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November 1, 2005
Jennifer Homans on Ashton
Via dirac at Ballet Talk, there's an article on dance in The New Republic.
England on Pointe (You will need to register or use Bug Me Not to read it.)
It's bad form to criticize a colleague, but the article is a tremendous disappointment. Homans is repeating the same tired shibboleths about Ashton that New York critics used a generation ago to justify their preference for Balanchine (that Fred, he's so dear, so twee, so trivial . . .) and adding a layer of historical sludge to justify it.
Ashton's choreography tends to extended, breathless phrases filled with Isadora-like flourishes and feints, barely controlled by conventional grammar. Known for working with gestures and rushes of dramatically tinged movement, which sent him flying across the studio, he would then turn to the dancers and say, "now, what did I do?" In sum, Ashton backed his way into classicism, often pressing ballet into the service of impersonation and his own acute observations of social manners and codes. This led him to a unique and subtle but (as we shall see) highly perishable idiom.
Or, at least as Homans sees. She writes about dance the same way that other writers in TNR write about politics: as if somewhere there was a jury summation to be made or an election to be won (or worse, a doctoral thesis to be defended). We learn what Homans has learned from reading Secret Muses, which makes more sense to her than most of what she saw onstage. Ashton's classicism does come from outside the academy, but his comprehension of it is firm - he's also the man who went up to the balcony to watch Sleeping Beauty and "get a private lesson" from Petipa. Just look at Scènes de Ballet, the Act II divertissement in The Two Pigeons (which bothered some critics who were expecting character dance, and it isn't - it's a classical set piece with a character flavor) the court dances in Cinderella or several other examples.
This has been Homans' modus operandi in several of her articles, which range far and wide but at least all the ones I've read have been about the rise (or not) but always fall of ballet: Historical research laid on thick in a reverse-engineered attempt to justify her own tastes.
So why do British audiences love Ashton so unconditionally? What do they see that I do not?
Ashton's ballets are hard to fathom for an eye trained to American - or Balanchinean - classicism. It took me years. But since Homans can't see it, it must be a unique quirk of the British character. Is it possible that while Homans is delving into her sociology texts and biographies, the audience is actually looking at the ballets?
Posted by Leigh Witchel at November 1, 2005 10:01 PM
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Comments
Well, I didn't mind the historical stuff as much as you seem to, and I do think she has a finger on the shift in style that came with Kenneth Macmillan and the general changes in British arts at that time, but I don't agree with her basic take on Ashton, that he's not a real ballet choreographer because it's all wafty bits taken from Duncan and Pavlova. His classicism is descended from Cecchetti, and so it has a different sense of kinesphere (a slightly smaller "reach space" which makes it seem like it covers less space in traveling) but he is, in a different way, just as pure a devotee as Balanchine.
Posted by: sandi at November 9, 2005 2:26 PM
The problem to me is not that she uses historical analysis, but that she uses them to create false tautologies. Yes, those changes occured. No, they have nothing to do with whether Ashton could choreograph classically or not.
Posted by: Leigh Witchel at November 14, 2005 4:58 PM