{"id":99848,"date":"2016-06-28T17:01:27","date_gmt":"2016-06-28T21:01:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=99848"},"modified":"2016-06-28T17:36:49","modified_gmt":"2016-06-28T21:36:49","slug":"even-the-chickens-dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/28\/even-the-chickens-dance\/","title":{"rendered":"Even the Chickens Dance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/20113_show_landscape_large_01.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-99849\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-99849\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/20113_show_landscape_large_01.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"394\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/20113_show_landscape_large_01.jpg 606w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/20113_show_landscape_large_01-300x197.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>This summer we\u2019re introducing a series of new columnists. Today, meet Jeff Seroy, who has <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/02\/29\/where-the-boyz-are\/\" target=\"_blank\">written on ballet before<\/a> for the <\/em>Daily<em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s got <em>everything<\/em>, including a Maypole.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I asked the choreographer Mark Morris\u2014erstwhile bad\u00a0boy of the dance scene, now about to turn sixty\u2014as we were discussing a memoir he intends to write, to name a work by another choreographer he loved. His answer couldn\u2019t have intrigued me more: Frederick Ashton\u2019s <em>La fille mal gard<\/em><em>\u00e9<\/em><em>e<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Even aficionados of ballet may never have seen <em>La fille mal gard<\/em><em>\u00e9<\/em><em>e. <\/em>It sounds antimodern and retrograde and frumpy and drearily clich\u00e9d. A comic ballet set in the countryside about a young girl in love with a shepherd whose bossy mother wants her to marry up? That reeks of mildew and lacks the authority of a canonical warhorse to excuse it. But trust Morris\u2019s taste. <em>La fille<\/em> may turn out to be the best thing you\u2019ve never seen\u2014or you may wonder, as I now do, whether it\u2019s the best thing you\u2019ve <em>ever<\/em> seen. After many years out of repertory, American Ballet Theater has just revived their production of this masterpiece, and it\u2019s perfection.\u00a0<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Ashton\u2019s version of <em>La fille mal gard<\/em><em>\u00e9<\/em><em>e<\/em> dates from 1960, when it was triumphantly received, and it remains perhaps his most beloved creation. But the piece has a long history. Created just after the French Revolution, it debuted in July 1789, making it maybe the oldest ballet still performed today. In the eighteenth century, it drew attention for breaking with the old order, whose ballets favored gods and goddesses and mythological figures. <em>La fille <\/em>spurned all that\u2014along with the hierarchies of court life and the divine right of kings\u2014in favor of provincial domestic frivolity featuring farmers, notaries, and assorted plain folk going about their daily rural tasks and pursuing simple pleasures.<\/p>\n<p>Not long after its debut, <em>La fille<\/em> traveled from France to Russia, and toward the end of the century it was staged, at the czar\u2019s request, by Petipa and Ivanov, whose version became a star vehicle for some of the Mariinsky\u2019s great ballerinas. Among them was Tamara Karsavina, whose memoir,\u00a0<em>Theatre Street<\/em>, recounts one of her earliest performances as a corps member in a school production in front of those eminent choreographers. Over half a century later, Karsavina told Ashton how much she loved <em>La fille<\/em>, providing him with copious notes on the Mariinsky production. These, according to Ashton\u2019s biographer Julie Kavanagh (but not Ashton himself, who preferred to claim all credit), formed the basis for his Royal Ballet production.<\/p>\n<p>Ashton had recently moved to a house in Suffolk and was intoxicated by the English countryside. Meanwhile, the Royal\u2019s director, Ninette de Valois, was encouraging choreographers to look to English folkways for inspiration. What happened when these vectors intersected is nothing short of a miracle. There can\u2019t be another work in the entire repertory of classical dance\u2014okay, let\u2019s make that <em>dance<\/em>\u2014as endlessly inventive and of such sustained joy, innocence, and charm. The imaginative magic in <em>La fille<\/em> comes from Ashton\u2019s deeply felt connections to the land, to English coziness, to dance and theater and folk traditions. One feels in it the love that moves the sun and other stars, and if paradise exists, this ballet is playing there in an endless loop.