Sir frederick ashton biography of abraham

It's easy to forget that Frederick Ashton, founding genius of English ballet, was originally South American. The youngest of four boys, he was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador on 17 September l904, and brought up in Lima, Peru where his sister was born. Ashton's father, a businessman and vice-consul, was British, and so was his mother, who introduced her impressionable son to the airs and graces of belle epoque Lima. Images from childhood - the languorous sensuality of tango dancers at colonial tea dances, the swaying, ritualized walk of feast day processions - stayed with Ashton, infiltrating his choreography. His Roman Catholic schooling also found expression in his ballets. The ceremony and mystical potency of high mass influenced his timing of effects and climaxes, while the ecstatic, baroque indulgence of Spanish religion is obliquely sublimated in Symphonic Variations, his greatest and most life-affirming work. More crucially, it was