Frederick Ashton might have been a quintessential Englishman of the old school. He was a knight, a companion of honour and a recipient of the order of merit. He was a close friend of the Queen Mother, whose congratulatory note on his OM said, accurately, "you have put our English ballet on a pinnacle," and illustrated this with a jaunty drawing of a ballerina on a mountain peak. A list of his friends reads like a roll call of high society. They enjoyed his wit and his light, self-deprecating manner.
Below the frivolity, though, lay insecurity and a hard-driven talent. He was not rich, grand or, even, properly English. He was born 100 years ago in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and brought up in Lima, Peru, where he spoke Spanish and French as much as English. His parents, English people of humble origins, had emigrated to South America, where his father was a minor diplomat. In 1919, they sent him to a public school in Kent, an experience for which he was singularly ill-suited. Hopeless at games, he shone only in optional social dance classes, and in holidays pursued a self-improving regime of trips to the ballet. Shortly after he left school, his father committed suicide, leaving his mother inadequately provided for and forcing Ashton to take up a lowly job in the City. Being homosexual, he was not conventionally respectable, but what was even less respectable, and certainly un-English, was his choice of ballet as a career. Secretly, while still working in the City, he started taking lessons with the great choreographer and dancer, Léonide Massine, which cost him one guinea a week. But the cost was not the reason his family were outraged when they found out; it was the stigma of a man dancing.
Such were the prejudices of the 1920s. Unlike other European countries, Britain had no indigenous ballet. There was no state company, and the founding of the Arts Council was decades away. Ballet came courtesy of intermittent seasons by foreign dancers such as Adeline Genée and Anna Pavlova. It took the success of Diaghilev's Ballet Russe to show the British that ballet could be a worthwhile art. Diaghilev inspired Marie Rambert and Ninette de Valois to create Britain's first ballet companies - Ballet Rambert and the Vic-Wells Ballet, which, in 1956, became the Royal Ballet. They were the mothers of English ballet. Ashton, who was discovered as a choreographer by Rambert, was to become its father.
The ballerina Ashton worked with most was Margot Fonteyn. He helped mould her stage persona; she, in turn, was his muse. The combination produced unforgettable roles and international fame. To ballet, Ashton brought the wit, light touch and decorum that distinguished his own public personality. His choreography did not challenge the traditional aesthetic of ballet so much as enrich and extend it with a heightened musicality and soft, rounded harmonies. Graceful and measured, the Ashton style became identified as the Royal Ballet style - de Valois poached him from Rambert in 1935 - and, by extension, the British (usually called the English) style.
Ashton's original ambition had not been choreography, but dancing. When he began training with Massine, he was, at 20, a late starter. But he had nurtured an obsession from a single encounter. At 13, he had seen Anna Pavlova dance at the Teatro Municipal in Lima. The ballerina looked old and beaky when she entered, but as soon as she started to move, he was transfixed. "She injected me with her poison," he famously said, "and from the end of that evening I wanted to dance." Even after it became apparent that Ashton was never going to be a great dancer himself (he lacked the virtuosity and, with his long face and spindly legs, the looks), Pavlova would always be with him. Her impassioned movement would be an inspiration to his choreography and a model to his ballerinas.
In 1937, before the premiere of one of Ashton's great pieces - A Wedding Bouquet, for which Gertrude Stein had provided the words and Gerald Berners the music - Stein discussed with Alice B Toklas the question of whether Ashton was a genius. If Ashton was a genius, he had become one by accident. After Massine left London, he enrolled in Rambert's school in Notting Hill Gate, where he found himself roped into a comedy ballet - A Tragedy of Fashion - about a couturier who stabs himself with his scissors following the failure of his latest creation. As Rambert's only male dancer, Ashton was cast as the couturier. Rambert was considering another pupil to choreograph the work until she saw Ashton demonstrate a few movements. These communicated character so succinctly that she cajoled him into undertaking the entire ballet. The 1926 premiere was presented as part of Nigel Playfair's Riverside Nights revue at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. Although the piece had no pretensions to greatness, it was a popular success. Ashton received critical praise and was photographed in Vogue. It not only launched Ashton the choreographer, but marked the tentative start of Britain's first ballet company, Ballet Rambert.
