Connor Mayes

FREDERICK ASHTON

Frederick Ashton (left) and Robert Helpmann rehearsing their roles as the Ugly Sisters in …

Photograph: Frederick Ashton (left) and Robert Helpmann rehearsing their roles as the Ugly Sisters in … (credit: Central Press — Pictorial Parade)

· Born Sept. 17, 1904, Guayaquil, Ecuador. — died Aug. 18, 1988, Sussex, Eng.)

· Principal choreographer and director of England's Royal Ballet.

· After creating ballets from 1925 for the Ballet Club (later Ballet Rambert), he joined the Vic-Wells Ballet (later Royal Ballet) in 1933, becoming principal choreographer, assistant director (1953 – 63), and director (1963 – 70).

· At least 30 of his works remain in its repertoire, including Façade (1931), Symphonic Variations (1946), and Birthday Offering (1956).

· He also choreographed for companies such as the Royal Danish Ballet (Romeo and Juliet, 1955) and the New York City Ballet (Illuminations, 1950).

The choreographer most responsible for the growth of ballet in modern-day England, Sir Frederick Ashton (1904 - 1988) was one of the most important twentieth-century inheritors of the classical ballet tradition, developed in France and nurtured in the late nineteenth century above all in Russia.

Much loved by dance audiences, Ashton created more than 110 ballets over his long career. Though forbidding in the level of technique they demanded from dancers, they had a direct appeal often marked by lyrical beauty and even humor. "Romantic, passionate, and funny, Frederick Ashton's choreography captures the best and worst of what it means to be human …" observed Dance Magazine writer David Vaughan. "It's a sweet, sane world as Ashton sees it. Skaters may slip and fall, but they get up. The golden age may be lost, but the joys of a country farm remain undiminished. Even a doomed courtesan's heartbreak has its own glamour. While symmetry and form have a place, they don't undermine Ashton's essential warmth and gallantry."

Raised in South America

Born in Guayaquil, Ecuador on September 17, 1904, the man who become a central figure in English cultural life spent most of his childhood in South America. His father was a low-level diplomatic official. Finally the family settled in Lima, Peru, where Ashton grew up speaking mostly Spanish; when he attended schools in England as a teenager, his classmates teased him because he spoke with a Spanish accent. He became transfixed by dance when he saw a performance by the famed Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova in Lima in 1917.

Dance was not considered a proper occupation for young men among middle-class British families of the time, and Ashton's family refused to give him the lessons he asked for. It is probable that they also identified his homosexual orientation and tried to stamp it out. But Ashton continued to pursue his interest in dance after being sent to England. He saw the Ballets russes (Russian Ballet) led by impresario Serge Diaghilev, the leading progressive dance company of the 1910s, and in 1921 he saw the American modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan. Finally Ashton's brother Charlie paid for a few dance lessons, and in 1922 Ashton used money saved from his job as a translator at an import-export firm to begin studies with one of Diaghilev's lead male dancers and choreographers, Léonide Massine.

Taking up the art in his late teens, Ashton was extremely atypical in the dance world; most dancers begin their training as small children. Ashton's late start may actually have contributed to his success as a classical ballet choreographer in an age when modern dance was on the rise; the standard steps of ballet, which seemed exhausted of possibilities to creative young dancers who had studied them for years, instead represented to Ashton the exciting fulfillment of a lifelong dream. Ashton dreamed of becoming a dancer himself, but another teacher, Marie Rambert, encouraged him to develop his talent at choreography instead. By 1926 Ashton had contributed a ballet called A Tragedy of Fashion to an English musical revue, Riverside Nights.

Spending part of 1928 and 1929 in Paris, Ashton finished off his choreographic training with leading classical choreographer Bronislava Nijinska. Stung by Rambert's comment (quoted by Jack Anderson of the New York Times) that he was "bone lazy," he created over 30 works between 1929 and 1934, many of them for Rambert's Ballet Club company. Les Rendezvous, an early success, depicted lovers who meet in a park. Like his contemporary George Balanchine (also born in 1904), Ashton flirted with the idea of moving to the United States; he visited in 1934 and did choreography for the modern opera Four Saints in Three Acts, composed by Virgil Thomson to a text by Gertrude Stein. Ashton recruited African-American dancers from Harlem nightclubs to execute his innovative choreography.

