Past master

The lack of great dance-makers that characterises contemporary dance has prompted a number of reconstructions of long-lost ballets, often with questionable results. It is utterly refreshing, therefore, to see how Frederick Ashton could evoke the past without getting entangled in an artistically sterile quest for authenticity. Few people in the history of ballet had his deep understanding of past styles, practices and atmospheres. And few people in the world could evoke all that through their individual choreographic idiom, as he did, without having to reconstruct anything.

Sylvia is Frederick Ashton’s quintessential tribute to late 19th-century French ballet. The ballet is thus a triumphant plunge into that good old bad taste that informed French theatre dance from the Second Empire onwards. Yet, Ashton’s three-act work is anything but bad taste. Its complex, choreographic layout has little in common with the superficialities described in primary sources relating to the original Sylvia (1876).