On 19 June 2023 at the Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, W1, The Frederick Ashton Foundation presented the third Frederick Ashton Lecture, in association with the Wallace Collection. The speaker was the writer and mythographer Dame Marina Warner CH, DBE
Out of this world: Dancing into Fairylands
Thank you for trusting me to give the 2023 Frederick Ashton Lecture: it’s an honour and a challenge which I hope you will think I have risen to adequately. I love dance but am not in any way a critic or historian of the art, so I am going to approach this talk by staying where I feel at home – in fairyland. That is, I shall be exploring with you the realms out of this world that many of the most loved ballets occupy, which Ashton himself crystallised in our collective memory through his choice of subject, story, and music, through his choreography and his own performances. As you know, the Romantic ballet and its great exponent Alicia Markova struck him to the heart with a deep passion, and in work after work, he realized the vision of ethereal beauty and often doomed love that the tradition represents.
I want to say something tonight about walking between worlds and the undertow of such desires to access other dimensions that ballet represents, at least to me… or not exactly ballet but the gravity-defying energy of dance. How it allows you and me to taste dangers and pleasures without suffering the consequences. I am going to explore the underworlds in ballets and the relationship of dance to fairy tale encounters with passion, violence and death. I’ll begin with some brief comments on Giselle and Swan Lake in which we in the audience meet enchanted beings, and then explore The Red Shoes, the fairy tale about dance by Hans Christian Andersen and the film Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made in 1948 (the same year Ashton produced his Cinderella). Powell and Pressburger are major figures in the story of postwar dance because they made significant innovatory use of cinema to express its power to a broader audience. The film within a film called ‘The Ballet of the Red Shoes’ extends the themes of the main frame story and explores what it means to want to dance and how dance is a metaphor for accessing other states of being – from ecstasy to death. Ballet has offered one way of following the poet George Seferis when he declared: ‘It’s painful and difficult / but the living are not enough for me. I have to ask the dead / in order to go on further / There’s no other way.’[i]
Dance can lead us to encounter those forces that lie beneath or beyond conscious intelligibility. By a significant contradiction, the physical technique, strength and control exacted in the act of dancing brings about a capacity – a preternatural, superhuman capacity – to conduct us, the audience, to zones closed to ordinary experience. George Balanchine thought of the dancers in his company as angels – the female dancers above all but also the male – and the leads of both sexes even more so, and he urged them on implacably, Jennifer Homans tells us in her superb biography, to train and train until their bodies became instruments at their – and his – and our – service.[ii] The word angel comes from Greek ‘messenger’ and their being was defined by one authority as ‘corpus sed non caro’, body but not flesh. Of course, I am not saying that dancers’ bodies are not enfleshed! We know the toll their work takes and how often they suffer injuries. But on stage, since the 19th century and the Romantic ballet, at a symbolic level, the curtain lifts on the possibility of otherworldly visions and the dancers embody its inhabitants. The experience of a ballet, which demands exceptional feats of endurance and acrobatics from its performers, takes us across the threshold into other realms – but only for a time. It must then deliver us back to reality. In this respect, we the spectators find ourselves in a similar position to the protagonists in the story, who are in peril from the fairies and might be abducted into their world and are usually reprieved – but not always. As in the myth of Orpheus, the encounter with the underworld may cost them their lives. This is the fate of the heroine of The Red Shoes. But we, in the auditorium, live on.
Even the beloved tale of Cinderella reverberates with these dark and difficult themes – not only the grotesque cruelty of the ugly sisters, brilliantly lampooned by Ashton with Robert Helpmann in his enduring production. Cinders is in mourning for the loss of her mother and covers herself in ashes as a sign of her sorrow; the fairy godmother performs the magical transformations in her mother’s place – in several versions, including the Grimms’, she comes back as the ghost of the mother sometimes in the form of an animal, and looks after her daughter from beyond the grave.[iii] In Donkeyskin by Perrault, a variant of Cendrillon, the trunk filled with her magic dresses follows her under the ground and rises to the surface and opens when she strikes the earth with the magic ring the Lilac Fairy has given her.
The supernatural imaginary of stories that structures ballet does not divide the invisible cosmos into above and below, heaven and hell, day and night, but dwells on an intermediate territory beneath but not very deep down, where fairies, mermaids, gnomes and imps dwell – twilight zones. Tolkien picks up on this structural, spiritual geography when he invented Middle Earth. This imaginary map follows the architecture of human consciousness that Mary Douglas discusses in her Natural Symbols (1970).
The stage can represent this interzone for us in the audience, who are earthed as it were: in the theatre, the scene on which the curtain rises may unfold predicaments of our earthbound state and aspire to hold a ‘mirror up to nature’, (in the phrase Hamlet uses to praise the strolling players), but in dance and opera, the proscenium arch spans a different space, and that site of performance acts as a portal.[iv] From the Greeks onward, it has opened windows on to beings who cannot be seen on this earth – gods, nymphs, monsters, fairies – and on to events that bring the actions of supernatural powers within our experience and reveal its invisible features and inhabitants. On the Greek tragic stage, the central inner chamber was called the skene, meaning “tent”, the origin of the word “scene.” (This etymology is not certain, but at least thought-provoking). The “scene” is concealed from view, an inner chamber behind the main arena where the action took place in public: the inner realm figures the hidden depths of self and world in conflict. It is there that the most terrible crises unfold in Greek tragedy, where private and unseen and unspeakable things happened, giving rise to the word “ob-scene”: Medea killing her children, Oedipus putting out his eyes. It is from there that witnesses to these tragic events then emerge to bring news of what has happened.[v]
The stage acts as an open arena that promises knowledge of inwardness. It gives access to the inner world of consciousness. By extension and in contrast, ballets like Swan Lake seize and realize the unseen or the unseeable and take us there – for a time.
