Ashton and MacMillan in Fairyland: Contrasting Styles in Le Baiser de la Fée

Abstract

choreographer for the Vic-Wells Ballet is surprising. The story is complicated and the initial performance of the work, by the Ida Rubinstein company in 1928 with choreography by Bronislava Nijinska, had mixed reviews.3 Ashton knew this well?he had danced the role of a peasant in it?but he felt that the problem was caused by the ungainly dancing of Rubinstein, who played the Fairy.* He chose the ballet because he loved the score and, in an article written in November 1935, he hinted that the music as op posed to the story would take precedence.4 If Baiserwas an unlikely story for Ashton to tackle, it was even more so for Kenneth MacMillan, whose scorn for fairy stories is well known.5 But he, too, was drawn to the music and mounted his version in 1960, later reworking it for a revival in 1986. According to Lynn Seymour, who danced the Bride, her first major role for MacMillan, "Baiser was Kenneth's homage to Frederick Ashton."6 And she points out that because of the earlier Ashton version in which Margot Fonteyn danced the role of the Bride, many critics drew parallels between the Ashton-Fonteyn partnership and that of MacMillan and herself. But forming celebrated dance partnerships