Archives for March 18, 2020

Frederick Ashton dances the mime role of Carabosse in Ninette De Valois’s production of Marius Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty, performed by London’s Sadler’s Wells Ballet (now the Royal Ballet). The score is by Tchaikovsky. The performance, directed for TV by Clark Jones, originally aired as part of NBC’s Producer’s Showcase series of TV specials. It was telecast in color on December 12, 1955, but this black-and-white kinescope is the only known filmed record:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“In public life it is sometimes necessary to appear really natural to be actually artificial.”

Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge