Sir Fred and Mr B.

part one

Just when Russia's great founding choreographer Marius Petipa was forcibly retired from the Imperial Ballet, his two prime successors were born within months of each other on opposite sides of the earth.

George Balanchine began life on 22 January 1904 in St Petersburg; Frederick Ashton followed on 17 September of that same year in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Both were to spend their careers far from their birthplaces; and each would initiate a distinctively national style for using the classical ballet tradition they inherited from Petipa, which is why we celebrate them now.

Balanchine was first off the mark. Son of a Georgian composer, he entered the ballet school in his home town (then just renamed Petrograd) aged ten and began making dances while still a student. Influenced by the avant-garde choreographers Fyodor Lopokov and Kasyan Goleizovsky, the Evenings of Young Ballet which he soon mounted proved too provocative for traditional taste.

So, obtaining permission in 1924 to tour with a small group to Berlin, he took the opportunity not to return to Soviet Russia. But after their initial contract he and his colleagues found it difficult to obtain work until they were accepted on audition into Diaghilev's company, not least for the sake of Balanchine's choreographic potential.

During the next five years Balanchine, still in his early 20s, made eight new ballets for Diaghilev plus several opera-ballets and shorter works. They included two of his enduring masterworks, Apollo (beginning his greatly influential collaboration with Igor Stravinsky) and The Prodigal Son.

When Diaghilev died, Balanchine, despite illness, worked briefly for the Paris Opéra Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet and shows in London, also becoming a founder-choreographer of Colonel de Basil's Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. But he left and, with Diaghilev's former assistant Boris Kochno, formed Les Ballets 1933 for performances that year in Paris and London with a repertory of six new ballets by him. Then the Boston-born poet, author and dance enthusiast Lincoln Kirstein persuaded him to move to America and start a new company there, an offer accepted with the fore-sighted stipulation 'But first a school'.

Kirstein thereafter was to be his constant administrative support, propagandist and fund-raiser.

By this time Frederick Ashton’s contribution to British ballet was beginning to become apparent, although family disapproval of a stage career had prevented him from beginning to train as a dancer until Balanchine was already joining Diaghilev's company. Transplanted to his family's origins in London, and initially working in an office, Ashton began studying with Leonide Massine, and was passed on to Marie Rambert. She encouraged him to stage a comic little ballet, A Tragedy of Fashion, featuring both of them, as part of a revue in Hammersmith, west London, in 1926. Thereafter he spent a year in Paris dancing with Ida Rubinstein's company where, already keen to make ballets, he taught himself a lot about how to do so from observing resident choreographer Bronislava Nijinska.

Click here for part two of three.