LILAC GARDEN (Jardin aux Lilas)

Choreography & Libretto: Antony Tudor
Music: Ernest Chausson Poeme for Violin & Orchestra
Design: Hugh Stevenson

Premiered 21 January 1936 by Ballet Rambert at Mercury Theatre, London

When Tudor proved his choreographic credentials beyond all doubt with his sixth ballet Jardin aux Lilas, he had served seven years as general assistant to Marie Rambert's Ballet Club (the emerging Ballet Rambert). Rambert had taken him on in 1928, an eager, ballet-struck, working-class 19-year-old with a day job as a clerk at London's Smithfield Meat Market. He had danced, stage managed, taught the younger dancers, played piano, done whatever the company demanded, and learned his trade the hard way.

The young choreographer worked with his costume designer Hugh Stevenson to develop a straightforward but emotionally and atmospherically potent plot, which has been compared to a short story by the French master Guy De Maupassant, set to music by another late nineteenth century French master, Ernest Chausson.

Tudor's protagonist Caroline attends a lilac-scented party on the eve of her marriage of convenience to "The Man She Must Marry", where the guests include "Her Lover" and the other woman, who, unknown to her, has been "An Episode in His Past", from whom he is also parting. This unhappy quartet passes among the guests in a series of brief encounters and interrupted confidences, culminating in Caroline's departure on the arm of her betrothed without having satisfied her desperate longing for a farewell kiss from the man she has loved and lost.

The ballet is at the same time fragrantly elegant and psychologically powerful, its turbulent emotional undercurrents expressed with economy and skill, in touched hands, lifts and lines, as its quartet of crossed lovers weave their passions and frustrations through the formal patterns of a social occasion.

Tudor always eschewed flashy technical displays in favour of a deeply felt human and psychological truth, building on what he had learned from his acknowledged master Mikhail Fokine. Perhaps his preference for dance drama and the human condition, rather than the then-fashionable classical "box of tricks" arose from being a passionately committed latecomer to ballet.

The Ballet Rambert premiere was danced by Tudor himself, his long-time partner Hugh Laing, Maude Lloyd and Agnes de Mille.

As Baryshnikov so clearly put it, "We do Tudor's ballets because we must. Tudor's work is our conscience".
©Tim Tubbs