by Leigh Witchel
Even if you weren’t keen on celebrating Ashton, there was plenty to see in the second Ashton Celebrated program at The Royal Ballet. A host of debuts were slated. But for those of us looking to learn more about the choreographer, there was fertile ground for study, both in what was there, and what wasn’t.
Liam Boswell, an American who completed Upper School at The Royal Ballet, made a powerful debut as Puck. He exploded through every jump and turn, and felt as if he were breakdancing when he swiveled round on the stage. Still, like Ikarashi the day before, he looked weedy in the part.
Lara Turk and Lukas B. Brændsrød as Hermia and Lysander did their first scene, where they lay down in the forest, through the music. Looking again at how it’s done more broadly at American Ballet Theatre, if memory serves, the gestures and mime at the Metropolitan Opera House were bang on the end of every musical phrase. Both physical and musical timing affects how a joke lands.
Back at Covent Garden, as with the night before, there were tons of little sitcom details you needed to be close enough to catch. Olivia Cowley and Leo Dixon repeated their roles as Helena and Demetrius and again, Cowley was so very British. “Oh dear. Something is going horribly wrong.” In her frustration she pushed Turk over. When she reconciled with Dixon, she rubbed noses with him and Brændsrød stopped himself from kissing her just in time. “Oh, it’s you!”
Barry Wordsworth conducted both nights, and took the overture tempo a hair faster the second night, which focused the opening dance for the fairies. Looking at that wonderful section twice, interesting to note all the different runs Ashton asked for to get both the style and the blocking from the fairies: sometimes a skitter, sometimes on high half-toe, sometimes a flat-out run.
Thomas Whitehead, once a Soloist, now a Principal Character Artist, was a manly, clear Bottom. The way he picked through his runs on pointe in parallel position felt here almost like a strange premonition of the pointe work required for a ballet Ashton would revive two years later: Les Noces. Whitehead also made the recollection monologue clear, including his shock about what he thought he did with Titania, before he ran off. And like any good trooper, he did his jig in the finale broadly for the audience’s applause.
Both Vadim Muntagirov and Lauren Cuthbertson got their first shots at the leads in The Dream. It wasn’t a bad first outing, but it felt like the sketch of what could be a more detailed reading. Cuthbertson had lovely feet and port de bras, but could push farther, beyond correct technique. Her acting could grow more specific and focused: anger at Oberon rather than just an angry mood. The unspooling of the plot when Oberon woke Titania looked less like a lover’s quarrel than a college prank.
Muntagirov is one of the company’s most ingratiating men, but his Oberon hadn’t clicked yet. Instead of an angry King of the Fairies, he was a big green pussycat who looked irresistible when he smiled. Which he did a lot. He’s a beautiful, easy technician, and he made all his turns into arabesque, but less emphatically than Sambé.
Muntagirov and Cuthbertson did the complicated manipulations of their final duet fully, but piece by piece. His hand went up. Then over, and to her waist. He folded her. She bent over. He swiveled her round. Repeat. It was technically correct, but the phrasing suggested but it hadn’t penetrated yet to the core. You saw more abandon from them as the duet went on. They just need a few more cracks at it.
If you asked me what part of this performance I will still be talking about years from now, it’s without a doubt Natalia Osipova in Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan. Watching Osipova do Ashton was like watching Sara Mearns do Cunningham. It was unforgettable. Perhaps not in the way anyone intended, but still, unforgettable.
Osipova’s glory has always been that she gives 120% of herself in performance, but as she spends more years as a star ballerina, her main product is Natalia Osipova. It’s one hell of a product, but you have to be fine with that, or discerning about what ballets you’re okay with becoming The Osipova Show.
Brahms Waltzes is one of Ashton’s more fascinating miniatures because it takes the salon qualities of both the music and Duncan’s performances and scales them up to an opera house. Drop Osipova on to that and the scaling becomes, well, it was pretty pumped up.
Osipova embodied Duncan, if Duncan were a major Russian ballerina. Whose name was Natalia Osipova. That is to say it had very little to do with Duncan, or Ashton. Every port de bras was a declamatory shout, every movement filled with drama drama DRAMA.
