The Floridian city of Sarasota has become host to a kind of Royal Ballet in exile. Since Iain Webb became artistic director, in 2007, and Margaret Barbieri joined as his assistant in 2012, the company has been building up an impressive collection of works by Sir Frederick Ashton (32 largely one-act ballets and excerpts at the last count).
This “gala” was the penultimate show of an all-too-brief debut season at The Royal Opera House marking the launchpad for a five-year Ashton Worldwide Festival. More than 35 years after his death some of Ashton’s ballets are more popular than ever and some of those that might easily have been forgotten are being kept alive in Sarasota.
These magical six days have included seven performances, engaging a rotating programme of around a dozen pieces although each show has opened with the same work. Several ballets, including some in this “gala” programme, have not been performed in the UK for many years. Structurally, there was little difference between this “gala” and the two other programmes. The only contrasts being the presence of three guests from The Royal Ballet, it being the only show on a Saturday evening and a significant uplift in ticket prices.
The lynchpin of every performance was the inclusion of Valses nobles et sentimentales, a 16-minute ballet that Ashton refashioned in 1947, with the same eponymous music by Ravel that he had used to create a piece for Ballet Rambert (Valentine’s Eve) some dozen years (and a world war) previously. This second iteration was influenced by his appreciation of the work being made in the USA by George Balanchine and also personal feelings of unrequited love.
His perfect capsule of mannered sophistication in dance epitomises the épaulement, arched back, musicality and other aspects we might include in the definition of “Ashton” or “English”, style”; so charmingly and consistently illustrated by these dancers, working a whole ocean away.
The essence of a story hovers through the movement although it would be easy to miss the subtleties. An opening group sequence for five couples quickly distils into an “Excuse me” as two strapping fellows (Ricardo Rhodes and Daniel Pratt) vie for the hand of a beautiful maiden (Jessica Assef). Their rivalry includes a pas de trois where both suitors take turns in partnering their intended and an entrance where they carry Assef with her outstretched legs in full splits, balanced on their shoulders like the arms of a rickshaw (a choreographic device that Ashton used more than once). A pas de deux with Rhodes seemed to suggest that he will win this war of romance but as the final tableaux brings the brief ballet to an end, Assef is seen partnering both men in turn, behind a screen as the curtains close, leaving the audience still guessing the outcome.
Valses is a luscious, creamy iced latte of a ballet that visually articulates Ravel’s dreamy music. Sofie Fedorovitch’s burgundy and pink costume designs, the bare set enclosed by screens on three sides and the silhouetted suggestion of potted palms creates a perfect vintage atmosphere in the manner of a dream sequence from a Powell and Pressburger film.
The middle act was prefaced by a mesmerising performance of Dance of the Blessed Spirits by The Royal Ballet’s Joseph Sissens, displaying an abundance of elegance and strength coupled with a complete absence of any visible strain. This composed and breath-taking tour de force was followed by a chic performance of Varii Capricci, made in 1983 when Ashton was almost 80. Rhodes returned to do double duty as the cool beach-boy, hooking up with cocktail girl Jennifer Hackbarth, although was it him or the sunglasses that she was really after? The profound influence on Ashton of the works of Bronislava Nijinska is very clear to see in this sophisticated work with designs by Ossie Clark and music by Sir William Walton.
Walton also provided the musical inspiration and score for Façade, the premiere of which (26th April 1931 for the Carmago Society) was nine days before what became the Vic-Wells Ballet (and eventually The Royal Ballet) gave its first performance at Sadler’s Wells.
It’s a brief and uplifting flourish of old English charm that sits in the same nostalgic treasure chest as music hall, seaside postcards and pantomime and it is remarkable how the dancers from Sarasota enlivened the work’s many cameos. All the performances captured the cocktail of comic entertainment and technical complexity and Gabriella Schultze’s Milkmaid and Macarena Gimenez’ Polka were amongst my many highlights. Two further guests from The Royal Ballet – Gary Avis and Lauren Cuthbertson – had great fun delivering vintage British silent humour to the pastiche Tango-Pasodoble that leads into the finale.
This charming, chic and chucklesome evening of splendid nostalgia topped off a great week of dance. Bringing Ashton from Florida to The Royal Opera House sounds like “coals to Newcastle” but I think that “discovering buried treasure” might be a more appropriate idiom.
