Sarasota Ballet tries to catch Ashton's 'Wedding Bouquet'

Gertrude Stein wrote, “A rose is a rose is a rose,” but is it also true that “a ballet is a ballet is a ballet”? If she were still alive, we would ask Stein, a literary lion of the 20th century known for her love of word play.

Stein wrote the libretto for Sir Frederick Ashton’s “The Wedding Bouquet,” which the Sarasota Ballet performs April 25-26 at the Sarasota Opera House. Under Executive Director Iain Webb and his wife, Assistant Director Margaret Barbieri, the Sarasota Ballet has championed the works of Ashton, whose ballets they both danced during their careers in the U.K.

Writing the text for a ballet would not have been on our bingo card of Stein’s accomplishments, but “The Wedding Bouquet” is full of surprises. We won’t tell you all of them, though. No spoilers here.

But we’ll give you a snippet from The New York Times review of a 1989 production by The Royal Ballet. The Grey Lady called the 1937 ballet “a mad stew of marriages of convenience, gossiping women, sour old love affairs, tipsiness and sexual ambiguities, with a good deal of wild sadness below the surface.” Sounds fun.

“The Wedding Bouquet” was choreographed by Ashton, England’s answer to George Balanchine, during the relatively carefree period between the two World Wars. Perhaps best memorialized by Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited,” it was a heady period of creative cross-pollination and wild weekend house parties.

Lord Berners, a friend of Ashton’s, composed the score and was also responsible for the scenario, costumes and set design of “The Wedding Bouquet.”

It was Berners, known as Gerald Hugh-Tyrwitt Wilson before he inherited his title, who suggested that Ashton create a ballet based on Stein’s play, “They Must Be Wedded. To Their Wife.” Berners composed the score and was also responsible for the scenario, costumes and set design.

Stein was one of the literary giants who assembled in Paris during the 1920s that included Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and others who made Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Co. bookstore their gathering place.

Berners invited Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, to England to work on “The Wedding Bouquet.” The creative collaborators came together at Berners’ ancestral home, Faringdon, the inspiration for the estate Merlinford in Nancy Mitford’s “The Pursuit of Love.”

The ballet skewered the pretensions of the aristocracy, of which Berners was a member, as well as those trying to climb the social ladder. However, it was set in France, notes Barry Wordsworth, narrator for the ballet.

Two titans of English dance

“Do you read music?” Wordsworth asks during an interview as he spreads out the score for “The Wedding Bouquet” on a table, with the words he will recite written above the musical alphabet used for the score.

Unfortunately the answer is no, which seems to take Wordsworth off guard. Before he can explain his musical pedigree, Grant Coyle, who is staging the production for the Sarasota Ballet, interjects, “Actually, Barry is quite famous.”

Indeed he is. Wordsworth was the music director of The Royal Ballet from 1990-95 and again from 2007-15. Today, he is the principal guest conductor of The Royal Ballet, which hosted the Sarasota Ballet for its triumphant guest residency in London during the Ashton Celebrated festival in June 2024.

Photo by Monica Roman Gagnier

Coyle is what is known as a “repetiteur,” a French word whose origins are the same as the English word “repeat.” In other words, Coyle is enlisted by ballet companies to help them replicate the works of choreographers no longer around.

He is also a practitioner of the Benesh system, the dance world’s version of stenography. The visual notation system was developed by Joan and Rudolf Benesh in the1950s, before video allowed dance companies to record the movements in a ballet. Some of the notations in Coyle’s book almost look architectural because they show the placement of company members on stage.

A native of Australia, Coyle trained at the Institute of Choreology in London, graduating in 1978. After that, he worked as a dance notator with The Scottish Ballet and the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet before becoming the principal dance notator for The Royal Ballet in 1987. He left in 2013 to become a freelancer.

This is the second time Wordsworth and Coyle, whom Webb knows from his career as an English dancer, have come to Sarasota to perform their respective roles in “The Wedding Bouquet.” The last time was in 2016, which marked the Sarasota Ballet’s premiere of the ballet. The company hasn’t performed it since then.

Pressed for what those in the British ballet world think about the Sarasota Ballet becoming the guardians of Ashton’s works, Wordsworth said, “Some people think The Royal Ballet should perform more Ashton.”

Over the years, Ashton’s reputation was eclipsed by Sir Kenneth MacMillan, who succeeded him as director of the Royal Ballet in 1971, and MacMillan’s works took center stage.

In Ashton’s “The Wedding Bouquet,” set at the turn of the century, one of the main characters is Julia, who plays a woman cast off by the groom. She is “ruined,” according to the moral code of the era, and is teetering on the verge of insanity.

No one ever questions why Julia would attend her defiler’s nuptials, but she’s not the only one of the groom’s former paramours in attendance. There’s lots of drunkenness and dancing at the raucous celebration. This makes for a lively ballet that requires acting chops by the dancers, even if Wordsworth’s narration is letting the audience in on various secrets.

Are balletomanes (a word dropped with casual elegance by Coyle) surprised to hear words spoken at a ballet? According to Coyle and Wordsworth, most will have done their homework and know “The Wedding Bouquet” has theatrical elements, so the narration is not a shock.

Adding a comedic element to “The Wedding Bouquet” is Julia’s dog Pepe, named for Stein’s Mexican terrier. Played by a younger dancer, Pepe acts as a surrogate of sorts for his mistress.

Long before Americans began bringing their “fur babies” everywhere, the French were devoted to their pets. It would not have been strange to see a dog at a French wedding in 1900, or perhaps even today. Still, Pepe makes a case for leash laws by acting out Julia’s miserable state of mind. Woof!

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the performance dates.