A rather unBritish achievement
Frank Johnson
THE ROYAL BALLET: 75 YEARS by Zoe Anderson
Faber, £20, pp. 329, ISBN 0571227953
✆ £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Who would have thought that the British, of all unexotic peoples, would turn out to be good at ballet; both at dancing and choreographing it? One minute they could do next to nothing of either. The next the world knew about Britain and ballet was that this damp, dour island off the Continent had a company as famous as any in the world.
The newly formed Vic-Wells Ballet gave its first full evening’s programme in the for ballet — unglamorous Old Vic in 1931. By 1949, as Sadler’s Wells, it was thought glamorous enough to appear in the world’s most star-struck opera house; with Fonteyn and the Sleeping Beauty opening its first season at the New York Metropolitan. Zoe Anderson has written what will immediately become the new standard history.
In the British past, there were some precedents. The masques at Elizabeth I’s court caused continental observers to refer to the ‘dancing English’. But by 1931 all that had long gone. In the eyes of most Britons, ballet must have meant something distinctly unBritish. It was a brave English male who first ventured on to that Old Vic stage in tights.
Still, Diaghilev once said, ‘After the Russians, the English have by far the greatest aptitude; some day in the future they will form their own school.’ He must have known something about the English that most of the English did not. Perhaps it was that, though the island may be damp and dour, much of its art has about it a kind of disciplined passion. That is what classical dancing is.
By the 1900s, ballet, not just in Britain but in Western Europe, had long been in decline. Then Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes burst on Paris (1909) and London (1911). Ballet became fashionable. Bloomsbury took it up. That would in the long term have brought disaster. Bloomsbury was only interested because the Ballets Russes was new, exotic, erotic, gaudy and, with any luck, to the bourgeosie improper. It does not sound much like our own dear Giselle, Swan Lake, and the Sleeping Beauty. Nor was it. The passion was not all that disciplined. The layman is wrong to assume that what Diaghilev offered was much like what the Royal Ballet, as well as the Kirov and the Bolshoi, offer today. The steps, the choreographers and the dancers came from the St Petersburg Imperial Ballet. But most of the ballets did not, being specially created for the West. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes never danced in Russia. It was not conservative enough. We are still brought up to scorn conservative art. But classical ballets cannot be watched over and over again unless the choreography confines itself to a fairly rigid convention. Otherwise it ceases to be classical. Most Diaghilev ballets relied on effects other than mere dancing; brilliant décor, music that was then avant-garde. They were exciting to see every now and then, but the effects soon wore off. That is why few are given today.
The Ballets Russes surged back to London after the first world war. In 1929 Diaghilev died. Having no subsidy from any state, the company dispersed. Catastrophe, everyone said; but its disappearance was a blessing.
A minor Diaghilev dancer, Ninette de Valois, actually an Irishwoman, Edris Stannus, founded what became the Royal Ballet. She somehow persuaded the Old Vic to give ballet a chance. She enlisted someone who became a choreographer of genius, Frederick Ashton, and a brilliant conductorcomposer, Constant Lambert. Within a few years, on the tiny Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells stages, the company mounted the 19thcentury imperial Russian classics, Giselle, Swan Lake, and by the end of the Thirties Sleeping Beauty. A refugee, Nicolas Sergeyev, taught them from notation he had brought out of Russia at the revolution. By the 1930s, the Soviets had altered that choreography, thinking to make it more acceptable to the masses. The Russian classics in London were thus more authentic than in Russia. Also, Ashton’s ballets were much more classical than the Diaghilev repertoire.
But why did de Valois depart from Diaghilevian sensationalism — which would have assured her the intelligentsia’s interest — in favour of pre-Diaghilevism? I have never seen this satisfactorily explained. Perhaps something told her that dance audiences now wanted to experience dancing as a form of visual music which could be watched over and over again as a symphony or opera could be heard. In Britain, classical ballet was both created and saved.
True balletomanes are gossips. I am sure that Zoe Anderson knows much more than, in what is intended as a serious reference book, she can let on. You have to read between the lines in her account of the previously little known Australian, the late Ross Stretton’s tenure — unfathomably appointed and swiftly sacked. She refers to ‘rumours’ of ‘inappropriate relationships between Stretton and young dancers.’ Enough said. Or rather not enough. But this is a sort of official history.
Stretton, she says, was hired as ‘a new broom’. The people who run so many of our arts today, having little self-confidence, are prone to new brooms. It emerged that Stretton knew next to nothing about, for example, Ashton. The Royal Ballet’s history is proof that in ballet it is the old brooms that work.
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