The allure of Ashton: the Royal Ballet brings the work of its founding choreographer back to the U.S. this month.

One of the most important issues in the dance world today is the preservation of companies' distinctive styles and repertoires as the masters who formed them disappear. Directors such as Peter Martins at New York City Ballet must find the right balance of their companies' unique inherited profiles with new creations (not always of the same high caliber). Gabriela Komleva wrote in Dance Magazine last month about the loss of Petipa style outside the Kirov. How and to what extent should ways of dancing evolve? When the Danish-trained but Russian-influenced Peter Schaufuss becomes director of the Royal Danish Ballet in the fall, will he sacrifice its distinctive flavor? With "international" dancers, teachers, and choreographers, the danger is that companies will become interchangeable catchalls.

When Britain's Royal Ballet returns to the United States for a tour that begins this month at Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., audiences will have the opportunity to see how some works of the company's founding choreographer, Sir Frederick Ashton, are faring. [See Presstime News, page 14, for further information on the tour.] Included in the repertoire are The Dream and A Month in the Country, perennial favorites that Ashton choreographed on the company's current artistic director, Anthony Dowell, still considered the greatest of British-trained male dancers though now semiretired, and The Tales of Beatrix Potter, a whimsical novelty that Dowell staged after a film by Ashton. The company will also return in July to New York City's Metropolitan Opera House.

Ashton's work and the "English style" that he imparted to the Royal Ballet's dancing of the classics have always had special allure for Americans. Many of us remember fondly those biennial New York seasons in the 1960s when we returned to the Met night after night to cheer the company. Ashton's distinctive style--the softly rounded and controlled arms linked with active epaulement and a highly flexible torso, the arabesques with the hip kept level to preserve the purity of line, the intricate footwork--all this was very different from the American style of George Balanchine. And yet, as has often been remarked, Balanchine and Ashton shared the same starting point: the music and the movement. Americans take to Ashton's musical poetry of motion as metaphor of deep human feeling, his timeless belief in romantic love, and his pas de deux with the famous low, skimming lifts suggesting gentle transports, in which the women (as in Balanchine) retain their physical and spiritual autonomy.

Dowell deserves much credit for revitalizing the Royal, as audiences noticed on its last American visit in 1991. He has developed exciting young dancers and given a more athletic edge to the men's dancing. Recent talks in London with people associated with the company in various capacities reflected support for Dowell and an outpouring of affection for Ashton, who retired as director of the Royal Ballet in 1970 and continued to choreograph rather sporadically after that. He died in 1988. The talks also reflected hopes and worries for the future of the Ashton style and repertoire. (Dowell's responses follow below.)

The Royal, like its sister company the Birmingham Royal Ballet (formerly the Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet), often still conveys the poetry and charm of Ashton's work. But its priorities seem heavily tipped in other directions: new works, the late choreographer Kenneth MacMillan, whose subjects often seemed inspired by the tabloids, an influx of Russian teachers, and spotlit dancers from outside who sometimes have a very different style, whether Russian or the hyper-flexible permanent guest Sylvie Guillem. Lady Lousada, the former Pat McBride of New York City Ballet (not to be confused with Patricia McBride), who is now a member of the Royal Ballet's board of advisors, says that the influence of the Russians and of Guillem "are concerns. And they could be a greater problem when the people who worked with Ashton, such as Anthony, leave the scene."

The Royal's young dancers now emphasize a pulled-up, vertical stance, while the arms can easily become wilder and the arabesques higher. Ashton can be danced with a misplaced dutiful cuteness. Reviewers expressed renewed concern about neglect and even disappearance of Ashton works after the Birmingham Royal Ballet dimmed hopes for reviving his 1952 Sylvia by commissioning a new version of the Leo Delibes classic from David Bintley. (Mary Clarke in The Dancing Times called Bintley's version a "sometimes vulgar and very silly retelling of the story.")

Meanwhile, at the Royal Ballet School, a strong contingent of Russian teachers is altering the look of the school. Students are sometimes given Ashton solos and corps passages in class, but few Ashton ballets have been presented recently in the school's annual performances.

