Ashton Fan

As far as I can see the seven former Royal Ballet interviewees have, each in their own way, identified the cause of much that is

wrong with the Royal Ballet. The loss of the training ground provided by the the touring section; the lack of the systematic coaching regime that the major Russian companies have, has probably done more damage than anything else. However;the weaknesses at the school under Park's directorship; Lady MacMIllan pushing her husband's cause for all that it was worth; Dowell's weakness as director,his apparent capitulation to the Board when it came to questions of repertoire and his admitted failure to stand up to Michael Kaiser are all factors that have contributed to its current difficulties

The problem is,I am not convinced that O'Hare has got what it takes to sort the company out Mason , it seems to me, decided that rescuing and restoring repertory was a more pressing issue than developing dancers. But all the switching dancers around in the recent run of Symphonic Variations does not suggest that O'Hare has any idea of how to deal with the company's problems..Giving everyone the chance to have a go ;resulting in a series of inadequate performances in major mature Ashton works rather than programming his earlier ballets that had trained the company in its early days, is not the way to develop dancers.The failure to give Ashton a more central role in his programming and his decision to mount a production of Don Quixote does not do anything to make me reassess my view of the current artistic director's capacity to deal with the company's problems.

Perhaps classical ballet is in better shape in the US than it is here.I did not find all the negativity that some of you say that you found in the book. I would not describe Desmond Kelly's interview as a rant .It seemed to me that each of the former Royal Ballet dancers had some very pertinent things to say about the amount of experience that they were able to get early in their careers. The extensive tours of twelve, fourteen or more works with eight performances a week gave all of them a solid grounding in the works of Petipa,Ashton, MacMillan and others. No wonder they brought so much to the ballets that they danced.It is the difference between dancing Swan Lake or Fille twice in a season and fourteen times on tour.It is about the strength, stamina and insight that the dancers derived from that experience.What they say about coaching or the lack of it and the way that choreography has been watered down (Seymour) or altered (McLeary) was for me most illuminating.

Perhaps the problem is that seven of the interviewees are former Royal Ballet dancers but what they say about coaching and rehearsing roles and the overemphasis on pyrotechnics at the expense of artistry goes a long way to explain the type of performance that we see to often in certain ballets. McLeary's working relationship with Guillem explains how and why choreography is altered and how certain dancers get away with it;David Wall's comments on the adverse effect that learning from DVD can have on the individual dancer's development of a role even when they have coaching helps explain some of the performances that we see.

Of course we may not want to read that, in the experience of an interviewee, the current corps of dancers are more concerned with technique than artistry; or that some of them have little or no interest in anything except technique or that for many the efficient reproduction steps of is thought to be all that is required in order to dance in a ballet. But those comments are based on long experience as a dancer and coach and deserve to be given serious consideration. Ananiashvili was still dancing at the time that she was interviewed and is engaged in restoring and developing a company with dancers who, perhaps, have a somewhat different attitude to their art. Sibley makes only occasional forays into the rehearsal room and only does so to coach dancers in her old roles, perhaps as a result, she tends to work with dancers who are more concerned with artistry. I think that it is a book that anyone interested in ballet should read.It may make you think.

I agree that it is sad that Cervera has been so underused.But it is also sad from the audience's point of view that dancers are cast in roles for which they are clearly unsuited simply because they are principals and have a following.I think that the audience is entitled to expect that the Royal Ballet will put on the best casts that it can for each type of ballet that it stages. The fact that it does not always do so is not so much of a problem for regular repertory pieces such as Manon but is little short of disastrous when works that are performed infrequently are cast in that way. Although a few of Ashton's works have a secure toehold in the repertory the majority do not and so the decision to treat Scenes and Symphonic as training opportunities has almost certainly done more harm than good both for the dancers and audiences. If Kevin O'Hare has finally recognised the need for the company to dance more Ashton then he should have scheduled pieces like Facade and Les Patineurs and scheduled Monotones for revival.

