Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Royal Ballet battle for the heart of English dance

English ballet erupted out of the second world war in the hands of the rival choreographers Frederick Ashton and Robert Helpmann, colleagues but of different instincts, one for dance, the other for drama. The case is currently being made for each by the Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet.

But how to revive the sensations and imaginings of the 1940s? It was long before most of us were even born, and more than any other art form ballet is dependent on evoking memory, atmospheres, intangible associations. Ashton, who emerged as the creative giant of the Royal Ballet’s nurturing, has recently been as out of fashion as furs and cocktail parties. He’s a choreographer of period, atmosphere so densely and excitingly sealed in its own mystery, its special references, that the dancers become our decoders, the experts with the key to the treasure, nowhere more crucially than in his two supreme masterpieces, 1946’s Symphonic Variations and 1948’s Scènes de ballet.

As the current Manon run is showing, today’s Royal Ballet is far more sure-footed with Kenneth MacMillan’s big emotions than Ashton’s Mozartian exactness. And yet his precision, elegance and bravura, his text, blaze through even indifferent, uncomprehending performances, as we had too much of on the first two nights. The opening go at Scènes de ballet, and the second night’s Symphonic Variations, shouldn’t have left the rehearsal studio in that state. It’s not my fallible memory that tells me that, it’s the text.

Lines falling apart everywhere in Scènes undermined the ballet’s basic graphic quality, which is its mesmerising Euclidean geometry, the 18 dancers designed to be watched (Cunningham-like) from all angles. Without that spatial precision, whipped along by Stravinsky’s syncopated music, all the atmospheric deliciousness — the midnight mystery, the peerlessly chic ice-blue tutus and sexy berets and pearls, the surreal ruins and Ashton’s cool daring in punctuating the geometric lines with explosions of technical tricks — all of this goes by as nothing.