ROYAL BALLET, LA FILLE MAL GARDEE, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON, DECEMBER, 1991

 

From: THE TIMES, December 16, 1991

Dance Review by John Percival

IN THE BEST BRITISH MANNER

John Percival sees two foreign dancers enjoy a triumph with the Royal Ballet in Frederick Ashton’s La Fille Mal Gardee

We must learn not to describe them as Covent Garden’s "Russian" dancers any more. Nina Ananiashvili is from Georgia, on the shores of the Black Sea; Irek Mukhamedov was born at Kazan, in the Russian republic, but is a Tartar... Both are exotically good looking, with dark hair and eyes.

The reputation of Moscow as a ballet capital drew them both there as students; both became stars of the Bolshoi Ballet very young. Eighteen months ago, Mukhamedov joined the Royal Ballet. Ananiashvili keeps her Bolshoi affiliation but now fills her diary with guest engagements around the world, including both the Royal Ballet companies. Last week they both danced for the first time in Frederick Ashton’s La Fille Mal Gardee, each with a British partner.

This is accepted more than any other creation in the Royal Ballet’s six decades as the quintessentially English classic, and in many ways that description is justified. Ashton had been reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s diaries when he made the ballet, and the countryside whose past he set out to evoke was the one he knew and loved. Besides, he incorporated traditions from the old British musicals: the clog dance for Widow Simone (played by a man), and the cockerel and hens whose comic dance opens the ballet.

But there is more to "La Fille" than this. The ballet was invented by a Frenchman, Dauberval, in Bordeaux in the year of the French Revolution, and although it has had innumerable treatments since then (and at least three scores by different hands), something of the original inspiration was handed down over the years from each generation of dancers to the next. Ashton’s version, first given in 1960, was an instant hit and has been mounted for companies in America, Australia, Canada, South Africa and Denmark, Sweden, Poland and Hungary. It is England’s greatest gift to international ballet, repaying part of the debt which British ballet owes to other countries, chief among them Russia.

So it should be no surprise that last week’s newcomers to Ashton’s "Fille" triumphed in it as many other dancers have done before them. Or, to be honest, rather better than most...

Ananiashvili as Lise was partnered by Stuart Cassidy, one of the Royal Ballet’s bright young hopes who has himself danced the ballet only once or twice before. But both looked utterly at home in it. He has something of the cheeky, ebullient manliness of David Blair, for whom Ashton made the role, and Ananiashvili’s beautifully light soaring through her solos is a welcome reminder of the virtuoso technique of Ashton’s first Lise, Nadia Nerina. The mixture of wistful seriousness with bright humour in her characterisation, too, is absolutely right...