Sex on legs

That joke about the young bull who tells the old bull, ‘Hey, Dad, see all those cows — let’s run and get one of them,’ and the old one replies, ‘Let’s walk and we can have the lot,’ is of course far too politically incorrect to tell these days. But it did creep into my mind last week watching Birmingham Royal Ballet’s double bill of Frederick Ashton’s masterworks, The Dream and A Month in the Country.

He’s the old bull, and after the Duracell rogering in Christopher Wheeldon’s Strapless the other week, the serene, sly, ceaselessly sensuous way Ashton seduces you in those ballets, with choreography that never stoops to representing sex itself, comes like a caress after a grunt.

I say ‘stoops to representing sex’ not because I think doing so is low — Kenneth MacMillan was a genius at it, choreographing some viscerally exciting sex scenes, as well as some scarily abusive ones (see the imminent The Invitation at Covent Garden in May) — but because, as someone else said, dance is the vertical expression of the horizontal, and Wheeldon was far, far too horizontal. Using choreography to spell out full sex between two people wearing tights, breeches, leotards and jockstraps is somewhat laughable. Split and splayed legs, bump and grind, changing position every ten seconds. You can’t empathise with it.

Smart choreographers such as Ashton and MacMillan make the moves represent sexy feelings, not actions, the arc of desire, mining the foreplay of frisson and hopefulness, exploiting the rising ardour in increasingly risky moves, a superbly climactic orgasmic high (for both, happily, or one, tragically), then descending in tenderness or hatred. Then the audience’s juices or tears will flow.

The Dream, Ashton’s Shakespearean hour to Mendelssohn’s magical music, is soaked in sex.