"Sylvia"
American Ballet Theatre
Metropolitan Opera House
New York, NY
June 29, 2009
by Mary Cargill
copyright © 2009 by Mary Cargill
With the emphasis on "today's audience" and the necessity of filling seats, ballets can sometimes seem to be a mirror, only capable of reflecting the audience's whims, and today's whims includes lots of males doing lots of jumps, or women as pretzel. But art is also a magical telescope with the ability to look both forward and backward, to what might be possible and also to bring the past to life. There is no astronomer through whose telescope I would rather view the past than Sir Frederick Ashton. "Sylvia" is his twentieth century take on Tasso's pastoral paradise, where love can conquer all, reflected through the nineteenth century prism of Delibes' luscious score. There are echoes of Ashton's beloved "Sleeping Beauty" in both the atmosphere and in the actual choreography. Like Petipa's Prince, the hero, Aminta, is guided and protected by a benevolent supernatural power, and he doesn't really have to do anything but be his loving and noble self. Evil exists, but is controllable; there is no feeling, as in the romantic sensibility of ballets like "Swan Lake", "Giselle", or "La Sylphide" that the hero is out of his place, that he wants something unattainable, or that some irrational force is against him. In Ashton's and Delibes' calm Attic world, love may be capricious but once it conquers, all is well.