<\/p>\n<p>I got to thinking, What\u2019s in it for Morris? For the comedian in him, it begins with four chickens and a rooster in a vaudeville routine. Then there\u2019s a storm scene with a madcap denouement a la Mack Sennett, and silly stage business mixed in with social dancing\u2014as in the first act of Morris\u2019s <em>The Hard Nut. <\/em>There\u2019s a matronly star turn <em>en travesti<\/em>, and there are props galore: butter churns, wine bottles, carts and live ponies, batons and scythes\u2014and, famously, yards of pink ribbon, with which the romantic duo, Lise and Colas, entwine themselves as they court each other. Further on, Lise gathers the ends of ribbons from eight women who, holding them, run circles around her as she turns on pointe\u2014a moment the<em>\u00a0New York Times <\/em>critic Alastair Macaulay likened <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/05\/26\/arts\/dance\/review-dancing-chickens-and-a-real-pony-in-american-ballet-theaters-comic-pastoral.html\" target=\"_blank\">in a review last month<\/a> to \u201cthe music of the spheres.\u201d And indeed, it feels like a kind of cosmic bliss.<\/p>\n<p>Morris adores props. Early in his career, he made a solo for himself about dance props called \u201cTen Suggestions.\u201d What do you do with a chair? With a hoop? With a pink ribbon, as it happens? \u201cTen Suggestions\u201d\u00a0provided engaging answers. Over the years, he cannily deployed fans, chairs, dolls that get bashed, and, naughtily, in <em>The Hard Nut\u2019<\/em>s French national dance, baguettes and riding crops. But his most richly inventive ode to props is \u201cSoap Powders and Detergents,\u201d from his evening-length <em>Mythologies. <\/em>It features tons of white bedsheets, and in a veritable apotheosis of laundry, seemingly nothing that can be done with them by dancers is left undone. <em>La fille<\/em>, for its part, has clog dancing (including clogging <em>sur la pointe<\/em>) and Morris dancing, and Morris (Mark, that is) has often found inspiration in folk dance forms and used feet to percussive effect. \u201cGrand Duo\u201d is a fine example of both.<\/p>\n<p>And of course, there\u2019s the Maypole. Morris may very well have borrowed Ashton\u2019s for <em>King Arthur<\/em>, an operatic variety show that could uncharitably be described as Lawrence Welk presents Purcell. But whatever one may have thought of it\u2014the critics spurned it; a few of us enjoyed it; a former dancer compared it, favorably, to being on acid\u2014its Maypole dance was a sensation. As a dancemaker, Morris must have particularly registered the childlike, hypnotic delight induced by watching ribbons magically braid while dancers weave robust figures around each other to thumping country tunes as they welcome spring. And perhaps most profoundly, Morris has always been drawn to dance that celebrates community. That\u2019s not only true of the Maypole dance: the entire ballet is an abounding example.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<em>J<\/em><i>eff Seroy is senior vice president at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This summer we\u2019re introducing a series of new columnists. Today, meet Jeff Seroy, who has written on ballet before for the Daily. \u201cIt\u2019s got everything, including a Maypole.\u201d I asked the choreographer Mark Morris\u2014erstwhile bad\u00a0boy of the dance scene, now about to turn sixty\u2014as we were discussing a memoir he intends to write, to name [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":811,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22700],"tags":[1942,11572,55,11092,22988,22993,12019,22987,22990,22992,22989,22991],"class_list":["post-99848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-correspondents","tag-ballet","tag-chickens","tag-dance","tag-frederick-ashton","tag-la-fille-mal-gardee","tag-mack-sennett","tag-mark-morris","tag-props","tag-repertory","tag-soap-powders-and-detergents","tag-tamara-karsavina","tag-the-hard-nut"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>On the Enduring Appeal of Frederick Ashton\u2019s La Fille Mal Gard\u00e9e<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Why would you want to watch a ballet with dancing chickens? 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