When Robert Kirk at the end of the 17th century describes fairies in his study, The Secret Commonwealth, he couches his account in the scientific language of the day:
These siths or fairies they call sluagh maithe or the good people (it would seem, to prevent the dint of their ill Attempts, for the Irish use to bless all they fear harm of) and are said to be of a middle nature betwixt man and angel (as were daemons thought to be of old), of intelligent studious spirits, and light, changeable bodies, (like those called astral) somewhat of the nature of a condensed cloud, and best seen in twilight. These bodies be so pliable through the subtlety of the spirits that agitate them that they can make them appear or disappear at pleasure. Some have bodies or vehicles so spungeous, thin, and defaecat that they are fed by only sucking into some fine spirituous liquor that pierces like pure air and oil; other feed more gross on the foison or substance of corns and liquors or on corn itself that grows on the surface of the earth, which these fairies steal away, partly invisible, partly preying on the grain as do crows and mice.[vi]
This is a very recognizable evocation and matches closely the appearance of sylphs etc, in Romantic ballet. Kirk’s work was edited by Walter Scott in the 1840s, so it may have contributed to the familiar fairy visions in the 19th century. Many other sources also shaped our expectations: Blake was inspired by Shakespeare when he painted fairies dancing in a ring; he gives them insect wings, to suggest ethereality and lightness. Related imagery infuses the lexicon of both insects and fairies: ‘nymph’ describes an early stage of development of butterflies and other lightsome creatures; ‘larva’ in Latin means a spectre or apparition. Shakespeare calls one of Titania’s attendants Moth and another Cobweb, which remembers the nocturnal and more sinister aspects of insect existence. But in spite of these disturbing undertones, it is entirely conventional that translucent insect wings spring from the backs of fairies and are attached to ballerina costumes for tiny tots.
‘Light changeable bodies somewhat of the nature of a condensed cloud’, really seems to announce the dream of a dancer as captured in the painting by Nicolas Lancret, here in the Wallace collection, depicting Mlle Camargo Dancing (1730).[vii] When this first prima ballerina of the Paris Opera was performing, the entertainments were called Féeries, sealing the association of the dramatic form with the fantastic invisible world. The affinity between fairy tale and music theatre is very deep, and especially so in the case of the fanciful and lavishly decorative spectacles that were much encouraged by the court at Versailles and the King (Louis XIV was an admired dancer himself). And when the pointe shoe came in, Marie Taglioni incarnated the image of a threshold spirit who lived in the deep dark forest or the edge of a lake. The crepuscular settings of Giselle, Swan Lake and La Sylphide situate the auditorium as the entrance to this underworld – a realm of the dead or a land of spirits – it was believed that fairies were not, unlike gods, immortal. Fairylands were usually thought of as situated at entrances to the dark: heroines of fairy tales meet good or bad fairies at a well head, with the implication that the fairy has come up to the surface to meet the girl… or inside caves and fairy hills.[viii] I would hazard that Féeries and their progeny have provided ways that we humans live our fears and horrors, by taking part as spectators in the magical aesthetic transformations of suffering.
As you know, early theatre was a form of mime – masked performers, the chorus chanting and some music to accompany the divine interventions. Naturalistic or realist theatre conventions do not allow actors to dance their roles nor sing of their passions. The artifice and the sheer virtuoso skills of dancers and musicians has the effect of projecting a different reality into the performance space, or, since the coming of cinema, on to the screen. Fairyland, as it is conceived and realized in ballets such as Giselle, Swan Lake and La Sylphide isn’t a version of paradise but a sinister, dark, twilit place. The sylphs, and swans and Wilis who entrance us with their pure whiteness, their incandescent feathers and shining tulle and pearls are living in – often trapped by enchantment – a nether world, neither hell nor purgatory in a Christian scheme of salvation but closer to limbo, a word derived from ‘limen’, threshold. Limbo has now been abolished in Catholic doctrine, but was declared in medieval times as a neutral holding place for the souls of those who through no fault of their own had not been baptized – either because they died before Jesus’ redemption or, in the case of still births, before they had time. Limbo was a device to console parents. The dimension which the unquiet spirits of ballet occupy hardly reflects Christian salvation (or damnation), it is what you might call a No Man’s Land, except that it is thronged with women who in some way or other have been wronged and who draw into their sphere a passing man to avenge their wrongs.
The libretti ring a series of changes on the myth of Orpheus: they reimagine a story of descent, of passing through the veil that screens off fairyland, what is called in Greek a katabasis: Orpheus descends to bring back Eurydice from the dead and fails. Alcestis volunteers to go down into the realm of the dead in the place of her husband. She is rescue and restored to the upper air by Herakles. Persephone is abducted by Hades until her mother Demeter finds her and fetches her back from the land of the dead. All these myths haunts fairy ballets.
Giselle opens with the prince knocking on the door of her forest cottage, where she lives alone with her mother.[ix] He then plays a kind of hide and seek with her, so that as he moves, dancing around her, he personifies the freedom of movement members of his class and his sex possess. The story then tells us that she has a weak heart, and that though she loves dancing, it is dangerous for her. Her mother foresees her death: in the Peter Wright production I saw, she was presented as a pure Gammer Gertel figure out of Grimm – homely, and peasant-like, but also a woman in touch with the forest and with secret mysteries, the future, and death. Betrayal does not only crack Giselle’s heart, but her wits too. (I saw her danced by Miyako Yoshida, thistledown light and intensely, poetically yearning in the role.)
The storyline of Giselle mounts a very powerful defence of the truth of the heart’s affections: here Albrecht fits the part of Hades/Dis appearing to have his way with a figure of youth and innocence – of springtime. Unlike the myth, this story doesn’t accept his seduction as an effect of the way things are between unequals, between gods and mortals, nobles and peasants, but punishes him. Entry into the unknown realms beyond this life, where ecstasy – dance, passion – may carry you, will be punished. Orpheus naturally has attracted a myriad musical and dance interpreters – Ashton and Rambert used Gluck’s wonderful music in their ballet Leda (1958). In Orpheus, he is torn to pieces by maenads when he spurns the love of women and prefers boys – or so Ovid tells us. In Giselle, the Wilis are all jilted girls. Giselle’s swain, Hilarion, dies at their hands, while mourning at her grave; but she protects Albrecht from the Queen of the Wilis, Myrtha, so that when dawn breaks at the stroke of four, he returns to the land of the living, and the Wilis vanish.
Wilis flock on stage in a multitude – some featured dancers, but mostly a large corps de ballet – giving an effect of a teeming cemetery. Veiled, grey-white ghosts, with tiny insect wings at their waist at the back; very reminiscent of first Spiritualist images of revenants – and the dates interestingly coincide, since Giselle was first performed in 1841 in Paris.
The portrayal of the uncanny proposes an intermediate world of unquiet spirits who have been wronged, rather than sinning themselves. They cannot be laid to rest, but continue, like vampires, to haunt the living who have betrayed them – or, in the case of Hilarion, simply belong to the sex who preyed on them. Their metamorphosis into sylphs doesn’t translate them into the stars (a catasterism) or to a higher dimension or return them to the natural cycle of birth and death. They persist as disturbances, anomalies, with no home except darkness, night and death, a form of the undead.
Tchaikovsky’s beloved ballet, Swan Lake, most beloved of all Romantic creations, premiered rather disastrously in 1877; its vicissitudes should give heart to anyone who has had a horrible failure with the reception of their work. As this audience will know, the work was revised again and produced, with new choreography in 1895, and has continued to be reworked and reimagined – including with an all-male cast in Matthew Bourne’s smash hit. Ashton added to the original choreography for the Royal Ballet’s enduring and much revived production of 1952, working with Ninette de Valois on Petipa and Ivanov’s foundations.
During Tchaikovsky’s overture to Swan Lake, a scene was added in 1958 to give a back story, showing the sorcerer Von Rothbart turning Odette into a swan. No cause or aim of the metamorphosis is given; he acts out of pure motiveless malignancy, and I think the scene acknowledges the fathomless caprices of the supernatural. Or, rather, the logic imputed to the supernatural embodies our fears. By enacting them, in landscapes of mysterious darkness, we bring them into the light of day and consequently face them down. This ‘Prologue’ continued to be played until 1967 and it reappears now and then in different productions. I saw it in Tamara Rojo’s for English National Baller in 2014.
Swan Lake Act II opens ‘on a lakeside clearing in a forest by the ruins of a chapel’. It is ‘a moonlit night.’ The swans gather, all of them former victims of Rothbart’s magic. Siegfried, out hunting, shoots a swan, who turns into Odette. His action also trespasses against natural law – the aura of swans is so intense that it seems sacrilege to hunt them, and indeed in England, they have been the special preserve of the monarch. Eerie in their shining whiteness and their silence, they evoke angels, yes, but also spirits, ghosts, and wraiths, apparitions as in the title of the ballet Ashton created in 1936. Swans are the most mythopoeic of birds: the form Zeus takes to rape Leda who then gives birth to Helen of Troy from an egg – another myth which inspired Ashton to create a ballet. The metamorphosis of girls into swans – and boys too – recurs in folk tales and myths originating in countries where the birds are native, all over Europe and Russia. In Ireland, the children of Lir are turned into the birds, cursed to remain in swan shape for 900 years. In the Andersen fairy tale, The Wild Swans, and in others he wrote, restoring the protagonists to human shape drives the momentum of the story – you may remember, the sister has been cursed with muteness and sews shirts made of nettles to change her brothers back.[x] She is about to die at the stake when they come flying to the rescue, and she manages to throw her shirts over each one of them and transform them back – except one, because she hasn’t finished the sleeve and so he lives on with a swan’s wing for an arm. The bird’s exceptional beauty and grace has made them intermediate beings, corresponding to the threshold state of the enchanted lake. I wish I could stop to speak of Mallarmé’s sonnet ‘Le Cygne’, but if I continue on swans, we shall ourselves be carried away for 900 years.
