the school after winning the Prix de Lausanne in 2017. You could see within a minute that he wasn’t the corkscrew usually cast in the lead. Nakao has good proportions and tight, sharp beats, but on first glance, he also seemed an upper body dancer with a legato quality, beautiful suspension in the torso, and elegant carriage.
His best moments weren’t the expected ones in a pyrotechnical role created on Mikhail Baryshnikov. When Nakao arrived onstage and searched among the women, he didn’t have to work to make it look like an echo of Swan Lake. He had no trouble just standing there yet taking the stage, and that can’t be taught.
When the tricks, and there are many of them, arrived, Nakao rolled through 540s and barrel turns, yet made them look like choreography.
Nakao was not as high-octane as Ikarashi in the same part (stay tuned) and Nakao’s softness made some details fuzzy. When Ashton asked him to imitate Paganini, he less played the violin than did a port de bras.
Nakao had to stay focused to maintain that level of bravura; he just made some repeated turns after a group of extraordinarily beautiful sissonnes. His fight for the role had an emotional urgency that someone who just cracked out the tricks might not have. Still, Ashton legendarily asked Baryshnikov to bring all his steps. Is steel-plated virtuosity the choreographer’s original intention here?
Anna Rose O’Sullivan had steel-plated technique in what was originally Collier’s part, and that Collier coached. O’Sullivan raced through her fast footwork, not showing brightness or femininity but authority on her entrance: every movement phrase ended with a period. I. Am. Queen. Bee.
She was a different kind of first dancer than Nuñez, who seemed to have a Margot Fonteyn fantasy. Still, when Nakao came to O’Sullivan after her first entrance she warmed, and extended into positions with lushness. At the beginning of their pas de deux, O’Sullivan had an almost insular quality. At first she danced in front of him, finally she melted and danced with him. Was that just more Queen Bee?
The most detailed American reporting on Rhapsody came from Arlene Croce, but she wrote almost as a Baryshnikov surrogate. Croce saw the ballet as showing off Baryshnikov and trying to hide Collier, but if that ever was the intention or result, it isn’t any longer. Nakao let O’Sullivan take the lead; he partnered unobtrusively and let the duet be about her before taking her off in a press. Even though the ballet is about the male soloist, Rhapsody, in all the ways the female lead is presented or glorified, doesn’t look as if it questions the primacy of the ballerina.
One of the quiet but huge details that folks with Balanchine eyes need to get used to when watching Ashton: Ashton tended to test technique where Balanchine tended to flatter it. That may come down to schooling, which for Ashton was Cecchetti, which concentrated on building strength. Those classes give a corps de ballet the ability to get through all the sustained arabesques in La Bayadère.
Here again, Ashton asked a lot of the male ensemble, a brutal grand allegro in unison that had echoes of the male quartet in Raymonda. He was kinder to the women, letting them show off exquisite moments of schooling in their sextet.
Again, for the women, all of them were doing some épaulement, but some were doing a lot more, and sticking out. It would look best for everyone to bump up to that level, rather than hammering down the nails that stuck out.
Even if she has a different quality than Nuñez, O’Sullivan’s superpower was clarity. You could pick out every individual move. Her toe work was articulate, racing onstage in pas couru and bringing herself to absolute stillness with her feet flat on the floor. That speed on pointe is a hallmark of the role, and from the look of O’Sullivan’s pointe shoes, it seemed as if she had long toes, which would make that speed harder to achieve.
No matter, she managed photo finishes and quicksilver articulations, bending her leg to her knee in parallel and almost snapping it back into place. Her upper body work in her final fast solo showed the same clarity as she rolled through her shoulders. Still, there was the same question of original intention as Nakao. What’s most important for the ballerina here, phrasing or clarity?
Nakao connected with the audience and was easy to warm to. He was adorable at his last gesture, the same shrug all three ballets ended with, as if the point was to act as if the dancers did nothing special in producing extraordinary magic.
Like Balanchine, some of the loss of signal in Ashton is inevitable, some of it isn’t. Context will slowly change over time, because our context changes. But there’s a bedrock core. It just isn’t Balanchine if you step under yourself, or stay resolutely on balance. It just isn’t Ashton if you do classroom positions and don’t bend. And that will still be so another century from now.
There are a million places in a fragile chain that link can be broken. Watching an Ashton Insights program, Vanessa Palmer, who was a new stager, was asking for mobility in the torso in rehearsal at a specific moment in Les Rendezvous – and getting it. But that same detail didn’t make it to the stage at this performance. It’s not enough to for it to be right in one rehearsal with one cast. The strength of the signal has to make it all the way through the transmission.
Copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Les Rendezvous, The Dream, Rhapsody – The Royal Ballet
Royal Opera House, London
June 6, 2024
Cover: Francesca Hayward and Marcelino Sambé in The Dream. Photo © Tristram Kenton.
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