Name: An introduction to Frederick Ashton's La Fille mal gardée (The Royal Ballet)
Uploaded: 2025-09-06T13:59:39.000Z
Duration: 12 min 6 s
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Welcome to this evening's performance by the Royal Ballet.

You're about to watch a classic tale about a little village romance, Le Femme Agade.

And although it's technically challenging, it's very light-hearted.

You get to have fun with each other on stage.

You feel like everyone's out there together.

It's a painted set, but it still looks amazing.

We have a real-life pony that comes on stage, called Peregrine.

His father used to be the pony before, and so it's a family tradition for him as well.

I think the choreography for Fee is the most brilliant choreography.

It's got the ribbons, the complicated patterns.

It's got the lines of the corps de ballet.

There exists in my imagination a life in the country of eternally late spring, a leafy pastoral of perpetual sunshine and the humming of bees, the suspended stillness of a constable landscape of my beloved Suffolk.

It was the English countryside that gave Sir Fred the inspiration for the setting of Le Femme Legate, was at the Royal Opera House on the 28th of January, 1960.

She has eight premieres that can ever have happened here.

I think we all thought the roof would go off.

Le Femme Legate was originally performed on the eve of the French Revolution in Bordeaux, so that was 1789.

The story is enchanting, and I think people wanted to bring it into the repertoire of their companies, and Fred was persuaded to do it by Tamara Kasavina, a famous Russian ballerina who danced with the Diaghilev Ballet.

She was someone Sir Fred admired enormously.

She talked about how much she'd enjoyed dancing the role of Lise in St.

He had a home in Suffolk, but I think he drew on his love of all things English, and so he created a romance, a comedy, and something essentially English.

But it's the charm and the range of dance styles that he incorporates in the ballet that makes it a classic.

Sir Frederick Ashton was the founder choreographer of the company, so he's a huge part of what the dancers around the world want to perform.

He really did create an image for the company, so it's very important what his work means to all of us.

Sir Fred was inspired by many different styles of dance.

In this ballet, he combined the traditional folk dances with classical ballet, which has given La Fille Malgarde a very English feel.

On this production of La Fille, I've just been rehearsing the principal couple, which I've enjoyed very much, Stephen and Roberta, who love dancing with each other.

The ribbon, it's a lover's knot, really, isn't it?

It's just Fred's way of being romantic, completely romantic man, understands love, and he just wanted to tie them up in pink ribbon.

In act one, we do a pas de deux, and we had to do so many things with the ribbon.

Roberta had already performed the ballet previously, so she was able to guide me a lot.

The pas de deux with the ribbon is very tricky.

The more you do it, you get your own way of dealing with the ribbon.

But trying to learn it for the first time seems like you're never going to get it.

They find their own way, and then it works very well.

Sir Frederick would have been investigating different dance styles.

Clock dancing intrigued him and amused him.

It's the delicious way that he weaves these different styles into the classical steps as well that is such fun and makes it so unique.

Folk dancing is part of the Englishness of the ballet, but they're still dancing with the classical technique.

Even though there's a lot of skipping, but in natural fact, when one is a child, that's how you begin your classical ballet training with a lot of skipping.

Dame Lynette de Valois introduced traditional country dancing to the curriculum at the Junior Royal Ballet School many, many years ago, and it's continued to this day.

She encouraged all her choreographers to look to country dancing, and she must have been very thrilled with what Fred came up with.

We learnt folk dancing at White Lodge, Royal Ballet Lower School, where you go from 11 to 16.

We did Morse dancing, country line dancing, Northumberland, Rappersword dance.

The clog dance came from a Lancashire town from the north.

Stanley Alden, who was the original Widow Simone, he was a huffer, a tap dancer really, and my first teacher at White Lodge, Ronald Emblom, played Widow Simone for a long time.

I can remember seeing him, and it's something I've always wanted to do.

I was a tap dancer before I went to White Lodge.

I hadn't done much ballet, so the tap dancing actually helped me with the clog dance.

It's always one of those numbers that you want to do someday, and it's also one of those numbers that looks much easier than it is.

It's quite an honour to do something like the clog dance.

It's a reminder of how steeped in history this ballet really is, and how lucky we are to be doing it.

At the end of each ballet, we're supposed to give the shoes back.

These are special for me because they're my first dance teacher at White Lodge.

I'll keep these until I stop doing the role, and then I'll hopefully pass them on to someone else.

The majority of aspiring students will be doing stuff like this for the bulk of their career, and it's something you can be very proud of.

You don't have to be the best of the best of the best.

You can be the best you can be, which for me is this.