Ashton Celebrated review – Royal Ballet turns traditional

Royal Opera House, London
Frederick Ashton’s musicality, footwork and storytelling are showcased in a programme of gracefully danced favourites

When you watch the ballets of Frederick Ashton alongside the work of others, he can sometimes look traditional. Yet seeing a programme devoted entirely to his work at the start of a four-year international celebration allows the eye to catch other qualities.

All his famous musicality, his intricate footwork, his storytelling clarity are on display, but you also see his impulse to disrupt his own carefully contrived symmetry, to start from a sidelong angle and see where it takes him. In Les Rendezvous, for example, a romantic interlude set to the music of Daniel Auber, he’s always plonking women down on the floor and finding ways for men elegantly to raise them. At one moment, five men lift five women with their backs to us, pinioned motionless in the air like human pillars while a solo unfolds in front of them.