Swan Lake has become, over its successive phases, more and more beloved; this takes me back to the heart of my argument tonight. The drama the work unfolds contradicts assumptions about the frivolous delights of ballet, its lightness and loveliness, romance and grace; Odile, Von Rothbart’s daughter and Odette’s diabolical double, often danced by the same dancer, is a truly alarming creation, raising fears of loss of self. The conclusion, when Von Rothbart’s powers are broken, and the swans restored to human form, offers some consolation; the music, by now so familiar, is ravishing. But the lovers die, throwing themselves into the lake. Overall, Swan Lake isn’t really a family evening for little girls who long to be ballerinas. for it takes us to strange places. Black Swan, the film made in 2010, attempted to reprise, in a psychoanalytic key, its disquieting character. Its creators were strongly influenced by the film Powell and Pressburger made in 1948, The Red Shoes.
The fairy tale that inspired the film was written by Hans Christian Andersen and published in 1845 and has enjoyed huge success ever since, inspiring artists and illustrators all over the world. Andersen was born in 1805 on an island in the Baltic in the small Danish town of Odense in conditions of brutal poverty; his mother was a washerwoman and his grandmother worked in in the local asylum; neither of them was literate or altogether ‘respectable’; his father and his stepfather were both cobblers, with many customers who stopped by to talk. Andersen’s biographers have revealed how his own torments fed the morbid punishments and humiliations in his tales – by all accounts he was a peculiar, ungainly, unlovely figure, snobbish and chippy, beset by foibles and phobias, and tending to fall passionately in love with unobtainable men and women. Significantly he cross-genders the stories’ points of identification: he projects himself as the mermaid, the match girl, and the girl who transgresses by loving her red shoes.
Andersen heard stories from his family and neighbours, and he was familiar with the Grimm Brothers’ Children’s and Household Tales, which first came out in 1812, and the bizarre, alarming stories of E.T.A. Hoffman, the originator of the Coppélia story with his tale ‘The Sandman’, which inspired Freud to define the Uncanny – tales that aren’t fit for the nursery at all. Andersen also drew on Scandinavian ballads in which witches’ gatherings were warnings against bacchanalia and sinful pleasures, like dancing feature gruesomely, as a ballad goes:
Many ride tall and red
but in the morning sick and dead.
Sir Olof he rides so far
to his wedding to offer his hand,
and the dance goes so lightly through the grove.
There dance four, and there dance five,
elfking’s daughter reaches out her hand.
“Welcome, Sir Oluf, let thy burdens go,
stay a little, and dance with me.”[xi]
Andersen relates the fairy tale in a light, breezy manner with complicit asides to his audience about human folly, but a streak of Victorian disapproval, especially of wanton girls, runs through his storytelling. In his most magical tales, however, such as ‘The Snow Queen’, love and courage triumph: Gerda valiantly overcomes ordeal after ordeal to reach Kai, and free him from the spell of the evil enchantress. The splinter of ice falls out of his eye as Gerda restores him to the human world of tenderness and roses.
Like thousands, no, millions of children, I loved Andersen’s stories: the pious endings did not repel as they do now, and the mutilations (the little mermaid’s tail split in two to make her human legs; the little Match Girl freezing to death in the street) enthralled and even excited in me a kind of perverse glee. But many adults now, like myself, find that Andersen’s mawkish piety, his mixture of sado-masochism and jocosity, and his moralizing gender expectations seep into his stories, leaving an unpleasant taste.
‘The Red Shoes’ is only a few pages long and a muddle, except for – and this is key – the decisive dance of death leading to Karen’s fate and apotheosis.[xii] Karen, a ‘delicate and charming’ young girl, goes barefoot in summer and in winter has to wear clogs which turn her ankles red- the first entry of the colour into the story. Later, red shoes appear again and again, changing from marks of shameful poverty, signs of luxury, to sinful fetters.
The hue-family of reds to purples is associated at one end of the spectrum with pleasure, luxury and sin, and no colour more so than scarlet (‘a scarlet woman’, The Scarlet Letter, Scarlett O’Hara). At the other they proclaim splendour, riches, power and prestige (the red carpet, cardinals’ crimson robes, the Red Army). Michel Pastoureau, the preeminent historian of colour, comments that ‘Red is colour incarnate… Formerly considered masculine, and strongly linked to power and war, red gradually became a feminine colour, a symbol of love and pleasure.’[xiii]
Karen wants all these connotations of redness: she’s fatally attracted to luxury (a word which originates in the Latin word for Lust, Luxuria). One day, she goes to church, wearing the forbidden red shoes, and an old soldier with a devilish long red beard (shades of Von Rothbart) leaning on a crutch by the door asks to wipe Karen’s shoe; and when ‘she stretched out her little foot… he slapped his hand on the soles’ and says, ‘Stay on tight when you dance!’[xiv]
The veteran’s words are a prophecy and a curse, and from this moment the shoes control her, and the fairy tale gathers pace. Her foster mother has fallen ill, but Karen wants to go to the great ball in town – and is away when the old woman dies. Like so many of the uncanny animate things in Andersen’s tales, the red shoes have a mind of their own and they carry off the wicked girl. Karen meets an angel, who spells out the curse: ‘Dance from door to door. And wherever proud and vain children lie, you will knock so they hear and fear you! Dance you shall, dance – !’[xv] She has become a bogey whose fate will scare children into behaving well and prevent them falling into perdition.
In her frenzy, Karen dances to the executioner’s house and asks him not to cut off her head, as she shan’t be able to repent if she has no head. Instead, he must cut off her feet. He makes her wooden feet; meanwhile the red shoes, with her severed feet still in them, keep on dancing across the fields and into the deep forest.