The topic started as an attempt to identify Ashton dancers It would be so much easier to answer this question if both the Royal Ballet and the Birmingham Royal Ballet programmed Ashton's works with greater regularity and covered a wider range of them than they do. Then there is casting.There are very few dancers who are equally effective in everything.If you can get it wrong by casting dancers in order to give them something to do,Soares and Galeazzi in the Thais pas de deux for example, or because they want to dance particular roles Guillem in Month in the Country and Margueritte and Armand then you can do almost as much damage by deciding that the corps' work in Scenes de Ballet should be used as a learning opportunity and that Symphonic Variations can take any number of cast changes without detriment to the performance experienced by the audience.

I do not think that it is true to say that there are no Ashton dancers at the Royal Ballet but there is ample evidence that management casting decisions are more about seniority or giving dancers the opportunity to have a go than they are about suitability. As management gives away as little as possible about casting when tickets first go on sale you have to take pot luck about the quality of the performance that you will eventually see. If you had gone to the first performance of the recent Ashton mixed bill you would have come away very satisfied with the performance of Symphonic Variations if you had come to the next performance you would have been far less satisfied by Symphonic because only two of the dancers from the first performance were on stage.On the other hand you would have been far more impressed by the performance of the Five Brahms Waltzes.

Morera is probably the best all round Ashton dancer at present .She has the right musicality and because she has mastery of the choreography she is able to forget the steps and simply dances the ballet She is excellent in the ballerina role in Rhapsody and as Fairy Autumn and Diana. She is very good as Lise, Titania and Fairy Godmother. She is very good in Symphonic and in the Neapolitan Dance.In the last revival of Birthday Offering she danced her variation with real understanding and musicality, not something that could be said about most of the dancers on stage.

Of the male dancers two of the best Ashton dancers are Paul Kay and Ricardo Cervera neither of whom are principals.Kay is by physique and temperament a demi character dancer. He is one of the best Ashton dancers because he does not simply reproduce steps, he knows that mastery of the steps is just the beginning. His Jester, Alain, Puck and Blue Skater are all excellent. He is the sort of dancer that Ashton created so many of his on.He dances the Jester as a character rather than a close relative of a Soviet jester,all technique and nothing else. He is definitely not a mere leg machine. His Alain is beautifully characterised; his Puck brings out the text that is hidden in the choreography; his Blue Skater is not simply an opportunity to display technique. and he can actually dance the choreography including the section that McRae could not manage. His Kolia is perhaps,now, a trifle mature but still excellent. Cervera is a fine Colas and Tiranio and used to be excellent in the Neapolitan dance.He has been understudy for Oberon but never,as far as I know,danced it while Matthew Golding who I thought was hopelessly miscast, too tall and slow, has.

As far as the rest of the dancers are concerned Nunez is generally regarded as a fine Lise , She was the best thing in Birthday Offering when it was last revived. Both Rojo and Nunez appeared in the Fonteyn role but while Nunez danced the ballet, Rojo appeared to be counting and merely reproducing steps. Nunez is a fine Lykanion and excellent in Symphonic. Her Sylvia showed great technical command but was bland.

Yanowsky is a fine Lady Elgar, Natalia Petrovna,, and Fairy Winter,She is a wonderfully squiffy Josephine and although not an ideal height for Sylvia she has shown far more of what the ballet can be in performance than anyone else has done. Lamb was fine in Thais with Bonelli and in Cinderella but far too serious as Lise.

Bonelli is a fine Daphnis,and Baliaev and much better in the Thais pas de deux than Soares. Pennefather is a fine Aminta and

Baliaev.They are both excellent in Symphonic..Watson is a fine Oberon,and is good in Enigma Variations and White Monotones.

