Word: ashton
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Among British choreographers, 43-year-old Frederick Ashton has been the busiest and best, lately. U.S. audiences saw several of his witty, agreeable ballets, e.g., Cinderella, Facade, Wedding Bouquet, danced by Britain's Sadler's Wells company last fall (TIME, Nov. 14). Last week Manhattan fans got to see a new Ashton work danced by a U.S. company...
When he was invited last fall to do a new ballet for New York's City Ballet Company, Ashton was delighted. Ever since the war he had been coddling an idea that he thought might be too salty for English dancers. While he was an R.A.F. intelligence officer stationed in Scotland, he had taken to reading the neurotic verses of French Poet Arthur Rimbaud, who went looking for the secrets of life in its sewers, via drugs and debauchery. A lot of what Rimbaud (rhymes with Sambo) had to say was "indecent," Ashton told himself; but perhaps he could...
...Less Inhibited." He found the young New York City Ballet Company "less disciplined" than the crack Sadler's Wells. But the dancers were "more electric," "more rhythmic," and "less inhibited' for some of the Rimbauderies he had in mind. Says Ashton in what was obviously meant to be a compliment: "You have to pull such actions and gestures out of our dancers; yours understand immediately and express them easily...
...illumine his Illuminations, Choreographer Ashton had atomized both Rimbaud's violent life and his poetry, put the pieces back together in a sequence of nine charade-like "danced pictures." The pictures were full of familiar Ashton trademarks-the wit of Wedding Bouquet, the subtle fancy of Facade, the gay, gregarious pageantry and a little of the slapstick of Cinderella. And there were salty passages indeed; Rimbaud's (Nicholas Magallanes) painfully sexual grapple with Profane Love (Melissa Hayden) was both lurid and profane...
...with the severe regimen of a Sadler's Wells ballerina-an endless round of class, rehearsals and performances-the champagne & lobster life comes only once in a blue moon. Margot would be among the first to agree with Frederick Ashton that "being a ballerina is like being a nun; it is a dedication...