In 1948, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the director and screenwriter duo known as The Archers, made a film of Andersen’s fairy tale. Pressburger revisioned it as a contemporary love story set in the milieu of a ballet company masterminded by a charismatic impresario, a very grand Russian indeed, Boris Lermontov; in these bleak postwar years, the Archers were filming in sumptuous Technicolor, which they had already exploited to high octane, voluptuous effect in Black Narcissus, the year before.
Redness, like swans, like shoes, belong to the primary lexicon of fairy tales, the offspring of the logic of the imaginary, which isn’t exclusively verbal. As Michael Powell said, ‘film is essentially visual’,[xvi] and the visuals of fairy tale are couched in a primal, pre-verbal language written with the body, its limbs, nerves and internal organs, through movement, material qualities, texture, colour, sheen and sparkle. The Archers dazzlingly took up this legacy; their ambition of ‘composed film’ fused story, drama, music, movement (of the camera as well as the personae) and images. Furthermore, cinema could break through the manifest world to other worlds below, above, and beyond. The libretti of Romantic ballets frequently conjure another realm, haunted by the unquiet dead and ethereal creatures and demonic figures from pagan legends; in The Archers’ film of The Red Shoes, we glimpse Giselle, Les Sylphides and Swan Lake, all three classic works taking place in a twilit space contiguous to this world, made visible through dance; a passing scene from Coppelia also hints at automata and puppet masters. The filmmakers were intensely drawn to inhabiting these other worlds of imagination and created an original work, ‘The Ballet of the Red Shoes’, embedded at the heart of their film. Throughout, they explore, self-reflexively, the passions and processes that are necessary to achieve the spell of such spectacles, showing us from every angle how the piece came to be made, and returning to linger again and again on the shoes themselves, gleaming red like a polished apple or high gloss lipstick, trailing associations of warnings, blood, wounds, orifices. The new medium of Technicolor handed them a lustrous super-saturated palette that enhances Moira Shearer’s shining fall of red hair and pearly skin; and, with Brian Easdale’s symphonic score, they are able to convey high voltage passion – and danger.
The fairy-tale symbol of the red shoes reverberates with several much-loved stories. The Cinderella cycle revolves around the lost slipper, and in ‘Ashypet’, the Grimm Brothers’ version, the heroine’s sisters are urged by their mother to cut off their heels and cut off their toes to fit into the glass slipper.[xvii] When each of them in turn rides off with the prince, the doves warn him, ‘Turn and peep, turn and peep, / There’s blood within the shoe…’. The evil queen at the end of ‘Snow White’ dances in red hot shoes till she drops down dead. In the story of ‘The Shoes that Were Danced to Tatters’ (also known as ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’), the heroines wear out a pair of shoes every night and no one knows they have been meeting twelve princes and dancing till dawn. Interestingly, a Danish version features only one princess, who has twelve pairs of golden shoes, and she wears them out when she takes a boat each night to visit a troll to gallivant with him all night long.[xviii] Enchanted footwear – seven league boots, the Silver Shoes that Dorothy, in L. Frank Baum’s book, clicks three times to travel to Oz and back again – can carry the wearer across to other world. They resurface as ruby slippers for the 1939 Hollywood film, The Wizard of Oz, where clicking their heels together carries Dorothy back home or back to Oz – they are the key to the door of the other world. They cast a glowing shadow on the ballet pumps in the film of The Red Shoes, though these have a far less benign charge.
The film recruited stars from the dance world: Moira Shearer with her flaming hair and impeccable cool grace, and the Russian ballerina Ludmilla Tcherina. Robert Helpmann plays a dancer in Lermontov’s company, partners Shearer; in the inset ballet, Léonide Massine, choreographer and dancer with the Ballets Russes, plays an ebullient member of the company who embodies the demonic force of the red shoes. The dramatic cast features the consummately silky and seductive Anton Walbrook whose performance throughout adds intensity and menace to the highly wrought anti-fairytale the film tells. Powell and Pressburger also assembled a production team of exceptional talent for all their films and never more so than for The Red Shoes. Their principal designer, Hein Heckroth, created the scenarios and costumes for the inset Ballet and he brought in the war artist, musician and dancer Ivor Beddoes to work with him on its exceptional, hallucinatory fugue of scenes.
The Red Shoes plunges Andersen’s fairy tale into a hall of mirrors, in which the mythic story is refracted twice: the frame dramatizes the attraction between the rising star Vicky Page (Moira Shearer) and the impresario-cum-puppet master Boris Lermontov. In a clip from the beginning of the film, they meet at a party where the hostess, Vicky’s aunt wanted her to perform for Lermontov and he has contemptuously turned down this opportunity. Vicky finds him at the bar:
Boris Lermontov: Why do you want to dance?
Vicky Page: Why do you want to live?
BL: Because … I must.
VP: Exactly.
Later, a romance develops between the young composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring) and Vicky, which enrages Lermontov. Two themes from fairy tale ballet are entangled in the film; I would call them the Giselle theme, about dance as the threshold of the dangerous unknowable, and coiled inside this, the Coppélia theme about the essence of a marionette or puppet. These two strands are further tangled into a love triangle of sorts. But I am going to focus on the first, haunted theme because it grapples with the powerful, erotic energy of dance, and its roots in the search for ecstasy.
The two-ply plot is obliquely reprised, doubled and transformed in the ballet-within-the-film, which, at almost twenty minutes long, is a complete and original work in itself (a whole ballet company was created to bring it into being in a pioneering example of the new hybrid form, dance-cinema). The music for both is by Brian Easdale, who hasn’t had the attention his work deserves.