Dancers to watch out for Francesca Hayward who made a stunning debut in Rhapsody with James Hay in February and followed that up with an excellent Vera; Yasmine Naghdi who along with Hayward has musicality and epaulement;James Hay stunningly elegant in the main male role in Rhapsody, very good as Kolia and in the Brian Shaw role in Symphonic; Vadim Muntagirov who made a wonderful debut in the Some's role in Symphonic. If he did not look so happy at the second and third performances that could well be because of what was going on with the rest of the cast. Symphonic is an extraordinarily difficult ballet to get right with a good cast to dance it with a less than ideal cast must be hell. Finally nineteen year old Reece Clarke who made an auspicious debut in the main role in Symphonic variations.

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I think that the audience is entitled to expect the RB to field their best Ashton dancers for performances of Symphonic Variations and Scenes de Ballet. Unfortunately Mr O'Hare seems to think differently. It seemed that greater thought was given to casting and preparing Month, a work with which the company is familiar, than was given to Scenes or Symphonic. For my money Francesca Hayward should have been in Symphonic rather than cast as Vera or even more daringly,on the basis of her performance in Rhapsody, given the chance to dance the ballerina role in Scenes. She is one of the few who really look and move like an Ashton dancer. I should be interested to know which casts you saw Mashinka as the performances were, to put it mildly, variable.

Something that I find totally inexplicable is that ,unlike the past, no attempt seems to be made to build on experience.In the past dancers who had previously danced in Symphonic would be cast in revivals, but that never seems to happen now;and there are still dancers in the company who have danced it before. Given the amount of time and effort that must go into reviving Symphonic the current management's policy, which given the number of permutations seen in this revival,seems to be of giving everyone a chance to have a go, makes very little sense but says a great deal about their attitude to Ashton's works. Another example of this failure to build on experience is Monotines. A great deal of tiime and effort must have gone into reviving Monotones I and II. It makes no sense that it has not been scheduled this year. Most of the casts are still in the company and they had got so close to getting it right and a further run of performances might well have done it. But of course there is no need.They have got that piece of the heritage on DVD, time to move on.It probably will be revived at some point in the future with an entirely new cast who will almost get there and then it will be put back in the cupboard marked job done!

I think that I first noticed the ominous words "Heritage Works" being used at about the time that Ross Stretton was appointed director of the Royal Ballet.The words suggested that such ballets are something of an irrelevance and that it does not matter whether they are performed or not. Stretton's programming suggested that he felt that the works that de Valois and Ashton had worked so hard to acquire and the ballets that they had created were irrelevant in the twenty first century.

I can't help thinking that if Russian dancers in the throes of their reaction to the late nineteenth century style of ballet with its apparent over emphasis on technique were prepared to describe Petipa's works as classics and to dance in them at the same time as they appeared in Fokine's revolutionary works then we should feel able to do the same with the greatest works of the twentieth century If they were described as twentieth century classics their non performance might become an issue as far as the reputation and standing of ballet companies is concerned..A company's failure to programme its twentieth century works and perform them regularly with carefully selected and coached dancers would become something that artistic directors would have to justify.It would certainly become a ground for criticism of the company's artistic policies.Who knows it might result in a wider range of works being performed than is currently the case.

As far as the enquiry about Ashton dancers is concerned are you discussing dancers who dance in the appropriate styleand are good in the roles which the are given or dancers who are cast in Ashton's works regardless of their suitabilty?

I don't know how many people go to see ballet performances in your country or mine for that matter, but I have no doubt that it is a pretty small proportion of the population.You can't go by ticket sales because so many of us go to multiple performances to see different casts.If you know very little about ballet but have been to one or two performances then the chances are that you will have been to see one or two of the late nineteenth century classics. Ballets that were created to display technique as well as artistry. It is very easy, if stylistic considerations are of no interest to either the dancers or their coaches, for these ballets to degenerate into mere displays of dance technique. I am thinking for example of a Swan Lake where the great Act 2 pas de deux is danced at a funereal pace, in order to show the ballerina's control,or a Sleeping Beauty where the ballerina appears to be going for a world record for the duration of her balances in the Rose Adagio.