Ashton followed A Tragedy of Fashion with a stint abroad in the corps de ballet of the rich would-be dancer, Ida Rubinstein, where he came under the gruelling tutelage of Bronislava Nijinska, sister of Vaslav Nijinsky. Schooled in the old Russian Imperial Ballet approach and in her brother's method of doing barre work at high speed, Nijinska demanded extraordinary stamina and strength. Despite being shattered by her classes, Ashton learned much from watching her work, especially the arrangement of movement and her eloquent way of angling the torso and shoulders - a refinement known as épaulement. Many years later, as director of the Royal Ballet, he introduced into the repertoire the two masterpieces she had created for Diaghilev: Les Biches and Les Noces.
Back in London in 1930, he created his first significant ballet, Capriol Suite. The title came from a score by Peter Warlock, which had been suggested to Ashton by the composer Constant Lambert, who was to become his long-lasting collaborator and a key figure in the development of British ballet. A free evocation of 16th-century dances, Capriol Suite already offers evidence of the Ashton manner. It is modest in scale, yet rich in its allusions and mix of wit and sentiment. It catches the atmosphere of Shakespeare's sonnets and replicates Elizabethan images, such as the famous painting of Queen Elizabeth lifted in a Volta dance, her feet dangling beneath her hem.
There were more commissions, some slight and some substantial, and a remunerative contract with the Regal cinema at Marble Arch to create ballets for showing three times daily between film screenings. Then came Ashton's first big success: Façade, in 1931, to a score by William Walton. A collection of folk and music hall dance numbers merged with ballet steps, it featured Alicia Markova in the polka and Ashton in the final tango, a strenuously dapper gigolo with ulterior motives, instructing a naive débutante.
By then, the Ashton style was fully formed. It is a style unique in its lyrical fluidity and whole-body mobility. Remembering Pavlova, he could create a lavish rush of filigree movement that poured and vibrated and flickered and swooped. He was the only choreographer who could depict so vividly the elusive, shivering liquescence of the titular sprite of Ondine (1958), a ballet created for Fonteyn to a commissioned score, full of watery shifts and shudders, by Hans Werner Henze. Only he could suggest so completely the intangible elfin flicker of Oberon in The Dream (1964) or the ripe late-summer longing of Natalia Petrovna in A Month in the Country (1976). He was forever urging his dancers to move more, and late in life would lament the stiffness of the young generation.
But Ashton also had a gift for brevity, always leaving you hungry for more. Alongside all the curlicues he could favour reticence and simplicity. He understood the power of stillness or the limpid straightforwardness of a line of bourrées, an uncomplicated rippling run on point, as eloquent as a line of poetry. For him it was important to conceal difficulty, not flaunt it. There is nothing more stamina-killing to a ballerina's partner than Ashton's distinctive, chest-level lifts, even if they are less spectacular than overhead ones. Yet, as he demonstrated with Rhapsody (1980), he could pull out the athletic fireworks when faced with a virtuoso like Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Perhaps his love of simplicity came from seeing Isadora Duncan perform at the Prince of Wales theatre in 1921. By then Duncan was a blowsy 43 year old, but despite the wobbly flesh, visible through her flimsy tunic, she was still a performer of great charisma. She had a way of running in which, as Ashton remembered, she seemed to have "left herself behind, and you felt the breeze was running through her hair." But she also knew about the power of stillness. "She would stand for what seemed quite a long time doing nothing, and then make a very small gesture that seemed full of meaning."
In 1976, Ashton paid homage to her with a suite of solos, Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan, made on the ballerina Lynn Seymour. From Duncan he had also learned about musicality. She was the first dancer routinely to use great music - Wagner, Chopin, Beethoven. She immersed herself in it and expressed it through her body. "She was the first person to interpret music," Ashton remarked. "Others danced it." His own musicality was intuitive rather than theoretical. He played no instruments and could not even read a score, unlike his New York contemporary George Balanchine. Yet through repeated listening, he could extract mood and structure.
