Rimbaud In Action

Among British choreographers, 43-year-old Frederick Ashton has been the busiest and best, lately. U.S. audiences saw several of his witty, agreeable ballets, e.g., Cinderella, Facade, Wedding Bouquet, danced by Britain's Sadler's Wells company last fall (TIME, Nov. 14). Last week Manhattan fans got to see a new Ashton work danced by a U.S. company.

When he was invited last fall to do a new ballet for New York's City Ballet Company, Ashton was delighted. Ever since the war he had been coddling an idea that he thought might be too salty for English dancers. While he was an R.A.F. intelligence officer stationed in Scotland, he had taken to reading the neurotic verses of French Poet Arthur Rimbaud, who went looking for the secrets of life in its sewers, via drugs and debauchery. A lot of what Rimbaud (rhymes with Sambo) had to say was "indecent," Ashton told himself; but perhaps he could put Rimbaud into successful ballet just the same. Ashton's countryman, Composer Benjamin Britten, had set nine songs from Rimbaud's Les Illuminations for tenor voice and string orchestra. Last month, with Britten's music in his baggage, Ashton set out for Manhattan.

"Less Inhibited." He found the young New York City Ballet Company "less disciplined" than the crack Sadler's Wells. But the dancers were "more electric," "more rhythmic," and "less inhibited' for some of the Rimbauderies he had in mind. Says Ashton in what was obviously meant to be a compliment: "You have to pull such actions and gestures out of our dancers; yours understand immediately and express them easily.'

Last week, soon after the curtain went up on Cecil Beaton's fancy sets, a world premiere audience in Manhattan's City Center theater found it could understand immediately too.

To illumine his Illuminations, Choreographer Ashton had atomized both Rimbaud's violent life and his poetry, put the pieces back together in a sequence of nine charade-like "danced pictures." The pictures were full of familiar Ashton trademarks--the wit of Wedding Bouquet, the subtle fancy of Facade, the gay, gregarious pageantry and a little of the slapstick of Cinderella. And there were salty passages indeed; Rimbaud's (Nicholas Magallanes) painfully sexual grapple with Profane Love (Melissa Hayden) was both lurid and profane.

A Little Afraid. Most astonishing to Ashton fans was the new, contorted violence of his work. When Illuminations came to an end (with the shooting of Rimbaud by Poet Paul Verlaine), the sellout audience brought the house down.

Freddie Ashton had been a little afraid of "laying an egg." But if he had, he had at least cooked it to Manhattan taste. The British will get to sample the gamy dish too: the New York City Ballet is taking it to England on a tour this July.

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