For an art form obsessed with tradition, ballet is surprisingly bad at preserving its own history. Works drop out of the repertoire and are never seen again. Context is lost. Lovers of Frederick Ashton therefore owe the Sarasota Ballet and its director Iain Webb, a former dancer with Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, a great debt for its loving preservation of his work. Since he arrived at the company in 2007, he and his assistant director and wife Margaret Barbieri have carefully revived many rarely seen pieces.
The Florida company’s triple bill is a perfect way to kick off Ashton Celebrated, a Royal Ballet mini-season devoted to its founding choreographer. The revelation was Dante Sonata, which sends 22 dancers flooding across the tiny stage in movement at once uninhibited and highly sculptural. Designed by Sophia Fedorovitch and set to Liszt as arranged by Constant Lambert, it was premiered in 1940 at a point when the future of the world seemed in doubt.
It sets the forces of the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness opposite one another in expressive choreography full of moments of anguish but poses of calm resolve that reaches back to Isadora Duncan (whom Ashton saw when he was a ballet-obsessed teenager) and forward to Pina Bausch (whose mentor Kurt Jooss was also working in Britain through the war). The steps – women rushing, hair loose, squared elbows pumping against the air – are astonishing, but so is the emotion. It may be a period piece, but it is utterly alive.
Ashton’s velocity and intricacy and Fedorovitch’s genius are also on display in Valses Nobles et Sentimentales from 1947, a swooning rose-tinged tapestry for four couples to Ravel, full of anticipation and a hint of mystery. Sinfonietta from 1967 shows Ashton the modernist, constantly inventive, moving a woman among five men like a hypnotised acrobat, setting couples springing and bouncing in radiant lightness, in perfect synchronicity with Malcolm Williamson’s score.
The whole programme, danced with grace and care, is a history lesson and a delight.