He used movement like a composer, as a language of its own. His concern was poetic dance, achieved through the visual effect of shape and rhythm, texture and allusion. For that reason, although he created many story ballets, he was the master of plotless pieces, such as Les Patineurs (1937) and Les Rendezvous (1933), where there is a mood and even incidents, but no narrative. At its purest this approach produced Symphonic Variations (1946) and Scènes de ballet (1948), regarded as his masterpieces, and the eerie, mesmerising plastique of Monotones (1965-66).
Unlike Balanchine, Ashton never went so far as to abandon costume or decor. Trained in the old Cecchetti system, he preserved its symmetries, while extending them into a poetic language. That traditionalism, though, concealed radical notions. For all its restraint, Scènes de ballet is a mould-breaker. Its group geometries, based on Euclid and arranged to make sense from any angle, challenged theatre's frontal perspective long before the postmodernist choreographer Merce Cunningham smashed the convention.
Ashton approached his story ballets in the same way as his plotless ones. He started from the steps, not the narrative. He used their expressive power to create character and emotion rather than to provide padding between the action. The humour of his most famous piece, La Fille mal gardée (1960), comes from his psychological penetration and love - for Lise, the feisty heroine, for Widow Simone, Lise's gruff mother, for Alain, the umbrella-obsessed simpleton.
In private, Ashton had a gift for impersonation. He kept his friends entertained with a gaggle of female caricatures: Queen Victoria in her bath chair; Gertrude Stein; Ida Rubinstein taking an arabesque and dropping her false teeth. On stage he played several travestie parts, including one of the ugly sisters in his version of Cinderella (1948). His portrayal was more subtle, less comical than is usually seen now and he modelled his make-up on the distinctive features of Edith Sitwell. But he didn't play the role of his most famous travestie character, Widow Simone. It was given to Stanley Holden to bring out the grudging affection underpinning the maternal strictness, traits inspired by Ashton's own mother.
The travestie roles are now often played like pantomime dames, when, as Ashton conceived them, they were much more. The Royal Ballet faces criticism that it does not fully understand Ashton's choreography and fails to give his work sufficient space in the repertoire. This November, it is reviving the three-act Sylvia of 1952, which has not been seen in almost 40 years. But this is part of a season honouring Ashton's centenary. More than a dozen of his ballets are being staged, including A Month in the Country, A Wedding Bouquet and La Fille mal gardée. It is an Ashton cornucopia, the like of which has not been seen since his death in 1988 and which is unlikely to be repeated.
The fact is that Ashton is not prominent any more in Britain and little known abroad, except in the US, which staged its own Ashton festival this summer. The contrast with Balanchine's internationally celebrated centenary (also this year) is dramatic, but then Balanchine's work is everywhere, as is that of Ashton's successor at the Royal Ballet, Kenneth MacMillan.
Ashton's legacy lacks an energetic widow like Deborah MacMillan or a promoting body like the George Balanchine Foundation. Ashton bequeathed his ballets to individuals, among them his nephew Anthony Russell-Roberts (the Royal Ballet's administrative director), but they have not formed an Ashton Trust, despite claims of being about to do so.
Might the nature of his work also be a problem? Ashton has been attacked for his lightness; he could find truth in the smallest, slightest subjects. Maybe, then, it is the language he used that is outmoded. He is no deconstructionist like the American choreographer William Forsythe; no gritty realist like MacMillan with his gang rape and incest. Yet watch carefully and you will see the audacity under the grace and politeness. Watch Daphnis and Chloë and you will find in the duet of Lykanion and Daphnis some of the most erotic dance on stage. Watch Sylvie Guillem in A Month in the Country and, under the good manners, you can taste the sensuality.
The problem is that Ashton is not performed enough. And if his ballets are not performed, dancers lose the skills to perform them. Ashton's delicate choreography relies on sensitive dancers far more than Balanchine's, whose formalism provides some inoculation against bad performances.
The future for Ashton looks grim. In another 100 years only a few of his most popular works are likely to be performed. Balanchine will, rightly, survive everywhere, but Ashton, wrongly, may not.