The figures in the film are strongly shadowed by the famous real-life history of the Ballets Russes: Lermontov is a take on Diaghilev and his relation to Vicky Page reverberates powerfully with Diaghilev’s love affair with Vaslav Nijinsky. Surviving drawings and photographs of Nijinsky capture his androgynous grace and beauty – it wasn’t a stretch to model a female dancer on his persona. The way Diaghilev threw Nijinsky out of the company after he learned of the young dancer/choreographer’s sudden marriage to Romola de Pulszky clearly inspired Pressburger’s screenplay: Lermontov, on hearing of their love affair, brutally casts out Julian and Vicky. As you all know, Nijinsky never danced again after the rupture with Diaghilev; he was only 24 and he disappeared into silence and schizophrenia. While Powell and Pressburger were making The Red Shoes, he was living with Romola in nearby Surrey, where they had moved the year before.
Numerous further elements in the film evoke Stravinsky and Nijinsky’s creation, Le Sacre du Printemps (1913), one of the greatest breakthrough achievements of modern primitivism: Léonide Massine who incidentally had been Diaghilev’s last lover, plays the Shoemaker in the inset ballet of the fairy tale. He had worked on the choreography of Sacre for its 1919 revival, and he brought to his part as the Shoemaker the grotesque, angular dynamism and the virtuoso high leaps of his legendary predecessor.[xix] Marie Rambert, who danced in the original performance of Sacre in Paris, and collaborated with Ashton on Leda in 1928, makes an appearance as herself at Vicky’s matinée performance of Swan Lake. Vicky’s ecstatic performance first excites Lermontov’s interest. Easdale’s score pays tribute to Stravinsky in several passages; the film’s designer Hein Heckroth, who had collaborated with the Tanztheater pioneer, Kurt Jooss, worked with the war artist Ivor Beddoes, himself a dancer and choreographer, to create a hallucinatory sequence for the passages of ‘the Girl’ through the dark side; her wild dance echoes above all, the fate of the Chosen Maiden in Sacre, prefigures the fate of Vicky Page and provides a mythic structure to the film. Incidentally Heckroth would design for Covent Garden’s production of Orfeo ed Euridice, another Ashton ballet – making a connection to the Orphic theme in The Red Shoes.
The ballet within the ballet unfolds on different planes: on the plane of reality, the Girl covets the red shoes, is given them by the devilish Massine as the Shoemaker, and then leaves home and dances off into a brightly lit fairground, where she whirls past clowns, a weightlifter, jumping jacks, shills, and a top hatted ringmaster. She dances on into a melee, spinning from partner to partner; matelots surround her; there are hints of jitterbug and cake walk. She passes lewd streetwalkers at lampposts and is swallowed up in a bacchanal of horrific daubed and masked figures, part shaman, part monster, part skeleton (chiefly Beddoes’ work).
At one point, her Lover – Helpmann – is carried off against his will by her new suitors, while she takes flight onto another plane: she is driven on, the fair empties,[xx] and the Girl finds she can’t cross the threshold into her mother’s arms. The shoemaker’s shadow falls on her, and she is compelled to dance on and on; the stage setting dissolves, the camera lifts up and away and the Girl passes into a wide, dreamscape of swirling blue backdrops. The film-ballet is now inviting us to experience her inner world.
The world then reasserts its claims: darkness thickens, and in a famous piece of illusionism, a Paper Man rises to partner her – a warning about the thirst for fame. Technically, this masterly illusion puts on full display the innovations and daring of the Powell Pressburger approach to film and to dance film in particular.
The scene dissolves again, the camera lifts and we are backstage watching Vicky back in her own story, and inside her head as she pirouettes dazzlingly on stage to Julian’s baton and Lermontov’s command. The horizon clears and unfurls Heckroth’s lyrical scene painting of flowers, birds, and summer clouds, as her Julian has urged Vicky to imagine when dancing to his music. [xxi]
The Red Shoes, like others of the duo’s films, moves ambiguously between far-fetched fairy tale fantasy and detailed documentary naturalism. It’s a telling aspect of the Powell aesthetic, I think, that the make-up is so blatant (bushy stuck-on brows for Massine; spectacular close-ups of garish red dots in the inner corners of Moira Shearer’s eyes, encircled by wild spokes and mascara’d, spiky false lashes). In Black Narcissus (1947), Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) taunts Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) by painting her lips a brilliant scarlet. Lipstick and slap are colour-coded; they spell sex, desire, beauty, the artifice of art. Vicky on stage becomes herself an artefact; she’s presented as a confection in a film that also proclaims itself an artefact, a puppet or doll, the product of skill and labour.[xxii] In The Red Shoes Powell and Pressburgerreveal what lies behind the art: dancers at the barre, sets being struck, chaperones knitting, and props inspected. The Archers act like those post-modern conjurors who don’t pretend to disguise their trickery but enthrall you with their dexterity just the same.
As is usual with the pair’s singular storytelling, the film involves us in ambiguities that after any number of viewings continue to tantalize and grip the imagination. Prominent among these questions is the conflict between ‘perfection of the art and of the life’.[xxiii] The inset Ballet represents the pinnacle of art as a highly wrought composition, but all around this collective effort, human life is asserting its claims – as rivalry and tension, and above all, as sex and love. The impresario figure wishes to be master of it all, but the drama arises from the eruption of forces that elude his grip.