Based Ballet on Ice Skating

Balanchine went on to become a giant of American ballet, but Ashton returned to England in 1935 to take a position as resident choreographer at the Vic-Wells Ballet, later renamed Sadler's Wells Ballet and, in 1956, the Royal Ballet. This new post gave Ashton the chance to create full-scale ballets; most of his works up to that point had been for smaller companies. He remained with the company for the rest of his career, becoming its artistic director in 1963. Ashton maintained a high level of productivity through the 1930s, often inspired by a young Vic-Wells ballerina named Margot Fonteyn, later regarded as one of the great classical dancers of the middle twentieth century. One of his most characteristic works from this period was Les patineurs (The Skaters, 1937), to music by Giacomo Meyerbeer. Though it had no real plot, the work was instantly accessible even to audiences with little knowledge of ballet; it depicted the various personality types - lovers enjoying the winter scenery, show-offs, fearful novices - that one might encounter on an average ice rink. Ashton also created choreography for musicals and revues in the 1930s, sometimes working with American-born tap dancer Buddy Bradley.

Another comic Ashton ballet of the late 1930s was A Wedding Bouquet, which depicted a series of mishaps that beset a small-town wedding in France; a drunk guest has to be carried out, and the final dance of the bride and groom is a parody of the pas de deux of classical ballet. Ashton put the experience of the audience in first place as he planned his dances. "I had a terror of boring people," Anderson quoted him as saying. "And I wasn't concerned with being profound. The 20's and 30's were a very frivolous period and I wasn't trying to correct this; I just went with it."

Though Ashton's choreography was becoming increasingly popular, his works were sometimes criticized as lacking in seriousness. That changed, however, after the outbreak of World War II; his Dante Sonata was a turbulent work with a tragic spirit. Ashton served in Britain's Royal Air Force from 1941 to 1946 and returned after his discharge with Symphonic Variations, an abstract work that is considered one of his most important ballets. Believing that English ballet had become too literary in its orientation, he created a pure dance work. The work had its gestation in the midst of Ashton's wartime experiences. "Fred said that if he ever got through this 'bloody war,' he would make a ballet to the César Franck score [Symphonic Variations]," dance producer Wendy Ellis Soames told Allan Ulrich of Dance Magazine. "He envisioned angelic bodies moving through space."

Many of Ashton's ballets were large-scale productions that fit fully into the graceful Russian-French tradition in which he had been trained. Another 1946 ballet, Cinderella, used the composition of that title by Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev and exemplified the fairy-tale atmosphere that has endeared ballet to generations of audiences. Yet Ashton's dance language was flexible, and he responded enthusiastically to contemporary music. His Scènes de ballet of 1948 was based on a dry, rhythmically intricate composition by the modernist Russian-French-American composer Igor Stravinsky. According to Joan Acocella of The New Yorker, Ashton said he was attracted to Stravinsky's music because of its "cold, distant, uncompromising beauty."

By the 1950s, Ashton was generally considered one of the world's premier choreographers. He augmented his busy London schedule with visits to other countries, creating works for the New York City Ballet (Illuminations, 1950), the Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen (Romeo and Juliet, 1955), and La Scala opera house in Milan, Italy (La valse, 1958). Fonteyn remained one of his most frequent collaborators, and the depth of the pair's creative partnership was one of the hallmarks of postwar ballet.

Created Ingenious Realization of Elgar Work

Ashton was knighted in 1962 by Queen Elizabeth II. As artistic director of what was now the Royal Ballet between 1963 and 1970, he did not let his executive duties interfere with his creativity. In fact, the 1960s were a peak period for Ashton in terms of ballets that became ensconced in the repertories of dance companies around the world. He returned to the comic vein of his earlier works in La fille mal gardée (The Girl Running Wild, 1960), which was presented in the U.S. by both the American Ballet Theatre and the Joffrey Ballet. In 1968 he took on the difficult task of creating a ballet based on Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations, an orchestral work consisting of a series of subtle instrumental portraits of some of the composer's friends.