Derek Rencher--the veteran character dancer whom audiences might catch in a role he originated as Rakitin, the older admirer in A Month in the Country (he is still the only dancer ever to perform the role of the composer Edward Elgar in Ashton's Enigma Variations)--talks with relish about working with Ashton, his integrity and taste, his craftsmanship and musicality: "We just respected him so much," Rencher says. He stresses the importance of handing on the style and subtle details of his ballets.

About Ashton's retirement as director in 1970, Rencher recounts, "He said that once he'd left, he felt out of touch. He did announce he would retire at sixty-five. But Sir Fred was someone who, every time he took a curtain call, would say, |No, no,' but he'd be holding his hand out for you to drag him on. And I'm absolutely sure he was expecting to be asked to stay. [His retirement) was such a shock to all of us. We heard it first on an American tour. We were doing so well, and we all thought, Why change it? We were a bit like a chicken with its head cut off."

Margaret Barbieri--recently retired as a much-loved ballerina in the Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet with a wide Ashton repertoire, now a master teacher and a member of the board of governors of the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden--feels strongly about sustaining an identifiable English style, though she adds, "We can't stagnate. We can learn something from the Danes, the Russians, the Americans." She also stresses that the intricate, tricky footwork is integral to the Ashton style but "doesn't always get done. I don't think [the choreography] should be changed because it's too hard."

Nicola Roberts, a fine current Ashton interpreter, who came through the school at a time when the teaching was purely British and she could watch the Ashton dancers in the company, feels temperamentally attuned to his work: "It's a natural thing. It's hard keeping control of it, because of the way it shifts and changes direction. But it doesn't put emphasis on the technique. It's about what it says and who you are--all those things. You can find different layers to the characters. They shouldn't be sugary."

She worries that Ashton's special quality is at risk, "the emphasis on arms and the upper body and the movement as opposed to the turn or the leg extension--the isolated bits. It's the whole thing! It's musical, it's dancey. It uses everything."

Without constant prodding, the phrasing can get "ironed out," as Ashton put it. He was insistent on holding poses to register on the eye and on bringing out the accents in the music. Artists such as Antoinette Sibley and Dowell played with the phrasing to suggest spontaneity, emotion, and joy.

The single most-cited problem with current Ashton dancing is that the dancers don't use their torsos freely enough. It is probably this freedom more than anything that kept the style, with its neatness of arms and feet, from looking prim, and that made the tilt of the head, which now can appear tacked onto an upright torso, an integral part of an organic whole. Ashton often cited the plasticity of Anna Pavlova and Bronislava Nijinska as great influences on him. He was constantly asking for more--Bend at the waist. More. More head. Move your shoulders. Epaulement. Barbieri recalls fondly that "even when you gave him more, he wanted more."

Iain Webb, an excellent stylist who happily dances two of Ashton's own roles--in Beatrix Potter and as an Ugly Sister in Cinderella--as well as more active parts, has vivid memories of Ashton's ways of getting "more body": for example, by pushing Webb's head down so he would chasse bending forward almost to touch the floor in the skating ballet Les Patineurs. In Facade, Webb recalls, "he wanted me to really bend my body and go down and come up and travel at the same time. He got hold of my hair at the front--very gently--and said, |Now follow me.' And he just made me go, so there was a flow of movement through the body."

Indeed, looking at film clips of Ashton dancing as a young man in the 1930s, you can see the completely relaxed freedom with which his head and upper body might follow after his legs, in traveling sissonnes in his Foyer de Danse; or, in Facade, his body follows after the forward swoop of his arms, in a step that brings to mind his early years spent in South America. The late Dame Margot Fonteyn has recalled, "He was incredibly plastic. His own movement was something that nobody could imitate . . . We would try rather helplessly to copy what he was doing."

As artistic director since 1986, Dowell has hardly ignored Ashton. Before Ashton's death in 1988 he brought back Ondine--with great tenacity in the face of Ashton's diffidence--as well as La Valse. More recently, he revived Thai's Pas de Deux. He provides for coaching in Ashton--especially by Sibley and himself, and on occasion Michael Somes, Lynn Seymour, and others.

