Further Notes on Dance Classicism (Copy)
This essay was first published in the British quarterly “Dance Theatre Journal”. My thanks to Ann Nugent, who edited “DTJ” at that time, for her editing. AM.
I.
Some say that God created man in His own image, others that man created God in his. Either way, it seems to me that this old, old notion - that the human form is in some way divine - is one of the roots of classicism; and perhaps the deepest.
What a stirring idea: that we find in some, or all, humans, some aspect of the larger-than-human; some clue to absolute perfection; some essence of flawless beauty and/or truth.
The idea comes attended, however, by less comfortable notions: that some humans are better, more perfect, more ideal than others; and that God's gifts are not equally bestowed. Perhaps this is why the Greeks and other peoples had a comfortable multiplicity of gods - gods who, although powerful and serious, were sometimes fallible, partly flawed.
Here is the face of the man who believed he was a god, they used to say at the British Museum's 1972 Tutankhamun exhibition, as we looked at the Egyptian king's serene, inscrutable death-mask. But can any man really think that? Somehow we have to come to terms with the fact that much about us is ungodlike. We pass water and excrete; we age; we die, sometimes young, sometimes in misery, sometimes en masse.
And yet the knowledge of our corruptibility and mortality, even if it reduces our religious sense, does not shatter the classical idea. We cannot help discerning pattern in the world about us. It may be the geometry formed by the curves of the musculature of a leg. It may be harmony of colour (poppies in sunlight against barley) or of shape (the unchanging relation of the Plough <or Big Dipper> to the Pole Star). In these things, we perceive not merely surpassing loveliness, but also a sense of fixed laws. And our natural curiosity leads us to investigate and define what laws there may be in the particular affinity of one colour, or note, or position, to another. Sure, we know that the world is not all harmony. Even so, few of us believe we live in utter chaos. And where we perceive pattern, we feel part of a larger order that we can share.
In dance, the classical sense of harmony probably has its origin in the age-old marriage of dance to music. The phrase the piper hangs on the air finds its partner in the phrase I etch in time and space with my body. In this union of music and dance, humans return to one of the most profound and innocent of instincts. In several of his books - notably, “Awakenings” and “A Leg to Stand On” - Oliver Sacks has written of the radical effect of music on neurologically afflicted people; and, in “Awakenings”, he calls some people afflicted with Parkinsonism 'unmusicked' because of their loss of the fluent connective impulse that he recognises as musical. Perhaps, as some sociologists say, all human life is an endeavour to recover the sensations of the first few months of life, and moving to music is one of those primal pleasures. Just watch children: even before they can walk or speak, they sway in pleasure to a beat. Some children, as they grow, never respond to music so fully again. Others learn to make their response far more sophisticated.
II.
Why contemplate the roots of classicism now? Ten years ago, I wrote an essay, “Notes on Dance Classicism', in this magazine.<1> I believe now, as I did then, that dance classicism, in its outward deployment of energy and its structural organisation of time and space, shows us life lived according to a code of manners. Today, however, it seems to me that there is more to be said. The state of dance, and the state of the world, have both changed considerably. Today, I cannot help wondering if the plant of classicism is dying, and so I investigate its roots.
Classicism is something we find not in life, but in art. And intensely classical art seldom strikes us as intensely lifelike. Yet classicism - I suggest - originates in the patterns and harmony we find in nature. And, from those origins, it develops in society - usually in cities, where humans feel removed from nature. Classicism is not the same in all societies, and in some, it has not developed at all. Still, it has flowered in several quite separate societies - not only in ancient Greece, but in India and in Java, for example, too - and this is very remarkable. The choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh recently observed that classicism in Indian dance has arisen where a conjunction of more than one culture, or race, has occurred.<2> I believe that her point pertains to non-Indian conditions, too, and that it gives us a clue to the socio historical cause of classicism.