"In that ballet," wrote Anderson in the New York Times, "he evoked not only the loneliness of genius but Elgar's friends and family and the mood of England at the turn of the century as well, and evoked them with such simple details as the eating of an apple and the arrival of a telegram." Many of Ashton's ballets of the 1960s remained in the Royal Ballet repertory and that of the Joffrey Ballet in the U.S., renowned for its large collection of notated Ashton dances. Ashton retired from the Royal Ballet in 1970 and received the Dance Magazine Award that year.

Part of the reason for Ashton's professional longevity was his personal popularity in British high society. Never a public homosexual, he nonetheless made no secret of his orientation among his acquaintances. He had a sense of humor in person to match the one he displayed on the dance stage, and among those who enjoyed it was Queen Elizabeth II, whom he once taught to dance the tango. Ashton could mimic various well-known British personalities including the queen, who, it is said, retaliated with an Ashton imitation of her own when she heard about his routine. After his retirement, Ashton created the ballet Rhapsody for the queen's 80th birthday celebrations in 1980.

Ashton remained busy in his later years, choreographing more than 15 new ballets in addition to Rhapsody between 1971 and 1985. His Etude was featured in The Turning Point, a successful ballet film released in 1977. Retiring to a country home near the town of Eye in England's Suffolk region, he often returned to London to supervise revivals of his earlier works. He died at his country home on the night of August 18, 1988; some sources give his death date as August 19.

Ashton's ballets fell into a temporary decline in the years after his death, but as the hundredth anniversary of his birth approached, dance critics raised an alarm about the prospect that his works might be forgotten (dance can be written down in notation, but the process of reconstructing them is much more complicated than it is for music). Clive Barnes wrote in Dance Magazine that the Royal Ballet "has in practice done very poorly" by Ashton, and opined that "the lasting value of Ashton's ballets will stand the test of time if they are not sabotaged by the cruelties of history." The Ashton centenary year of 2004 brought a host of new performances of his works, as well as testimonials from the many dancers who had learned their craft as they struggled to master his graceful and appealing works.

Books

International Dictionary of Ballet, St. James, 1993.

Vaughan, David, Frederick Ashton and His Ballets, A. and C. Black, 1977.

Periodicals

Dance Magazine, August 1994; December 2003; July 2004.

Guardian (London, England), august 20, 1988.

New York Times, August 20, 1988.

New Yorker, August 2, 2004.

Washington Post, August 20, 1988.

Online

"Ashton, Sir Frederick," GLBTQ, An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender & Queer Culture, http://www.glbtq.com/arts/ashton_f.html (December 8, 2005).

"Sir Frederick Ashton," American Ballet Theatre, http://www.abt.org/education/archive/choreographers/ashton_s.html (December 8, 2005).

Dictionary of Dance:

(Sir) Frederick Ashton

Ashton, (Sir) Frederick b Guayaquil, Ecuador, 17 Sept. 1904, d Eye, 19 Aug. 1988). British dancer, choreographer, and director, regarded as one of the chief architects of 20th-century British classicism. He was inspired to dance after seeing Pavlova perform in Peru in 1917 and went to study with Massine in London in about 1923. Later he studied with Rambert, who sensed that his potential as a choreographer was greater than his dance talent and encouraged him to make his first ballet, A Tragedy of Fashion (mus. Goossens), in 1926. In 1928 he joined the Rubinstein Company in Paris, where he danced for both Massine and Nijinska, and in 1929 he returned to Rambert and created works both for her Ballet Club and for the Camargo Society. The most enduring of these, Façade (1931), is still in the repertory and displays much of the wit, fantasy, and elegance that informed his later style. He was invited to stage the Virgil Thomson/Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts in 1934 and during the 1930s he sharpened his craft in the commercial theatre, choreographing several numbers for revues and musical comedies.