It clearly pains Dowell when he is accused in the press and elsewhere of neglecting the Ashton heritage. As to style, he says, "What pleased Kenneth [MacMillan] and Fred's eye and me and my staff is very much the same." He feels it is important to keep the effortlessness, the pure line, the eyes looking directly over the hand in arabesque, the forward placement of the weight. He is concerned that speed has been lost, because of the increased "polish of how to get from A to B." And he says, "I will still tell people to use their bodies in the classics as he would have done when he rehearsed the classics--as I would rehearsing them in an Ashton ballet."

But Dowell seems to have a certain ambivalence. "We remember the head and the use of the eyes and the shoulders and the body, and that's one of the hardest things to keep alive in this day and age, because people are much straighter now, for more turns and this and that. It was what Fred did to us that made dancing so difficult--the altering of the balance all the time. But of course it made the eye go immediately to the upper body. It made it interesting." Dowell defends bringing in Russian teachers, saying, "I'm not sure what the |Russian influence' is that suddenly makes the company look different. I think we're a different generation. I was willing to learn from any influences. This |English style' drives me nuts. In a Fred ballet you dance Ashton style; but when we dance MacMillan we dance how Kenneth [wanted]. I don't want to stray away if there was a Royal Ballet style, but I'm dealing with who I have now. Who they are. and what I think is best for them."

As to the Ashton repertoire: Dowell is happy that he gave precedence to MacMillan's work before he died (in 1992). especially new creations. Next season he is planning on "a stronger Ashton flavor," although he downplays any possibility of an Ashton festival to commemorate the choreographer's ninetieth birthday on September 17, as the company's administrative director, Anthony Russell-Roberts, had mentioned [see Presstime News. January 1993] and as Barbieri says she proposed. Dowell is hoping for two complete Ashton programs next season. Including a new production--unless the Opera House's current severe economic problems intervene. (The number of ballet performances was cut back this year.) For the anniversary Birmingham Royal Ballet director Peter Wright is planning a reconstruction of a "lost" work.

Dowell stresses new ballets as the "food" for his dancers. Sheldon Schwartz, Kennedy Center director of programming, says that in discussions, the Royal was concerned about the repertoire for the current tour being "historical" rather than forward-looking, whereas Schwartz, for one. says he feels that "Ashton is part of the profile of the company, its bloodline. It is in their arabesque, in their dancing of the classics. The company should be proud of it and show it as often as possible."

Dowell cites Ashton's fear of overexposing particular ballets and reviving some others. "Times do change," Dowell says. "When we revived La Valse of his, he actually said. |It's hard for them' because--he used a lovely word that he tried to [suggest] to the girls: allure. It's very hard for a new generation of dancers to identify with all that mystery and courting. So you've got to be really sure that the dancers will also get something from it. There are those ballets of his that we keep going, but if you dig into the long list from the past that's why one would be wary." The company doesn't have "the luxury and time to look back and do reconstructions," he says.

Many people would prefer that Dowell not embrace Ashton's own well-known diffidence, but take the lead in educating the public and the dancers. Dancers like Roberts do seem to find Ashton roles rewarding, and young talents such as Darcey Bussell and Adam Cooper have expressed curiosity to be exposed to more Ashton.

A festival would undoubtedly draw visitors and media attention abroad, as did the recent Balanchine and Bournonville festivals. Russell-Roberts suggested that it would provide a context to revive certain ballets and see whether they would hold up in the regular repertoire. As lain Webb points out, the smaller works could be shown to advantage at Sadler's Wells Theatre (where many were created) and the larger ones at the Opera House; there could be guest performances of Ashton's Romeo and Juliet and galas showing reconstructed fragments.

For Ashton's ninetieth birthday, Roehampton Institute in London is holding a seminar November 12 and 13, in collaboration with the Society for Dance Research and the two Royal ballets. Organizer Stephanie Jordan, head of Roehampton's dance department, says that in addition to papers, there will be sessions led by former dancers, workshops in repertoire, speakers and panels, old films, a performance at Covent Garden, and associated events. A book will come out of it, to be published by Dance Books.