In the English Style

Among the world's great classical-dance companies, Leningrad's Kirov preserves with museum-like fidelity the ballet traditions of Imperial Russia. The New York City Ballet dazzles the eye with its athletic vigor and the astonishing choreographic virtuosity of its creator, George Balanchine. What Britain's Royal Ballet offers above all else is the English style. Style it indubitably is: the Royal's approach to dance is essentially lyrical rather than dramatic, narrative instead of abstract. It offers an almost invisible way of dancing that emphasizes detail-perfect simplicity and linear beauty rather than energy and showmanship. The Royal can often be cold, bloodless and impersonal, but at its best, it presents ballet that is marked by finish, accuracy and singing grace.

Last week, at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House, the Royal celebrated the 20th anniversary of its first U.S. tour with the American premieres of two works that admirably displayed its body-English mode of dance. Jazz Calendar, the slighter piece, is a light-hearted series of variations on the old nursery rhyme that begins, "Monday's child is fair of face." Wednesday's child, who is "full of woe," is portrayed by Svetlana Beriosova as a studiously mournful, black-clad wraith, pursued by a clutching quartet of mottled, mock-serious snakes. Friday's children love and give--to each other--in the explicitly sexual writhings of Rudolf Nureyev and Antoinette Sibley. The hard-working Saturday kids are a vivacious corps of high-leaping male dance students finally practiced into exhaustion by a starchy, cane-wielding sergeant major of a ballet master.

Spirit and Place. A made-in-America company might bring more rhythmic pizazz to Calendar; none but the Royal could evoke the special virtues of Enigma Variations. Based on the orchestral score by Sir Edward Elgar, the work is a nostalgic visualization of a half-remembered spirit and place: green and pleasant England at the end of Victoria's reign. Before a stunning set by Julia Trevelyan Oman that at once suggests the languor of an autumnal afternoon and the oaken mellowness of a Worcestershire estate, the Royal's dancers bring to life the Malvern Circle of friends whom Elgar referred to, by initials or nicknames, in his score: among them, the brusque, exuberant Troyte (Anthony Dowell), the gay, pensive teenager Dorabella (Sibley), and the romantic, home-loving Lady Elgar (Beriosova). Center and focus of the piece is its grave ringmaster, Elgar (Derek Rencher), who is at once observer and participant in a demimonde of amity.

Both of the Royal's new works, appropriately, were created by Sir Frederick Ashton, the company's director since 1963 and, with Balanchine, one of the world's two finest living ballet choreographers. "If Fred is in the English tradition," says Dame Margot Fonteyn, "that is because he is the one who made it." Like Balanchine, though, Ashton began in the Russian tradition. Born in Ecuador, the son of a British businessman, he began studying ballet at the age of 18. Two years later, he worked with the company of Marie Rambert, for whom he produced his first piece of choreography--a disastrous dance number in a review for which Author A. P. Herbert wrote the book.

Great Give-and-Take. A specialist in character roles rather than a heroic soloist, Ashton took up choreography in earnest on a freelance basis in 1928. Eight years later, as a member of the Vic Wells Company (which became the Sadler's Wells and ultimately the Royal Ballet), he produced his first role for Fonteyn, in a ballet called Apparitions. It was the beginning of a relationship that has persisted through 25 works. They range from romance, as in Nocturne (1936), with its archetypical flower girl, to exuberant comedy, as in his still hilarious version of Gertrude Stein's story The Wedding Bouquet (1937). "It has been a great give-and-take," he says of the long relationship with Margot. "She always carried my concept of things one step further. She has that remarkable instinct for what is apt and right."

Ashton has composed more than 100 dances, including five, evening-long, full-length ballets, 37 of which are still in the active Royal repertory. At first ballets came to him, he has written, "freely and spontaneously and without much thought; the steps just flowed out of me, and if they had any shape or form at all, generally it was because the music already had it." Now there is considerably more reflection, and without the right music, Ashton is often at a loss. The theme for Marguerite and Armand, composed for Nureyev and Fonteyn in 1963, had been in his mind for some time, but for want of appropriate music he had put it aside. One day, in his bath, he heard on the radio the finish of a piece that seemed just right. Wildly excited, he called the BBC, found out that it was Liszt's B-Minor Sonata. Soon he began composing the dance.

Repertory of Motion. The creative moves of Balanchine reflect the entire spectrum of ancient and modern dance; as a choreographer, Ashton much prefers to design within the sonnet-like limitations of classical ballet's repertory of motion. Nonetheless, he hates repetition. When he noticed that ballets seemed to be displaying a plethora of lifts, he wrote a pas de deux for Fonteyn in Birthday Offering without a single elevation. Currently, he notes, dancers seem to be spending more and more time on the floor. The next Ashton ballet is not likely to have a single prostrate moment.

A droll, Cowardly, lionized bachelor of 62, Ashton next year will give up his administrative duties with the Royal Ballet to concentrate on choreography. He has in mind to do something with Turgenev's A Month in the Country, and perhaps dramatize a short story by Henry James. Whatever he next designs, it will almost certainly be presented first by the company whose style he has done so much to form. "I really don't like to go around selling my work," he says. "I like the Royal Ballet. I want to keep my creative energies pretty much for them."

For its part, thanks to the impressive repertory he has created, the Royal will continue to devote a lot of its creative energies to Ashton.

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