Sunlight by Ashton

The hit of the London stage last week was a ballet born in Bordeaux on the eve of the French Revolution. La Fille Mai Gardee is the world's second oldest ballet (the oldest: The Whims of Cupid and the Ballet Master, which beat La Fille to the stage in 1786). In its present incarnation, La Fille not only provides the Royal Ballet with its biggest smash of the season but brilliantly demonstrates the versatility of a convivial, pink-cheeked, 53-year-old ex-R.A.F. officer--Choreographer Frederick William Mallandaine Ashton.

La Fille's plot is as wispy as a ruffled tutu: Lise, daughter of a prosperous farmer, falls in love with a strapping lad named Colas, but is opposed by her mother, who wants her to marry Alain, idiot son of a wealthy vineyard owner. Lovers outwit mother, amor vincit omnia, curtain. The original score was probably written by an unknown member of the Bordeaux Grand Theater Orchestra, was later revised by Ferdinand Herold, chorus master of the Paris Opera, who included such pirated tidbits as the overture to Barber of Seville, As for the choreography--originally by Jean Bercher (1742-1806), known professionally as Dauberval and regarded as the father of comic ballet--Innovator Ashton was almost completely on his own. The only guide he had to the original work was the hazy memory of an oldtime (75) ballerina, Russian-born Tamara Karsavina, who danced the role of Lise in czarist St. Petersburg.

Ashton's new Fille is an unabashedly lyrical, bravura showcase for pixyish (5 ft. 4 in., 105 Ibs.) Nadia Nerina (born Nadine Judd in Cape Town), long acknowledged the company's most polished virtuoso. Around the 32-year-old ballerina Ashton draped a ballet rich in invention, defiant of technical limitations, blending high jinks, low comedy and pathos. Brilliantly supported by Yorkshire-born David Blair (he managed a singlehanded portage not rivaled at Covent Garden since Ulanova was toted out of Juliet's tomb), Dancer Nerina turned in a performance of superb precision, fluency and lightness. The ballet had some stunning virtuoso bits: a pas de ruban running like a thread through the first two scenes, m which the lovers reel each other in and out of elaborate cats' cradles of pink rib bon; a scene-setting dance by a "cock and four rumpled "hens," whose strutting absurdities are closely modeled on th fowl Ashton observes at his Suffolk country home ("La Fille is my poor man's Pastoral Symphony").

For 25 years Choreographer Ashton had worked mostly with Margot Fonteyn's classical, dramatic talents in mind (she is semi-retired). In La Fille, noted London critics, he had done something different--"an open-air, sunlit ballet as perfect of its kind as the moonlit Sylvia or Ondine or the chandeliered La Valse." But the enthusiastic response did not alter Ashton's gloomy estimate of the ballet public. "I feel," said he, "that most people still think choreography is something to do with the feet--like chiropody."

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