Audiences had developed stronger stomachs during the war, Powell commented, after their experiences of death on the battlefields and the bombsites, but he still drew back from dramatizing Andersen’s scene of maiming Karen – instead the cobbler’s knife turns into a flowering twig in her hand – a moment of reparative magic. She then begs for the red shoes to be unfastened in a gesture which is reprised in the film’s closing scene when Vicky Page, impelled by the red shoes, throws herself off the parapet onto the railway tracks below, and asks her husband, with her dying wish, to unlace the fatal shoes.
With The Red Shoes, Powell and Pressburger found in dance a supreme medium to reprise, in a different, tragic key, the struggle with primal forces. It’s significant that the ballet performed at the very beginning of the film is called Hearts of Fire (more red). Andersen, who had such mixed-up feelings about sex, avoids facing up to the erotic, but for Powell and Pressburger, it’s the beating heart of the matter, which they approach through this extraordinary tour de force of innovative ballet-on-film. As Ian Christie made clear when he chose Arrows of Desire for the title of his splendid 1985 book about their work, the erotic lies at the centre of the Archers’ search for meaning. For ‘The Ballet of The Red Shoes’, Pressburger boldly condensed his source material to stress the conflict between art and life – utter dedication to dance against love, marriage and motherhood.
In Andersen’s fairy tale, Karen is violently punished for her love of pleasure and, it is implied, the delirium of sensual rapture dance brings. The film of The Red Shoes dramatizes this theme both in the inset ballet of the fairy tale and the film’s dramatic plot but does away with the puritanical condemnation. In Pressburger’s screenplay, Lermontov thinks he has prevailed over Vicky and seen off her husband’s claims. He’s triumphant that she has chosen art. His devastation, intensely conveyed by Walbrook when he tells the audience that she will not dance that night nor ever again, feels utterly genuine. Ultimately, his mastery was not powerful enough.
But the tug of war between them isn’t the primary meaning of the film. The shoes embody a wilder, deeper, Dionysiac energy that impels dance itself. She’s maddened to the point of self-destruction by the overwhelming, impersonal power of this life force, which Lermontov recognizes in her when he meets her for the first time and asks her, ‘Why do you want to dance?’ and she replies, ‘Why do you want to live?’ But Lermontov’s – and Balanchine’s – conception of dance demands that this force be channelled and disciplined and contained for the purposes of art. As Pressburger commented, his films ‘deal with what is going to happen to the human values – not to the human beings themselves.’[xxiv] The struggle in The Red Shoes lies between the yoke of love-in-marriage (Julian), the exactions of art (Lermontov), and the pull of wild pagan ecstasy, the zone of pleasure and sexuality; in other words, dancing subsumes Vicky’s being and supersedes all her emotional relations with others.[xxv]
As with Giselle, Odette in Swan Lake, and the Chosen Maiden in The Rite of Spring, Vicky Page is an offering to the powers below. The Archers’ films often reach sweet-tempered resolutions, but The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus are ferocious dramas about Dionysiac fury taking possession of a woman.
Yet the discipline of ballet is Apollonian; it checks and constrains the wilder currents in the impulse to dance.[xxvi]
Their film has inspired many young people to long to dance and many writers and performers to create works in response (the team who made Black Swan, the singer Kate Bush, Matthew Bourne and others – a glance at the web reveals tributes from the world over, many revelling in the grue.)[xxvii] This attraction doesn’t seem to cohere with the ostensible message, that dancing is enslavement and madness and will be punished. For some, the complex seduction of sado-masochism may intensify the pull, as Anne Sexton wryly recognizes in one of her bitter Transformations: ‘All those girls/who wore the red shoes… all danced like trout on the hook…’ [xxviii]
The film embodies the mysterious power of dance as self-control and self-abandonment at once, as self-expression taken to the point where it may explode and dissolve the self. The scene on stage and screen stands in for those dangerous and forbidden – and to many, unreachable – dimensions of experience and take us there without us having to cut off our feet or hurl ourselves down in front of a train. Frederick Ashton’s love of exquisite grace, which he found in Fonteyn and many others, aimed at Apollonian harmony and beauty, but he recognized the dangers that Orpheus met when he descended into the Underworld and the frenzy of the Bacchantes.
Ballet as he shaped it and as Powell and Pressburger filmed it gives us, the audience, knowledge that initiates us to mysteries and in doing so protects us. We are exhilarated, enchanted, given a taste of ecstasy – but all by proxy, safely transported to another world. Dancers take us there and bring us back.
Dame Marina Warner CH, DBE
Click here for footnotes
[i] George Seferis Collected Poems (1969) p 279, quoted in Richard Berengarten, on Dubravka Ugrešic, unpublished.
[ii] Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (New York: Random House, 2010), and idem., Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022)
[iii] I discuss several Cinderella variants in my book From the beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Chatto & Windus, l994), pp. 201 ff.
