With real live birds fluttering across the stage, and a sweetly happy ending – hurrah for young love! – Frederick Ashton's 1961 The Two Pigeons can look like mere frothy fantasy, precisely the kind of trivial, uncomplicated ballet plot that the young Kenneth MacMillan was reacting against in his own work in the early 60s. Is its return to the repertoire after an absence of 30 years just the Royal Ballet pandering to the escapist fantasies of its audiences – who, director Kevin O'Hare reveals, have been clamouring for this revival?O'Hare's announcement before curtain- Read more ...

In 1803 they called it Filly me Gardy. Today British ballet lovers refer to it by a single coded syllable: “Fee”. But translating its title is, for audiences at least, the only hard thing about this three-act romcom by Frederick Ashton. The rest is pure pleasure, and pure Englishness, in what must be the happiest work in the repertoire.The sugar-averse may wish the choreographer had done without the (real) Shetland pony and (human) chorus line of chickens. Discovering that Ashton's cockerel was doing the John Cleese walk 20 years before John Cleese doesn’t mitigate the feeling that it’s not Read more ...

This morning, those who follow ballet on both sides of the Atlantic might be feeling a bit like the male soloists at the beginning of Ashton’s Scènes de Ballet: turning their heads sharply, almost pantomimically, from side to side. Over there, in New York, Wendy Whelan, the prima ballerina retiring after a 30-year career with City Ballet, made her farewell in a programme heavy on modern masters Wheeldon and Ratmansky, including a world première. Over here, in London, the Royal Ballet performed a quadruple bill of works by Frederick Ashton, its revered and adored founder choreographer, the Read more ...

“The touch is light. We like it so,” wrote Ninette de Valois in one of her later poems. You didn’t know the founder of the Royal Ballet wrote poetry? Don’t worry, you’re not missing much – except the occasional phrase which can serve as an epigraph for early English ballet. “Light touch” is one of those expressions – like “very English” – which crop up in almost all descriptions of the work of Frederick Ashton, founder choreographer to de Valois’s company, later its director, and a reserved genius who knew pomposity and po-facedness only as traits to satirise (gently, of course) in his Read more ...

The Dream has at its heart a great partnership. Not just the original, magical pairing of Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley, for whom Frederick Ashton created the ballet fifty years ago (thereby launching one of the top couples in ballet history), but the partnership of Titania and Oberon themselves. Regal, fickle, fast, flighty, and dangerous, these two are equals as lovers and as rulers: it is their quarrel that starts the story and their smouldering reunion that brings it to a happy conclusion.So you need two good principals for a really perfect Dream – ideally with more than a hint of Read more ...

It is proof, as if more were needed, of how very right-on Birmingham Royal Ballet’s director David Bintley is, that he chose to open the International Dance Festival currently taking place in that city with two specially commissioned ballets from emerging choreographers who started their dancing careers with the company: Quatrain by Kit Holder and Kin. by Alexander Whitley. Finishing up the bill with an early Frederick Ashton piece – Les Rendezvous (1933) on Thursday and Friday; Façade (1931) on Saturday – completes a hat trick by choreographers not far off their 30th birthdays. These Read more ...

Is it odd that, in a bill containing an achingly contemporary première and a classic meditation on the First World War, a pastel-painted present for the Queen Mother’s birthday should race away with the honours?Not if it was by Frederick Ashton, the Royal Ballet’s founder-choreographer. He’s been rather an undersung genius since his death, but maybe last night will tip the balance towards him again in the capacity crowd stakes, for his plotless Rhapsody (1980) was the standout piece in the Royal Ballet’s latest triple bill. Much of the credit goes to Steven McRae, who danced his heart Read more ...

There's grand larceny afoot in the Royal Opera House. Two of today's stars are stealing Fonteyn and Nureyev's signature ballet, and they're leaving some spectators' cherished beliefs shattered in pieces around them. On Thursday, for the last time, Marguerite and Armand will be danced as a farewell to the Royal Ballet by its departed favourites, Tamara Rojo and Sergei Polunin, whose interpretations of the dying courtesan and her tragically hotheaded young lover have shown the heights that ballet can reach in deceiving spectators with purple romance.The ballet was created by Sir Frederick Read more ...

Genius does not mean having no influences. Monotones, one of the very greatest of Frederick Ashton's ballets, is heavily influenced by other works: by George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations and Apollo, by Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère. And it in turn has influenced other great works: Kenneth MacMillan’s searing Gloria would not exist without this unearthly, moon-calm vision.Monotones II, the second or “white” half, was created first, a gala piece which defies the usual fate of gala pieces. The starkness, the heroic simplicity and grace of this trio was immediately apparent, and Ashton Read more ...

Hans Werner Henze, the composer who died on Saturday aged 86, wrote the music for one of Margot Fonteyn's signature ballets, Ondine, a ballet about an inhuman spirit who longs to be joined to a man - but when she does, he must die. It might almost be a metaphor for the death of the thought the moment it is realised.A 1958 collaboration with Britain's major choreographer Frederick Ashton, Ondine was the first full-length ballet score to be commissioned by the emerging Royal Ballet, and it was, for the very young, and creatively fluctuating Henze, a process that confirmed his instinct that Read more ...

Birmingham Royal Ballet’s second triple bill at Sadler’s Wells this week is aptly titled "Autumn Celebration", acknowledging the season’s diverse weather through eclectic, light-hearted programming.Joe Layton’s The Grand Tour is a nostalgic 1971 comedy-ballet about the heyday of the 1920s and the escapist glamour of sea travel. John Conklin’s art deco set and costume designs are supported by a Noël Coward score (adapted and orchestrated by Hershy Kay) that ranges from toe-tapping to shoulder-swooning musical numbers. Coward features as a character on board, and Layton uses other celebrities Read more ...

A birthday offering, a wedding celebration - with that, and one further creative collaboration ahead, Dame Monica Mason makes her farewell as director of the Royal Ballet after 10 years. The last programme of favourites from the store cupboard must always be a tricky one, but true to form the mistress of the great occasion (anniversaries have been a mainstay of her programming) picked rituals and ceremonies that stressed company ethos and values.Those 10 years of her reign have been steady, stable, conservative - mostly restricted in programming to the box-office comfort zone; and while the Read more ...