In 1935 de Valois invited him to join the Vic-Wells Ballet as a dancer and choreographer and he remained with the company for the next 35 years (under its changing titles Sadler's Wells Ballet and Royal Ballet). Here he cemented a fertile musical relationship with conductor and composer Constant Lambert as well as an intense collaborative relationship with Margot Fonteyn which shaped both their careers. As both muse and star exponent of his style, Fonteyn created the leading roles in most of his ballets over the next 25 years. In works like Les Patineurs (1937) the distinguishing features of Ashton's style began to crystallize. Though profoundly influenced by the academic purity of Petipa, his own movement possessed a distinctive sensual plastique so that his fast, brilliant footwork was counterpointed by supple twists and curves in the body, and decorated with rippling arm movements and idiosyncratic angles of the head. Ashton always said that his dancers had to be unafraid 'of letting themselves go', though some of his greatest choreographic moments were characterized by profound simplicity and calm. Symphonic Variations (1946) was the first ballet he made when the company moved to the Royal Opera House and the luminous clarity of its dance images dominated the stage, demonstrating to British audiences that a ballet could stand alone without story or characters. In Scènes de ballet (1948) Ashton made another plotless masterpiece to Stravinsky's acerbic score. This emphasis on pure movement was also present in the many narrative works he went on to create—not only in their lyric dance interludes but in the musically inventive ways in which dance steps were shaped to create character. In Cinderella (1948), the first three-act British ballet, lyric dance was mixed with pantomime to create a distinctively British romantic comedy ballet (Ashton's own performance as the younger Ugly Sister in tow with Helpmann has become legendary). In Ondine (1958), described as a 'concerto for Fonteyn', he created a silvery dance language for the water-sprite heroine. He also created additional choreography for the Royal's staging of 19th-century classics such as Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake. During the 1960s he began to make work for a younger generation of dancers. For Nadia Nerina and David Blair he created the fresh and funny lovers in La Fille mal gardée (1960) while The Dream (1964) launched the partnership of Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell as Titania and Oberon. This also featured one of Ashton's greatest comic creations-Bottom-a figure of pathos as well as fun. Between 1963 and 1970 he was artistic director of the Royal Ballet (having been associate director from 1952) and this period is often viewed as the company's golden age, when its 'English' style was at its purest and the corps de ballet one of the finest in the world. His late ballets display a marked confidence and simplicity: in Monotones (1965 and 1966) the dancing is stripped to limpid essentials; in Enigma Variations (1968) character is distilled through a few gestures and steps; and in Month in the Country (1976) the whole of Turgenev's story is compressed into 45 minutes of poignant dance. He still liked to dazzle, though, and in 1980 created the virtuoso showstopper Rhapsody for Mikhail Baryshnikov and Lesley Collier.