Greek classicism, for example. In his 1995 book “Black Sea”, Neal Ascherson observes that
“On the shores of the Black Sea, there were born a pair of Siamese twins called 'civilisation' and ‘barbarism'... The first Greeks reached the northern Black Sea coast and set up permanent trading-posts there in the eighth century BC. But the encounter [between settled Greek city-states and mobile Scythian steppe nomads] lasted for several hundred years before the Siamese twins were born - before
‘different’ came to mean 'inferior’, and before the ‘otherness' of the steppe peoples whom the Greeks met on the Black Sea became a mirror in which Greeks learned to see their own superiority. That event - a sudden conceptual leap - took place in Athens in the first half of the fifth century BC, as the Athens of Pericles beat off the Persian invasions and became itself an imperial power.”<3>
Classicism is exclusivist. Some human beings are superior to others, some cultures more obsessed with perfectibility. Greeks are civilised; Persians and Scythians and Egyptians are barbarian. Achilles and Hector are heroic; Thersites and Paris are not. It is ironic, and relevant, that Athens, where classicism flourished, was, on the one hand, extending democracy to new extremes and, on the other, keeping women and slaves in inferior positions. In Athens, classicism and cultural imperialism were intimately related. I wonder: does classicism ever flourish without cultural imperialism, and without a sense of the barbarian at the gate? We must save ballet, Balanchine said to Denby in or around 1940.<4> A few years later, Ashton began to refer to Massine as “the Antichrist”.<5> Like Horatius on the bridge, these choreographers were defending the classical citadel against the intruder.
When people in Eurocentric cultures speak of classicism, they usually mean the tradition of classicism that began in Greece: the tradition that was then fostered by the Romans, later revitalised by the Renaissance, and subsequently disseminated throughout most of the world by Buropean colonialisation. Classical dance, as I wrote ten years ago, has taken inspiration and tradition from, in particular, the classical principles in Greek sculpture, and ballet - which has classical principles even when its practice is unclassical - has propagated these Grecian principles over the globe. Greek classicism, which was principally an Athenian creation beginning in the Periclean era, remains a luminous concept, and it is still luminous in certain works of ancient Greek art. The temple of the Parthenon, the plays of Sophocles, the sculptures of Pheidias and Praxiteles: these present proportions that the world still finds easy to recognise as ideal. They seem related to the spellbinding ideal theory. or theory of forms, that Plato proposed so beautifully in Book 7 of “The Republic” - encouraging us to believe that the forms we encounter in this world are in fact shadows, copies, or semblances of perfect forms; and that there is a world of perfect forms, all of which take, in turn. their essence from the Idea of the Good.
But where did the Athenians, having defeated the Persians. draw their newfound classicism from? The advances made in mathematics in the sixth century BC by Pythagoras had made their impact: the science of numers acquired mystical connotations as it revealed new harmonies of order. Most present of all, however, in every educated Athenian's thoughts was. surely. Homer: And, although Homer is, strictly speaking, a pre-classical artist, what his two famous epics - “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” - propound, enchantingly, is the classical idea: that heroes and gods are akin, that the gods have been actively involved in human affairs. As Jasper Griffin writes in “Homer”:
“We see and understand the nature and limits of human life as the gods intervene in it: the world becomes transparent, and we see the divine forces which act in the background and which in ordinary life are hidden.... It is one of the most characteristic features of Greek mythology that it is dominated by heroes and heroic stories... The replacing of the colossal, the vague, and the bestial with the human image and the human scale is perhaps the most vital and the most lasting of all the achievements of Greece, both in literature and in art. In ‘The Iliad’ that achievement appears already complete.”<6>
The human image and the human scale, rendered heroic, became central to Greek civilisation. True, when we think of Greek classicism, we may well think of motionless statues of Apollo and Aphrodite, or of kouroi - of youths whose beauty gave them an enviable pre-eminence. But what mattered more to the Greeks was heroism, which lies in moral quality demonstrated in action. The pursuit of honour (and. thereby, fame), by means of enterprise and prowess, mattered immensely then, and was not disdained even among those philosophers who prized the life of the mind more highly. For most of the course of “The Iliad”, both Achilles and Agamemnon swerve from the true course of heroism - Agamemnon by taking and keeping what belongs to Achilles, Achilles by sulking in his tent - and o prized the life of the mind more highly. For most of the course of “The Iliad”, both Achilles and Agamemnon swerve from the true course of heroism - Agamemnon by taking and keeping what belongs to Achilles, Achilles by sulking in his tent - and these human falls from heroic grace, which hold up the war against Troy, register like tragic flaws, causing deaths innumerable. Once this cloud has finally passed, however, we see how brightly heroism, notably that of Achilles, blazes. Achilles, too, will die - will die young - and he knows this. But he must prove himself in the contest - agon - of battle and in this proof his divine essence is unmistakable. Agon: heroism must be shown in action.
III.