If that is your experience of ballet either in the flesh or from DVD then you are going to see ballet as essentially a display of bodily control, and as such, not that different from gymnastics.A couple of years ago San Francisco Ballet came to London with a mixed bill that included two ballets for an all male cast, Mark Morris' Beaux and a piece by a young member of that company which was described as a homage to his Russian school. Beaux is a fascinating piece for an all male cast with not a jump in sight, the piece by the young dancer was a display piece with a limited vocabulary of jumps and turns. Beaux was greeted politely, with a degree of bewilderment, by the audience the "homage" piece with great enthusiasm.It seems to me that the audience were more in tune with the excitement generated by the "homage" than they were with the beauty of Beaux. That excitement, it seemed to me, was closer to the response to an outstanding sports event than to a work of art a" wow" response rather than "ah" that was so beautiful.

Danilova writing of the difference between ballet in Russia and the West said that ballet in Russia had once been concerned with storytelling and the creation of mood but had become a display of dancing. Perhaps the same thing has now happened in the West. There are dancers who say that you can never be too extreme when it comes to extensions and there are many who torture a score to give themselves time for extra turns and six o'clock extensions. If a choreographic text is altered by the addition of Mr X's or Miss Y's latest trick without any adverse comment then perhaps it should come as no surprise that ballet is described by many as a sport rather than an art form after all the addition of new tricks brings it closer and closer to ice skating which definitely is a sport.

Management decisions can be unfathomable whatever is being managed. Last season the company acquired two new male principals,Matthew Golding and Vadim Muntagirov. No one asked why Muntagirov was joining , his abilities are well known to ballet goers in London and everywhere that English National Ballet visits.Golding's talents were something of an unknown quantity. His appearance as Conrad in ENB's new Corsaire did not reveal anything out of the ordinary about him.Both men appeared at Covent Garden as the prince in Sleeping Beauty Muntagirov gave a very polished account of the role,Golding's performance was.not in the same class .Golding also danced Oberon, which proved to be a role that does not suit him.

This season he was announced as the lead for every performance of Symphonic Variations but was replaced without any explanation by Muntagirov and Reece Clarke.I don't think that anyone felt a pang of disappointment when they discovered that they were not going to see him. I know that a lot of people are wondering why he has been taken into the company.We all hope that we get an answer soon.The company was not desperate for another male principal at that point.The decision to sign him

does not make much sense in isolation and makes even less sense in the light of the subsequent recruitment of Muntagirov and the decision to take Reece Clarke from the school during his final year. But then the company has made something of a habit of

recruiting dancers to senior positions for no apparent reason. There is nothing wrong with most of them but there is nothing that special about them when they are on stage. They can't all be dancers who give their best performances in class.

The company found it necessary to recruit from the outside after the loss of several male dancers when Michael Kaiser suggested that the company should be disbanded during the rebuilding of the opera house and re-established as a sort of ABT on Thames. But that was nearly twenty years ago.It sometimes seems that having been forced to recruit from the outside through necessity the company has got into a habit that it can't break.

As far as the choice of repertory and casts for the screened performances are concerned I suspect that management believes that full length story ballets with known names are a safer option than a mixed bill.You could always try writing to Kevin O'Hare

to ask why he is showing such a limited number of works and why he keeps using the same group of dancers.The Royal Ballet's decisions on casting for performances on tour and those that are screened do not,it seems to me,always result in the best casts being seen by the wider public.There seem to be other factors at play such as interest in particular dancers and name recognition among the wider,non ballet going public. When the Collier Coleman recording of La Fille Mal Gardee was made they were the first cast in that ballet and there was a general consensus that they were the best exponents of their roles that the company could muster at that time. I do not think that the regular ballet goer would have said the same of the Acosta Nunez cast

at the time that their recording was made.I can think of at least two other casts that most regulars would have have gone to see in preference to them but Acosta has name recognition and sells tickets and presumably DVDs