Osipova snatched a scarf from the piano like it was some sort of bed sheet, wrapped it around herself as if she were playing dress-up, then tossed it angrily to the ground as if she were Isadora Dearest. Shortly after she shot us predatory looks as if we were her next meal. Her weird, over the top caprices were more like the best and most insane drag show you had ever seen.
The moment that crystallized this visitation was when she mimed catching an imaginary bird, which she caught by smacking her hands together with a loud clap. Gurl. Oh Gurl. It’s dead. You killed it. She let it go and watched it fly away, but it would have been Trockadero fabulous had she mimed watching it fall out of her hands to the ground, squashed lifeless.
Osipova brought in the rose petals for the final waltz as if Hamlet and Ophelia had already begun, and her gathering of petals at the finish felt like some sort of floral orgasm.
I may be poking fun, but nobody in that theater, including me, was bored.
The Sarasota Ballet got its moment on the main stage when Ricardo Graziano and Macarena Giménez, with Daniel Pratt, performed The Walk to the Paradise Garden. From 1972, the piece is a love duet, with a final intrusion, that used the most famous section of Frederick Delius’ A Village Romeo and Juliet.
In a light-colored dress with a blue ribbon, Giménez was hauled and carried by Graziano while doing her best Juliet, being rapturous as he pressed her from the ground into a bird lift. Giménez made the dance about gorgeous, rippling bourrées, but her battements serrés, the little beats of the foot against the leg Ashton often gave a woman to indicate rapture, barely happened.
Graziano did killer partnering, popping Giménez out of a torch lift, flinging her around, holding her upside down to slowly lower her to the ground, then yanking her leg to put her in the correct position. And things took a strange turn. Daniel Pratt appeared at the back, with a bald pate, dressed only in a huge cape and a loincloth. Ashton was playing with stage effects, having both Graziano and Giménez appear from under the cape, but at the end they lay there, dead. The combination of virtuosity, stage effects, skin and morbidity did not go down easily.
Hamlet and Ophelia was made in 1977 as a one-off vehicle for Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, staged here for Francesca Hayward and William Bracewell with new décor by Sarah Armstrong-Jones, who is Princess Margaret’s daughter. The work traded on both the mystique of Shakespeare as well as the star couple, to put it over.
Bracewell as Hamlet was lying in the center of the stage, Hayward appeared on a raised platform that covered the entire back of the stage, pleading with him. He instead stared at his hands. Ashton was creating a character study more than a danced scene, Bracewell raced from side to side, shot into sissonne and spun, tilting into penchée.
Armstrong-Jones’ backdrop of black, white and gray provided arresting mood shifts and the lighting changed. Hayward came to Bracewell from the back for an emotional dialogue of arabesques and attitudes, finally he kissed her.
He dragged her about then yanked her angrily. She begged, he rejected her, then sent her away. He changed his mind and came after her as she left, but then she rejected him, to cross the stage at the back swathed in a huge silk, assumedly the water she drowned herself in. Bracewell staggered as he reached for Hayward, then collapsed, and after a final reach, came to face us at center as the curtain closed.
As precious as it is to preserve any Ashton, none of these smaller pieces seemed to be great works. Few of his miniatures were. Most were either bonbons or one-offs. Hamlet and Ophelia was in some ways recycled goods. If the treatment of Ophelia by Hamlet reminded you of Marguerite and Armand, it should. The music was Liszt here as well, and doubtless Ashton was also trading on the memory of the earlier ballet, made for Fonteyn and Nureyev.
Hamlet was a juicy role for Bracewell, demanding he turn a pirouette into an anguished cry. But the masochism in the sketch of Ophelia wasn’t ameliorated by other qualities, and wasn’t grateful to Hayward. The silver lining in recycling: Ashton again explored the emotional possibilities of pointe work here. Instead of Marguerite’s staggering, Ophelia collapsed off pointe repeatedly to express her agony and despair.
Putting Paradise Garden on the same bill as Hamlet and Ophelia was inscrutable programming. All three of the smaller works would have looked better with something brighter in the middle. Voices of Spring, for instance, covers much of the same choreographic ground as Paradise Garden, with a contrasting emotional palette. You wouldn’t even have to buy more rose petals, just sweep up the ones from Brahms.
Daichi Ikarashi and Sae Maeda both made their debuts in Rhapsody. Both Ikarashi and Taisuke Nakao the prior night looked as if they were coached at the same time; Alexander Agadzhanov was credited along with Lesley Collier. Both men had spacious, legato carriage in the upper body. The only place you wanted something a little sharper from both was at the playing-the-violin mime.