The world has shrunk since 1987, and the dance world especially. Ten years ago, I could speak of Petipa, Balanchine, and Ashton in the present tense, not because they were still alive (only Ashton was) but because their ballets were still alive often enough. Seldom in full flower, but still with enough bloom to keep balletomanes happy.
Today, these ballets are usually, in their dance core, dead. The efforts of postmodern choreographers Twyla Tharp and Karole Armitage to move into ballet and to forge post-Balanchine ballet - efforts still so refreshing and exciting in 1987 - have not worked out well. The entries into classicism made ten vears ago by David Gordon, Michael Clark, and others have led nowhere.
Dance classicism, in 1997, is in drastic recession. To dance classicists, it is enough to create one world on stage, to show outward human energy released in formal structures within that world, and to reveal the internal division of time, space. and human quality as being proportionate. In classical works of art, one world contains dissonance as well as melody, Tiresias as well as Oedipus, Falstaff as well as King Henry. turn-in as well as turn-out. There is room for Phèdre’s guilty passion, for Carabosse's curse, for Don Giovanni to be taken to hell by demons. But the wiseguy ironies of postmodernism ill accord with so generous a conception of unity:
Well, what if classicism does die? It is not necessarily synonymous with civilisation, or with good art. The Greeks, the Indians, and others may have developed their classicisms, but several of the other races whom they regarded as 'barbarian’ were, in their various ways, highly civilised. We may be entering the next Dark Age of world culture - if so, it will be nothing like the last one - but history teaches us that the last Dark Age was by no means devoid of culture. Some authorities have announced that what is dying is Eurocentric culture. If so, it is having a long and busy deathbed scene.
But perhaps classicism cannot die while people still revere the Parthenon. Perhaps dance classicism can never wholly die while there are people who can watch with enjoyment the dancing of Fred Astaire - who was Balanchine's favourite example of classical style.
In much of the work of Mark Morris, dance classicism is still alive. In “L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato” (1988) - Grecian, Miltonic, Handelian, Duncanesque - he has forged a new classical tradition. Even so, the plant has certainly become an endangered species.
IV.
Classicism is inclusive. The classic classical choreographer remains Marius Petipa, creator of “La Bayadère”, “The Sleeping Beauty”, “Raymonda”, and much more; and, though classical ballet is always at the centre of his works, they are almost always shown to be absorbing material from other forms of dance and movement. His use of Indian dance in “La Bayadère” may have been a misrepresentation of its source material - the Kirov Ballet over the decades has distorted it much further, putting the Indian heroine Nikiya's “Indian" dances onto pointe - but it is obviously meant not as parody: as serious homage rather. We know that Petipa loved national dances, and choreographed them with especial fervour. His favourite was Spanish dance, and in “Don Quixote” and “Paquita” he spins superb suites of classical dances that are variations on his Spanish theme. In the first two acts of “Raymonda”, he creates a structural tension between classical ballet (mediaeval-courtly in flavour) and exotic dances, a stylistic tension that expresses the narrative tension between the ballet's Provençal heroine and Abdérame, the ballet's Saracen anti-hero. In the final act, however, when Hungarians have helped to save Raymonda, exotic dances (the Hungarian czardas and mazurka) are married to classical ballet in another of his great suites. Petipa's oeuvre demonstrates the belief that Frederick Ashton later put into words: classical ballet is the great river, other dance forms are its tributaries.
“Monotones” (1965, 1966) - the pair of pas de trois, “green" and “white”, to Satie music - is perhaps Ashton's ultimate statement of classical dance, and both its halves are certainly among the great dance adagios in all choreography. It is so pure and lunar that it seems removed from everything else.
Not so, however. When I interviewed Ashton in 1984, I asked why, at one point in "white" “Monotones” (to Satie's “Trois Gymnopédies”), the three dancers sit (each with one foot under them) and lean forwards, as if bowing, but with their arms powerfully outstretched behind them. “Well, you see," he answered, “Goldie the golden eagle had just escaped from London zoo....”<7> Yes. the wings of the eagle! And I laughed in recognition, for I remembered how, as children in 1965, I and my friends hoped to see the escaped Goldie flying through the air above us. It was "very Fred", as Royal Ballet dancers say, to pluck spontaneous inspiration from something that had just happened in the world at large.