Again I suspect that the choice of Darcey Bussell as the compere for the screened broadcasts is a subtle combination of name recognition and laziness.The sad fact is that as far as the average non ballet going member of the public in this country is concerned Nijinsky was a racehorse.The only dancers'names that are recognised are, Nureyev and Bussell which is why whenever a journalist, working for the popular press, writes about a young dancer their names are taken in vain. Name recognition only applies to Fonteyn and Acosta among people who actually go to the ballet. Bussell had,and continues to have,a loyal following;she has even greater name recognition now as a result of being one of the judges on Strictly Come Dancing. She is,no doubt,seen as someone who will dispel the idea that ballet is elitist. In this country elite and elitist are words that can only be applied to sportsmen and sportswomen without any hint of criticism.I haven't seen any of the screened performances but from comments that I have read from people in this country Bussell clearly does not impress. Deborah Bull would probably have been a better choice from the ballet goer's perspective but the powers that be may well have thought that she sounds too

authoritative but they may have given it no real thought to it at all.

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If you look at the ballets revived during Mason's directorship you will find that she restored a significant number of Ashton's works to the active repertory. Having restored Sylvia to its original three act form she ensured that it was seen during several seasons. Although we got to see a wider range of Ashton works than we did during Dowell's directorship not all of it was well danced.Both Ashton and MacMillan controlled the quality of the performances of their ballets by deciding who appeared in them Today the company management makes most, if not all, of the casting decisions. It is probably fair to assume that on occasion the need to keep the principal dancers happy by giving them roles that they would like to dance outweighs artistic considerations.

The revival of Birthday Offering in Mason's final season seemed to be a prime example of what can go wrong when you cast dancers according to their position in the company rather than their suitability for particular roles .Rojo was given the Fonteyn role in one cast and Nunez in the other. Rojo was very stiff and gave the impression that she was counting throughout rather than listening to the music and as a result the choreography did not look particularly good;whereas when Nunez danced, it made the impact that it should. The majority of the dancers made heavy weather of their variations.It might have been better not to have revived it because the revival did few of the dancers any favours.An intriguing alternative would have been to select Nunez and some of the younger members of the company for the second cast. I do not think that that would have been possible but it would have been a great improvement on what we saw..The lower ranks of the company have, for the main part, been trained at the RBS if only for a short time. The younger dancers might have had a better idea of the style and would almost certainly have listened to their coaches.

But just as you begin to despair something happens at a performance and your hope is restored,at least in part. That something was the appearance last February for a single Saturday matinee performance of James Hay and Francesca Hayward in Rhapsody. Ashton's Rhapsody is probably the most unlikely ballet for a debut at an early stage in a dancer's career and to put two relatively inexperienced dancers on in it seemed a little rash even to those who had seen the pair in other roles. While it may be true that Hay was dancing far closer to the edge of his technical ability than either McRae or Zucchetti had been,his dancing was elegant and seemed effortless. Francesca Hayward brought lyricism, natural musicality and bright, clean footwork to the Collier role.It would be nice to think that we might see it revived in the 2015-2016 season with this cast but,as the company does not take its role as custodian of the Ashton repertory seriously,it seems unlikely.

The problem for the Ashton repertory is that, apart from ballets like the Dream and Month,it is not performed with any degree of frequency. The rights to Ashton's ballets are held by a number people who have varying levels of interest in the revival of the works that they own while MacMillan's ballets are owned by a single individual who is active in promoting them. Although the company needs to develop its dancers it is now run by a team who seem to have little or no interest in using works such as Les Patineurs and Les Rendezvous as a means of developing its dancers. As dancers are more likely to see exemplary performances of MacMillan's works than they are of Ashton's his works continue to be performed at a consistently high level while the standard of performance of Ashton's works is far more variable.

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