Ashton choreographed most of his works for the Royal Ballet (he is now cited as its founder choreographer), though many are danced all over the world and he created several ballets for other companies, notably Illuminations (1950) for New York City Ballet (now in the Royal Ballet's repertory) and Romeo and Juliet (1955) for the Royal Danish Ballet (subsequently performed by English National Ballet). He was knighted in 1962 and received many other awards including Commander of the Order of Dannebrog, 1964; Companion of Honour, 1974; Hon. Doctor of Music, London University, 1970, and Oxford University, 1976; and Order of Merit, 1977. Works include: Capriol Suite (mus. Warlock, 1930), Façade (mus. Walton, 1931), Les Rendezvous (mus. Auber-Lambert, 1933), Mephisto Valse (mus. Liszt, 1934), Le Baiser de la fée (mus. Stravinsky, 1935), Apparitions (mus. Liszt-Lambert, 1936), Les Patineurs (mus. Meyerbeer-Lambert, 1937), A Wedding Bouquet (mus. Lord Berners, 1937), Dante Sonata (mus. Liszt-Lambert, 1940), The Wanderer (mus. Schubert, 1941), Symphonic Variations (mus. Franck, 1946), Valses nobles et sentimentales (mus. Ravel, 1947), Scènes de ballet (mus. Stravinsky, 1948), Cinderella (mus. Prokofiev, 1948); Illuminations (mus. Britten, 1950), Daphnis and Chloe (mus. Ravel, 1951), Picnic at Tintagel (mus. Bax, 1952), Sylvia (mus. Delibes, 1952), Homage to the Queen (mus. Arnold, 1953), Romeo and Juliet (mus. Prokofiev, 1955), Birthday Offering (mus. Glazunov-Irving, 1956), La Valse (mus. Ravel, 1958), Ondine (mus. Henze, 1958), La Fille mal gardée (mus. Hérold-Lanchbery, 1960), Les Deux Pigeons (mus. Messager-Lanchbery, 1961), Perséphone (mus. Stravinsky, 1961), Marguerite and Armand (mus. Liszt-Searle, 1963), The Dream (mus. Mendelssohn-Lanchbery, 1964), Monotones (mus. Satie, 1965 and 1966), Sinfonietta (mus. M. Williamson, 1967), Jazz Calendar (mus. R. R. Bennett, 1968), Enigma Variations (mus. Elgar, 1968), Lament of the Waves (mus. Masson, 1970), Creatures of Prometheus (mus. Beethoven, 1970), Tales of Beatrix Potter (film-ballet, dir. Reginald Mills, mus. Lanchbery, 1971), Meditation from Thaïs (mus. Massenet, 1971), A Month in the Country (mus. Chopin-Lanchbery, 1976), Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan (mus. Brahms, 1976), Rhapsody (mus. Rachmaninov, 1980), and La Chatte métamorphosée en femme (mus. Offenbach, 1985). He also choreographed for several opera productions, including The Fairy Queen (mus. Purcell, 1946), Orpheus and Euridice (mus. Gluck, 1953), and Death in Venice (mus. Britten, 1973).

Fairy Tale Companion:

Sir Frederick Ashton

Ashton, Sir Frederic (1904–88), British dancer and choreographer, who played a leading role in establishing the importance of the Royal Ballet in particular and of British dance in general. Encouraged by Marie Rambert, he commenced working as a choreographer while still a young dancer. Later in 1935 he was invited by Ninette de Valois to join her Sadler's Wells Ballet company as resident choreographer. This company eventually moved into residence at Covent Garden in 1946. Later, when the Royal Ballet was formed at Covent Garden in 1956, Ashton was one of its founders, creating many new ballets, and from 1963 to 1970 serving as the company's director.

For over five decades Ashton was a significant figure in the British ballet world, originating many new works and preserving the traditions of British classical ballet, the foundations of which he helped lay. Among his foremost ballets may be counted Facade (Walton, 1931), Symphonic Variations (Franck, 1946), and Enigma Variations (Elgar, 1968).

His work in the area of ballets with fairy‐tale themes include Cinderella (Prokofiev, 1948) and Undine (1956), a collaboration between him and the outstanding German composer Hans Werner Henze. Undine, which is on the subject of the water nymph, was created for Margot Fonteyn and the Royal Ballet.

— Tom Higgins

Actor:

Frederick Ashton

· Occupation: Actor, Writer, Cinematographer

· Active: '50s-2000s

· Major Genres: Dance, Theater

· Career Highlights: The Story of Three Loves, The Tales of Hoffmann, The Turning Point

· First Major Screen Credit: Dance Pretty Lady (1932)

Biography

Choreographer and dancer Frederick Ashton was raised in Peru. In 1917, he saw renowned ballerina Pavlova dance and fell passionately in love with the art. He studied ballet for many years before turning to choreography. Ashton was a key figure in the development of the London Royal Ballet and was involved with it from the beginning. From 1963 to 1970, he worked as the artistic director there and oversaw the performances of such illustrious dancers as Fonteyn and Nureyev, and helped elevate the Royal Ballet into one of the world's premiere dance companies. In addition to working with the Royal Ballet, Ashton also choreographed for operas, musical comedies, films, and reviews. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Filmography:

Frederick Ashton

Show More Movies

Frederick Ashton

See also Category: Ballets by Frederick Ashton

"Cinderella" ballet — DVD cover featuring Ashton and Robert Helpmann as the Ugly Stepsisters

Sir Frederick William Mallandaine Ashton OM, CH, CBE (17 September 1904 – 18 October 1988) was a leading international dancer and choreographer. He is most noted as the founder choreographer of The Royal Ballet in London, but also worked as a director and choreographer of opera, film and theatre revues.