And yet it’s worth thinking further about the classical links that Goldie may have illumined in Ashton's mind. That same backstretched port de bras, with the torso arching right forwards, occurs in the most influential classical ballet of this century, Balanchine's “Apollo” (1929), during the boy-god's second solo, as he feels divine power welling up within him.
Balanchine, coaching New York City Ballet male dancers, taught them that here were “the wings of the eagle”. Ashton had seen the original Diaghilev production of “Apollo”<8>; he probably took inspiration from it in his 1946 classic “Symphonic Variations” (especially during the dance early on for one man and three women), and he saw “Apollo” again several times that year and later. When he made 'green" “Monotones” (to “Trois Gnossiennes”) in April 1966, he included in it an explicit quotation from “Apollo”, and it was in November that year that he brought “Apollo” itself into the Royal Ballet repertory. The wings of the eagle: they were not only flying from London zoo.
In another interview with Ashton, in 1980, I asked about his drawing inspiration from “the classics” of the ballet repertory.
He replied, “I take inspiration from classicism”, emphasising the "ism”. “Monotones” is one of the clearest demonstrations of this. In its stillnesses and calm radiance, it refers to classical Greek statuary; in its chaste, flowing arabesques in fondu and its cambré ports de bras, it refers - as Arlene Croce has observed - to the great dance of the Shades in Petipa's “La Bayadère” (which, at Ashton's urging, Rudolf Nureyev had mounted for the Royal Ballet in 1963); it quotes, in “Trois Gnossiennes”, from both “Apollo” and “Symphonic Variations”; and, as a white dance to Satie music, the "white” “Monotones” probably refers, as David Vaughan has written, to Merce Cunningham's “Nocturnes”, a white' dance to Satie which had been shown in London in 1964 and which Ashton (as he told Cunningham) found poetic.<9> The look of the dancers moving slowly in white against a black void has, as Ashton agreed, the look that astronauts at that time had when walking in space <10>, and the opening image of "white” “Monotones” - in which the female dancer, her legs in a complete split, hugs her head to her knee while two men raise and slowly rotate her (turning her on her own pointe) - was inspired by Ashton's dream of “a chicken on a spit”.<10> All of which makes “Monotones” sound, as indeed it looks, a classic of the 1960s, and it has the unisex look of the 1960s too. What makes this extraordinary is that Ashton had apparently choreographed large parts of it decades before, to different music. In 1938, he made “Horoscope”, to music by Constant Lambert. One of his most loved ballets, it was short-lived, its scenery and costumes abandoned in Holland in 1940 before the advancing German army. Its pas de trois for the Moon and the Gemini was danced by Pamela May, Richard Ellis, and Alan Carter, and both May and Ellis, on first seeing “white” “Monotones”, recognised the choreography they had danced twenty-five years earlier. (Ellis even said, "As I first watched ‘Monotones’, I knew what was going to happen next.')<11> How much of “Monotones” was old, how much new?
It is strange to discover that Ashton may have been inspired by Cunningham. But then it is strange to discover that some of the great classical architecture of Brighton and Hove (notably Brunswick Square) was in fact influenced by the Jeffersonian architectural classicism of the young American republic. The more you study classicism, the more it makes you feel that there really is nothing new under the sun. Balanchine often said, “I don't invent, I assemble.”<12> “Monotones”, too, is an assemblage. And yet that is not how it - or Balanchine choreography - feels. Anyone seeing it knows how it seems to grow naturally from its Satie music, and how the continuity of Ashton's composition, as Croce wrote, “is like that of a master draftsman whose pen never leaves the paper”.<13>
There are just two choreographers who represent the true orthodoxy of classical ballet: Petipa and Balanchine. One obvious reason is that they best expose and celebrate the danse d'école, the academic language of ballet, as the heart of their ballets. But another reason, equally central to their works, is the emphasis they give to the differences between masculine and feminine, and to the (deeply ambiguous) device which brings these polar forces together: namely, supported adagio.
Ballet is sexist. No, not anti-woman. But based upon an essentialist distinction between male and female genders, yes. She dances on pointe; he does not. He partners her; she does not return the compliment. “Monotones”, indeed, contains some of Ashton's most striking figures of supported adagio, from a technical point of view; but the general unisex emphasis of either trio defuses the expressive force of this.
