![\"Fairy](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/AJ-Peaseblossom-150623_Royal_Ballet_theDream_006.jpg\")
<\/a>Fairy Peaseblossom (Akane Takada) flies above the slumbering lovers (Christina Arestis and Valeri Hristov) in Frederick Ashton’s\u00a0 The Dream<\/em>. At left, sleeping alone: Johannes Stepanek. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n Felix Mendelssohn wasn\u2019t yet eighteen when he wrote his Overture to Shakespeare\u2019s A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream. <\/em>He\u2019d only just read the play that year (1826) in German translation; it must have excited him mightily. He was over thirty when he combined the overture with incidental music to accompany a performance of Shakespeare\u2019s moon-struck work.<\/p>\n When Frederick Ashton choreographed his magical ballet The Dream <\/em>in 1964 in honor of the 400th<\/sup> anniversary of Shakespeare\u2019s birth, it was clear that he knew the play and the music equally well. Watching the Royal Ballet perform the work during the company\u2019s Lincoln Center season (presented by the Joyce Theater), I was struck all over again how deliciously the music evokes the play, and how deliciously Ashton ushered them both into dance life. In the overture (superbly conducted by Barry Wordsworth and played by members of the New York City Ballet Orchestra), you can already hear the skittering fairies, the braying of Bottom the Weaver transformed into an ass, the ceremonious court of Athens, and the squabbling lovers who wander into the nighttime forest. The incidental music, as arranged by John Lanchbery, bonds fluently with the dancing and the drama. And the presence in the pit of the expert Brooklyn Youth Chorus to sing Mendelssohn\u2019s several songs added greatly to these New York performances.<\/p>\n If you know the play, some of its words ring in your head when certain dance-and-music passages occur in the ballet. The fairy queen Titania\u2019s challenge to her mate, Oberon: \u201cThe fairy land buys not the child of me.\u201d Puck\u2019s obedience to the command of Oberon, his master, to hasten on his mission: \u201cI\u2019ll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.\u201d Demetrius to the amorous Helena: \u201cI love thee not, therefore pursue me not.\u201d Titania to Bottom transformed, as she strokes his donkey ears: \u201cO, how I love thee! How I dote on thee!\u201d And, although Ashton abridged the action of the play, he expanded one line spoken by Oberon upon being reunited with Titania\u2014\u201cSound, music! Come my queen, take hands with me.\u201d\u2014into one of the loveliest pas de deux ever created.<\/p>\n Demetrius (Johannes Stepanek) and Helena (Itziar Mendizabal) at odds. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n This production of The Dream<\/em> was coached by the Royal\u2019s Guest Principal Ballet Master Christopher Carr and by Anthony Dowell, the ballet\u2019s original Oberon. It retains David Walker\u2019s designs, with the immense gnarled tree in whose hollow trunk Titania sleeps, and the costumes for her fairy throng that allude to the head wreaths and longish tutus that Marie Taglioni and her ilk wore in the 1830s. The members of the Royal Ballet are wonderfully expressive in their dancing. Their expertise in mime and acting, the pliancy of their bodies and the clarity of their focus bear the story\u2019s atmosphere and emotions along wonderfully well. Their style in this ballet of Ashton\u2019s is more modest than the style of the New York City Ballet dancers we\u2019re used to seeing on that stage. The positions of their arms seem rounder; they\u2019re buoyant but not aggressive in space (unless aggression is called for). The fairies not only have swift and pretty feet, they regard their own with pleasure. When each raises a hand to her ear in that well-known evocation of \u201chark!\u201d she looks both like an alert woodland creature and a figure from a ballet lithograph.<\/p>\n Shakespeare’s rustics (L to R): James Wilkie, Erico Montes, Sander Blommaert, Benjamin Ella, Kevin Emerton. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n In the cast that I saw, all the dancers performed marvelously. Christina Arestis (Hermia), Valeri Hristov (her Lysander), Itziar Mendizabal (Helena), and Johannes Stepanek (Demetrius) pursued, squabbled, got mixed up, and fought fiercely as Shakespeare\u2019s human lovers. Bennet Gartside played Bottom with the sly doltishness required and performed his donkey-headed solo on pointe neatly (how brilliant of Ashton to have devised this substitute for hooves!). James Hay vaulted brilliantly in the antic choreography Ashton devised for Puck; his frequently cocked wrists, bent knees in the air, and arms crooked at the elbow give the character a look that goes with his name. Steven McRae, regal as Oberon, danced his demanding and very interesting solo with aplomb and looked handsome in his green outfit. At first, I found Sarah Lamb\u2019s Titania a trifle too pert, but she somehow matured as the ballet progressed and, in the end, was lovely.<\/p>\n Titania (Sarah Lamb) and Oberon (Steven McRae) reconciled. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n The final pas de deux, set to Mendelssohn\u2019s ravishing Nocturne, begins flirtatiously and builds through exaltation to surrender. When Titania and Oberon pull on their clasped hands (no, you go first; now follow me) their back-and-forth emerges as a lyrical, rhythmic flow. In the almost awkward maneuver when he dips her body down in her arabesque, turns her slowly once, and brings her back up into a proper arabesque, you can envisage a kind of erasure of the quarrel and renewal of their affection. Titania repeatedly darts out onto one toe, then sinks in her partner\u2019s grasp, yielding to him gradually, as if her limbs were growing heavy with amorousness.<\/p>\n The Dream <\/em>shared the program with Kenneth MacMillan\u2019s Song of the Earth<\/em>, choreographed for the Stuttgart Ballet in 1965 and acquired by Ashton, then Director of the Royal Ballet, for that company in 1966. The music that inspired MacMillan was Gustav Mahler\u2019s gorgeous song cycle, Das Lied von der Erde<\/em>, with its text drawn from German translations of Tang dynasty poetry by the Chinese bard Li-Bai. The lyrics sung by an onstage tenor and mezzo-soprano (at these performances: Thomas Randle and Katharine Goeldner) speak of the moon, of death, of loneliness, of spring, of drunkenness.<\/p>\n Kenneth MacMillan’s Song of the Earth<\/em>. At left: Carlos Acosta. In white: Nehemiah Kish. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n MacMillan\u2019s much-praised ballet (this version coached by former principal dancer and company director of the Royal, Monica Mason, and notator Grant Coyle) is spare and modern\u2014not in its dance style, but in its structure. The choreography presents clear, solid, architectural images most of the time. The young men and women in this society play, but they are not playful. They\u2019re garbed in gray-and-white practice clothes and dance in an almost featureless space (designs by Nicholas Georgiadis) that responds to lighting by John B. Read. Among these seventeen ensemble dancers (by my count), trios and partnerships form and dissipate, people rush on and offstage, or are carried away, soloists briefly emerge. In the fifth song, Nehemiah Kish, one of the protagonists, is attended by Alexander Campbell and Ricardo Cervera. Yuhui Choe dances sweetly alone during the third song, watched and guarded by others, before being carried off by the most important of the three principal dancers.<\/p>\n In the cast that I saw, this character, known as The Messenger of Death, was personified by Carlos Acosta. I\u2019ve read that this black-clad character is supposed to merge with the others and not stand out, even though he wears a half-mask that hardly looks like everyday wear. This deceptive humility is not possible with Acosta. This terrific Cuban dancer is tall, dark, and long-legged. And, when not leading the other men in the dancing or involved the more strenuous aspects of his own mission, he stands and watches the others, his posture regal. In Mahler\u2019s text, he is The Eternal One, and he does indeed appear to have the power of Death itself.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>