Ikarashi punched through the jumps but had huge elevation. He hurtled into a skidding entrance flinging his leg, whirling through uncountable turns. There were more quicksilver changes of moods tonight, which suited the ballet.
Interestingly the two casts of leading couples matched a sharper dancer with a softer one, but with genders reversed. Here, Maeda was much more liquid. Her torso and arms rippled into curlicues, curving beyond classical positions. She directed your gaze to her upper body.
Her approach to the part was the opposite to Anna Rose O’Sullivan, who went for Queen Bee. Maeda did Girly-Girl. She deftly created a sustained romantic fantasy and looked at home being lifted and presented by the men in the adagios. It was an almost Broadway stereotype of the star and her chorus boys.
Both approaches work, because despite the featuring of the male virtuoso, Ashton put the weight of his imagination – and his vast knowledge of ballet’s tropes – behind the ballerina as well. Maeda did the big duet as if it were her wedding, and like Nakao, Ikarashi acted more as porteur in the duet than co-star. The ballet looked quite balanced.
Maeda’s leg lines were lovely, but the night before O’Sullivan’s were rapiers. If you looked for it, Maeda’s pas courus in parallel, instead of a blur, were larger, more effortful steps. The one thing she didn’t get to do much was jump. But when she did: BOING. Her legs flew to the side in splits and when she let loose a jeté, she soared. Perhaps not appropriate here, but imagine how she’d look in a jumping role.
Ikarashi came in right after, and the man’s part is a jumping role. His 540s could make you gasp. There was a strange almost gear-like way he could take the leading leg and suddenly give it a second, centrifugal push to fling himself in the air.
If anything was less secure than at the first performance, the male sextet looked more challenged by the demanding corps dances. There were popcorn moments of everyone jumping on their own time when they shouldn’t have.
If Rhapsody tells you anything about Ashton, it’s that he valued both line and force in a dancer. It’s not the point of this piece, but a pet observation of mine is that male dancers fall – imperfectly – into two categories, dancers who prioritize force and dancers who prioritize line. And often that division again divides imperfectly by sexual orientation.
In a bit of stereotyping on my part, I assumed Ashton would prioritize line, but he doesn’t. It was Baryshnikov that Ashton was choreographing on and he met him where he lived, challenging him with a role that at many points the man has to power through to make a tough series of jumps happen.
More observations: I’ve always assumed the shrug that is so often in Ashton’s work was specified by him. Yet at this performance neither Boswell as Puck, nor Ikarashi in Rhapsody did it. Boswell pushed his arms upwards instead of using his shoulders, as if he were trying to raise the roof, and that felt like a misinterpretation. Ikarashi did a one-handed farewell to us, but was it possible Ikarashi decided on a slightly different gesture because he did the shrug the day before as Puck? Is the shrug always the choreography or a gesture that’s simply one option? As we lose the people who knew, are we taking moments such as “The Shrug” or “The Fred Step” and assigning them mystical import as if they were saints’ relics?
Another conundrum for the faithful: which Ashton is part of the true cross? Hamlet and Ophelia was recreated by Wayne Eagling, Dante Sonata was recreated in 2000 by David Bintley with assistance from members of the original cast. As valuable as the reconstructions are, what we don’t want to happen is what is currently happening with Martha Graham’s company, where the reconstructions are being performed more frequently than the intact works.
Besides programming more of it, preserving Ashton is not simply about getting dancers to bend more, though that’s as good a place as any to start. With Ashton, the steps without understanding the stories behind the steps are a husk. Watch Lynn Seymour in A Month in The Country (about 2:30 in). Natalia Petrovna isn’t dancing a variation, but a monologue where every movement phrase is a thought. Suddenly all of those gestures, all that bending, those signature steps we’ve attached so much importance to, crystallize as character and motivation. Lose that with Ashton and all you have left are details devoid of reasons.
Copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
The Dream, Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan, The Walk to the Paradise Garden, Hamlet and Ophelia, Rhapsody – The Royal Ballet
Royal Opera House, London
June 7, 2024
Cover: The Royal Ballet in The Dream. Photo © Tristram Kenton.
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