It is Petipa and Balanchine, in the great supported adagios of their ballets from “La Bayadère” to “Agon”, who have made this into a ritualistic form of dance drama. It is not always just one man and one woman. In the Rose Adagio of “The Sleeping Beauty”, Princess Aurora has four partners; in “Divertimento no 15”, there are five ballerinas and three male consorts, in various combinations. But all of these are high-tension rituals in which the male principle and female principle are combined. The ritual - very public, often with the bodies turned to face the audience rather than each other - is one of high courtesy and formality, even when (as in “Agon”) it also contains aggression and sex. And the source of the ritual is the code of chivalry, and the tradition of courtly love.
“It seems to us natural", wrote C.S.Lewis, “that love should be the most common theme of serious imaginative literature: but a glance at antiquity or at the Dark Ages at once shows us that what we took for ‘nature’ is really a special state of affairs, which will probably have an end, and which certainly had a beginning in eleventh-century Provence.”<14> Courtly love emerged in the era of the feudal system, and it was fuelled by a religious sense, too. The knight vows allegiance to one lady; his love - usually adulterous, as in the legends of Tristan and Isolde, or Lancelot and Guinevere - is an expression, not of erotic union, but of yearning to bridge the gap between two sundered people. Think of how often, in the great adagios of Petipa and Balanchine, a cavalier stretches forth his arm so that the ballerina, her own arm extended to hold his proffered hand in hers, may display her dance glory on pointe. There is acrobatic excitement here, yes; his hand steadies her as she extends one leg in attitude, in développé, in arabesque. But this is expressive: we see how much more his support permits her to do, and how both consent to this. And it has a tragic quality: we see the gulf between two people bridged only by the formal joining of hands. In the exceptional adagio of the second movement of Balanchine's “Symphony in C”, the ballerina and cavalier both face front while holding hands; ceremoniously, she extends her leg sideways in développé toward him; and the strange effect is of a heroic gesture saying both “I need you” and “Keep your distance”.
Who today remembers the meanings that the traditional “Swan Lake” used to have? Like “Raymonda”, it was set in the Age of Chivalry, and its swan heroine was an image of inviolable purity on a heroic scale. Here was classical form wracked by expressionist urgency, as she tried tragically to be released from her own grandly virginal purity. There are deep psychosexual meanings here, and we follow the swan dances largely from the woman's point of view. Love here is unmistakably tragic. No wonder that, as in “Tristan”, man and woman find release only in death.
Such adagios, which must be offensive to those who loathe the sexism of ballet, are ballet's quintessence. Petipa and Balanchine surround them with orchestral grandeur, often with a corps de ballet or coryphées providing unsupported variations on what the ballerina is doing supported. And they are the structural core of many ballets. In almost every surviving act of every Petipa ballet, a supported adagio is the crux; there follows a series of variations (solos and/or ensembles, male and/or female, almost invariably climaxing in a female solo; and then the coda, in allegro tempo. The structure celebrates the femininity that is sovereign in ballet, and the heroic masculinity that honours it.
The formality of classicism confers yet more poetic ambiguities than I have expressed upon these adagios. In the Rose Adagio, one prince after another offers his hand to Aurora, and each time she puts her hand into it. No observer could miss, amid this ballet that is all about the succession to the throne, the image of courtship and dynastic drama that this joining of hands suggests. And yet we hardly have time to reflect on that meaning, because, as Aurora takes each prince's hand, she becomes, in an instant, a radiant figure of ideal geometry - as she does again and again, supported or alone, in this supreme nineteenth-century expression of the danse d'école - and it is this strange sublimity that exerts more force on us than the simpler issue of royal courtship.
The only choreographer today who makes serious use of supported adagio is, curiously, Merce Cunningham - though it is never the structural centre of his dances, though it is only one of several duet methods he employs, and though his women do not dance on pointe. And Cunningham allows the utmost expressive ambiguity to arise from this male-female dance ceremony. Sometimes - as in “Channels/Inserts” (1982) - we see a man supporting (virtually shaping) a woman in one long-held statuesque position after another: Pygmalion at work on Galatea. Then, suddenly, we see her take the initiative, swinging one firm leg and coursing away from him, or eluding him while remaining in his company.
Thus does Cunningham express the mysteries of male-female colloquy. Beneath the chivalry, no person can be fully possessed, because no person can be fully known.
We are right to think of classicism, in its celebration of order, as an affirmative tradition. But not as a complacent one.
