Coming Home to Roost in London

In 1961, Frederick Ashton, founder choreographer of Britain's Royal Ballet, created a charming two-act narrative work called Les Deux Pigeons, a title Anglicized the following year to The Two Pigeons. I watched it for the first time during the Royal's winter 2019 London season, and at first glance the ballet can look trivial, drawing on timeworn devices such as gypsy characters and their dances to tell its story of love spurned and redeemed. But it also weaves into this narrative some virtuosic dancing, and in expressing the ups and downs of young love, it exudes an enormous charm. It strikes me as an important work for Ashton, coming at a pivotal point in his career.

In the postwar years and through the 1950s, Ashton chiefly created star vehicles for the Royal's prima ballerina, Margot Fonteyn. Narrative dominated these works, which included Cinderella, Daphnis et Chloé, Tiresias, Sylvia, Romeo and Juliet, La Péri, and Ondine. Casting Fonteyn in these romantic myths and fairy tales reflected her magical sway over the company and its repertory, and in the later 1950s, Ashton made steps that helped disguise her fading technique. Some of the lead roles in Ashton's occasional non-story works, like Symphonic Variations and Birthday Offering, went to her as well. As Fonteyn's career appeared to wind down in the early 1960s—she turned 42 in 1961—Ashton began to make roles on some of the company's younger dancers, such as Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell, who danced Titania and Oberon in The Dream, his 1964 Mendelssohn ballet. He also devoted time once again to non-narrative dance and experimented with more modernist movement, as in the sublime Monotones, his 1965 ballet to Satie. These new directions revitalized Ashton's choreography, and although Fonteyn's career unexpectedly revived when Russian defector Rudolf Nureyev joined the Royal as guest artist in 1962 and partnered her for another decade and beyond, Ashton made only one ballet for the two of them, a version of the Dame aux Camélias/Traviata story, Marguerite and Armand, in 1963.

The Two Pigeons derives from an 1886 Paris Opéra Ballet work by Louis Mérante, to serviceable music by André Messager, inspired by La Fontaine's fable of a male pigeon who goes off to explore the world but returns happily to his mate. Mérante made the characters human, sent the male off to explore the gypsy life, and had his love pursue him in gypsy disguise. Ashton simplified the story, turning the Young Man (as he is called) into a painter living in a huge Parisian garret, and the Young Girl into his rather restless model. The gypsies visit the garret, and, taken with a beautiful Gypsy Girl, he follows them to their camp, where, after a dance contest with the gypsy's Lover, he receives a beating and returns home to the Young Girl, who accepts him with love. At his departure, just before intermission, one of two live doves has flown offstage, abandoning the other; when he returns, so does the bird, first alighting on his shoulder, then joining its mate perched on the oval back of a white, cast-iron chair.

Throughout The Two Pigeons you can feel Ashton's delight in seizing the chance to work with dancers just starting out, their youth lending poignancy to the lovers' problems and affection. The premiere, on Valentine's Day, 1961, featured two 21-year old dancers, Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable. In this performance, the lead roles went to principal Akane Takada and first soloist James Hay. While both are somewhat older, they convincingly embody the moodiness and foolishness of young lovers from the very start. Hay dances while brandishing his palette, with graceful high kicks, while Takada, posing for him on the white chair, fidgets, scratches an itch, and stamps out a cockroach, things a ballerina simply shouldn't do. The juxtaposition of the Young Man's absorption in his art with the Young Girl's resistance admits a dose of realism into the ballet, hinting that all its foolish 19^th...