[iv] Hamlet, III.ii.20-22
[v] See Ruth Padel, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
[vi] Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, intro by Marina Warner (New York: New York Review of Books,2007), p.5-6
[vii] ‘One of Nicolas Lancret’s most original creations, the picture marks a new departure in his art, as well as in portraiture and the depiction of dance. Marie Anne de Cupis de Camargo (1710–1770) was the first great virtuoso ballerina of the Paris Opera. Lancret convinces the viewer of the theatrical veracity of the image through the observation of details such as the dress and ballet position à demi-pointe. The scene is set in the sylvan park landscape of a fête galante. More than a theatrical backdrop, this setting lends the subject a poetic quality, which evokes the ephemeral charm of Mademoiselle de Camargo’s talent. https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/mademoiselle-de-camargo-dancing-209414. Accessed June 14 2023
[viii] The Scottish balladeer Helen Adam invokes fairyland as ‘the Land of Null’ in one of her very eerie poems, The Bells of Dis (Could the pallor of spirits and fairies follow from their concealment from the light? Like asparagus kept in the dark to blanch them?)
[ix] I was taken by Ismene Brown on 27 July 2000 to a matinée at the ROH to see Peter Wright’s production, designed by John F. MacFarlane.
[x] The Fairy Tales Hans Christian Andersen, ed. Jackie Wullschlager, trans. Tiina Nunnally (London: Penguin, 2004), 107-121?
[xi] Peder Syv (ed.), Et Hundrede udvalde Danske Viser … forøgede med det andet Hundrede Viser (Copenhagen, 1695), no. 87; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elveskud#cite_ref-12
[xii] The Fairy Tales Hans Christian Andersen, ed. Jackie Wullschlager, trans. Tiina Nunnally (London: Penguin, 2004), 207-212.
[xiii] Michel Pastoureau, Chroma (London: Thames and Hudson, 2010), p.15.
[xiv] The old woman, Karen’s patron, gives him a coin for his pains – in utter contradiction of her previous opposition to the shoes. This is one of the many inconsistencies in the story as written.
[xv] The Fairy Tales Hans Christian Andersen, ed. Jackie Wullschlager, trans. Tiina Nunnally (London: Penguin, 2004), 207-212:210
[xvi] Michael Powell – A Life in Movie [RADIO], BBC Meridian, dir. Bryan Forbes, pres. Frank Delaney, 4 November l986. Available online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03m0qfm
[xvii] I discuss Cinderella variants in my book From the beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Chatto & Windus, l994), pp. 201 ff.
[xviii] ‘The Princess with the Twelve Pairs of Golden Shoes’, The Danish Fairy Book, ed. Clara Stroebe, trans. Frederick H. Martens (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1922), 135-42. Digitised by the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/danishfairybook00stro. Accessed 4 June 2020.
[xix] Sue Jones comments that Heckroth may have seen ‘Massine’s 30s/40s ballets – highly influenced by surrealism (Bacchanale (1939), or Labyrinth (1941), which had fantastic swirling designs by Dalí; Masson’s designs for Massine’s Les Presages (1933), Miró’s for his Jeux d’enfants (1932). You can likewise see the filmic influences on many of the sets of contemporary ballets of this time. Helpmann’s Hamlet (1942) had this kind of surrealist backdrop by Leslie Hurry.’
[xx] Sue Jones: Yes – this is the bit that makes me think there’s a pageant here of Ballets Russes themes – and an echo of the Petrouchka crowd scene … the emptying of the fair and the switch to behind-the scenes puppets’ boxes.
[xxi] Sue Jones: Yes – this is the nub of it – extraordinary how the ballet-within film/ballet as film/ballet and film works so well (in spite of the creaks you mention) and really shows the innovation of the interaction of these media at this particular moment in time – especially post-war etc…
[xxii] As in A Canterbury Tale (1944), the camera unfolds traditional, local craftsmen and women at work (wheelwrights, bellringers, carthorse drivers, magic lanternists).
[xxiii] W.B. Yeats, ‘The Choice’, W. B. Yeats: Selected Poetry: 153, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Macmillan, 1968).
[xxiv] Desert Island Discs (1980) [RADIO], “Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger”, BBC Radio 4, 20 September. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p009mvw8
[xxv] See Susan Jones, ‘Eliot and Dance’ in The Edinburgh Companion to T.S. Eliot and the Arts’, eds., Frances Dickey and John D. Morgenstern Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 225-242: 231-234. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1bh2kwt.25
[xxvi] In the novelization Powell and Pressburger wrote thirty years later, they bring out this underlying theme: ‘She [Vicky] stared at [Julian], keyed up for the performance, obsessed and unapproachable, like one of the Greek maenads who tore Orpheus to pieces. …. It almost seemed as if the red shoes glowed as he went out of the door.’ Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Red Shoes (1978; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), 274. My emphasis.
[xxvii] Kate Bush wrote songs for her album The Red Shoes in 2018; she identifies strongly with Karen/the Girl/Vicky Page and brings out the erotic charge of the Archers’ film: the cover image shows a foot en pointe in scarlet ballet pumps (and laddered tights) against a background of crashing waves, while the inside flaps spread a banquet of juicy fruits, as if by the goblins of Goblin Market, to illustrate the song, ‘Eat the Music’.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Shoes_(album); Matthew Bourne devised a musical based on the film in 2016, repeated at Sadler’s Wells in December 2019-January 2020, just before the first lockdown: https://www.sadlerswells.com/whats-on/2019/matthew-bournes-production-of-the-red-shoes-new-adventures/; see also The Red Shoes (2005), directed by Kim Yong-Gyun, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Shoes_(2005_film); amd Alexis Amann’s illustrations: https://www.behance.net/gallery/73910151/The-Red-Shoes-HC-Andersen
[xxviii] Anne Sexton, ‘The Red Shoes’, in Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), pp. 315-7: 316.