Beside the positive there is also a negative. We see - in so many works of dance classicism, old or new - the city-state, the social order, the festivities, the bright display of heroic energy; but also the mysteries of identity, the dark strain of courtship, the dramatic unpredictability of communion. The order of classicism does not mean stagnation. It involves tension, too.
VI.
Dance has its centre in its union with music. Is that centre holding? It is a sign of the drastic nature of the twentieth century that, during its course, music and dance have experienced estrangements, counselling, divorces, secret trysts, shotgun marriages, and bizarre liaisons, as never before in history. Dancing to non-dance music; dancing to the wrong music; dancing regardless of the music; dancing without music; dancing to anthologies of musical fragments ... our century has seen and heard all these.
Probably most choreographers will always use music, and probably there will always be a few who use it musically. There are many unclassical choreographers who use music in their work, but musicality is nonetheless a classical impulse. Fokine's “Petrushka”, Massine's “Le Tricorne”, Graham's “Appalachian Spring”, Robbins's “Dances at a Gathering”, MacMillan's “Mayerling”: these are all prime examples of largely unclassical choreography in which musicality provides a crucial element of classical connectedness. Where, however, we find unmusicality discord between music and dance where concord is intended - we invariably find non-classicism. (If only we could agree on what is unmusical! To some people, Natalia Makarova was a deeply musical dancer. And, to some people, Paul Taylor is a deeply unmusical choreographer.) To some of us, some of Cunningham's work is musical - not, to be sure, in its response to the music we hear, but in its rhythmic and structural organisation. And this musicality in Cunningham is intimately related to his classicism: which has been more widely acknowledged.
Cunningham is not (and does not try to be) a complete classicist. Rather than create one world on stage, he usually prefers - in works that lack beginnings or endings - to show us a fragment, or fragments, of the larger world. His dancers are not ideal, are not divinities. There is always irony between what we see and what we hear. Yet his work - even in its independence of sight and sound (the bird in flight and the traffic's roar co-exist without heeding each other) - keeps returning us to life and to nature. And, beaming through his dances, we see some impersonal flashes of the divine. We see not classicism but the classical idea, twinkling through. •
1997 biographical note: Alastair Macaulay is chief theatre critic of “The Financial Times”, chief examiner in dance history to the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing, and is currently at work on books on Merce Cunningham and Margot Fonteyn.
1.Macaulay, Alastair. 1987. “Notes on dance classicism”. “Dance Theatre Joumal”, 5, 2, Summer, pp.6-9, 36-39.
2.Jeyasingh, speaking at Symposium on Dance Classicism, Dance Umbrella, November 1993.
3.Ascherson, Neal. 1995. “Black Sea”. London: Jonathan Cape, pp.49-50.
4.Taper, Bemard. 1963. “Balanchine” (first edition), London: Harper & Row, p212.
5.Source withheld.
6.Griffin, Jasper. 1980. “Homer”. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Past Masters series), pp.8-9.
7.A largely unknown television documentary in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, with unique March 1965 footage, shows Ashton conducting a piano rehearsal of the first “Gymnopédie” and opening phrase of the second. As the three first-cast dancers - Vyvyan Lorrayne, Anthony Dowell, Robert Mead - bend forwards with arms arched back like wings, Ashton eagerly calls “Goldie! Goldie! Goldie!” I have shown this excerpt in the Library’s Bruno Walter Auditorium in presentations on both July 2015 and February 2018.
8.Ashton mentioned having seen the original production of “Apollo” in conversation with me in February 1988. Curiously, he mentioned not only the chariot arriving at the summit of Parnassus at the end of the ballet - as some photographs confirm - but also Apollo stepping into the chariot to fly away. I have always assumed that the latter point was Ashton’s embellishment; I do not think Apollo ever stepped into the chariot in any production of Balanchine’s ballet.
9.See Croce, Arlene. 1978: “How to be very, very popular”, in “Afterimages”.
London: A&C Black, pp.82-84; and Vaughan, David. 1977, “Frederick Ashton and his ballets”. London: A.&C. Black, pp.344-348.
10.Vaughan, ibid.
11.Conversations with Pamela May, December 1996, and Richard Elis, January 1997.
12.Balanchine, George. 1984, “By George Balanchine”. New York: San Marco Press, p.32. (In 1961, Balanchine said, “Creation is by God. We just assemble things already exist.”)
13.Croce, op. cit, p83.
14.Lewis, CS. 1936. “The Allegory of Love”. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.3.
@Alastair Macaulay 2026