Contents [hide]

Early life

Ashton was born at Guayaquil in Ecuador, in the artistic neighbourhood called Las Peñas, the original founding site of the city.

When he was 13 he witnessed a life-changing event when he attended a performance by the legendary Anna Pavlova in the Municipal Theater in Lima, Peru. He was so impressed that from that day on he was determined that he would become a dancer.

Career

In 1919 he went to England to attend Dover College and then to study under the famous Léonide Massine and established a working relationship with the ballet troupe belonging to Marie Rambert and Ninette de Valois. His aim was to become a great dancer, but his late introduction to dancing and slight physique made this a highly difficult ambition to fulfill. However, Rambert discovered Ashton's aptitude for choreography and allowed him to choreograph his first ballet, The Tragedy of Fashion, in 1926, starting a tremendously successful career as a choreographer.

He began his career with the Ballet Rambert which was originally called The Ballet Club. He rose to fame with Vic-Wells Ballet (later to become the Sadler's Wells Ballet before it was designated The Royal Ballet), becoming its resident choreographer in the 1930s. Work from this decade that has stayed in repertory includes Les Patineurs, Les Rendezvous, and A Wedding Bouquet.

World War II inspired Ashton to create some works along more sombre lines, including Dante Sonata (recently reconstructed after having been thought lost), and after the war he turned to plotless ballet, with such works as Symphonic Variations and Scènes de ballet.

The end of the war saw his first major three-act ballet for a British company, his version of Sergei Prokofiev's Cinderella (1948), which was followed by Sylvia (1952), and Ondine (1958), with choreography created especially to display Margot Fonteyn's unique talents and music by Hans Werner Henze. While Ondine was a vehicle for Fonteyn, Marguerite and Armand displayed the excellence of Fonteyn's partnership with Rudolf Nureyev. His version of La fille mal gardée was particularly successful, and his broad travesti performances as one of two comic Ugly Stepsisters in Cinderella, the other being Robert Helpmann, were annual events for many years.

Ashton was Director of the Royal Ballet from 1963 to 1970. He brought new works by Antony Tudor to the company, as well as guaranteeing the survival of several of Bronislava Nijinska's ballets by having her mount Les Noces and Les Biches. Two important revivals of George Balanchine's works also marked Ashton's time as Director.

He also enjoyed a productive career away from ballet as a choreographer for films, revues, and musicals. His work in opera included, in 1953, directing Kathleen Ferrier in Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice at Covent Garden.

He died in 1988 at his home, Chandos Lodge, in Eye, Suffolk, England.

Personal

Ashton was a great friend of the Paget family and was a frequent visit to the family seat at Plas Newydd; it was here that one of the Paget daughters, Lady Rose fell hopelessly in love with him; he rebuffed her advances and at one point returned her letters - after having corrected her spelling. Despite this, they remained friends.

Ashton's nephew, Anthony Russell-Roberts, is the Administrative Director of The Royal Ballet.

Honours

Ashton received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Award from the Royal Academy of Dance in 1959. In 1962, he was knighted for his services to ballet. He was admitted into the French Légion d'honneur in the same year. He was made a Commander of the Order of the Dannebrog in 1963, and was awarded the Gold Medal from the Carina Aria Foundation in Sweden in 1972.

References

Frederick Ashton (1904-1988 Founder Choreographer of The Royal Ballet. John Percival, for Royal Opera House's magazine produced for December 2007 production of Les Patineurs and Tales of Beatrix Potter.

External links

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