Les Patineurs (ballet)

The ballet, in one act, depicts a Victorian skating party that takes place on a frozen pond on a winter's evening. A semicircle of arched trellises painted white separates the pond from the snowy woods behind. Suspended above are colourful Chinese lanterns, shedding light on the white canvas stage covering, simulating ice, and dimly illuminating the dark trees silhouetted against the starry night sky. The first skaters to enter are four couples dressed in matching brown jackets. They are soon joined by others: two girls wearing blue jackets and bonnets, two girls wearing red jackets and bonnets, a girl and boy dressed all in white, and a lone boy wearing blue. This happy group of young people dance together in various combinations, gliding and leaping and spinning across the ice until snow begins to fall and the single boy is finally left alone, whirling like a top in the middle of the pond.

With a cast of only fifteen, Les Patineurs is a ballet in divertissement form rather than a story ballet: the dances simply proceed in sequence from beginning to end, with no narrative development. At the premiere, the principal dancers, the White Couple, were Margot Fonteyn and Robert Helpmann. The Blue Girls were Mary Honer and Elizabeth Miller; the Red Girls were June Brae and Pamela May; and Harold Turner was the Blue Boy, the virtuoso soloist in the group. The Brown Girls were Gwenyth Matthews, Joy Newton, Peggy Mellus, and Wenda Horsburgh, who were partnered by Richard Ellis, Leslie Edwards, Michael Somes, and Paul Raymond as the Brown Boys.^[3]

The sequence of the divertissements, which takes about twenty-five minutes to perform, is as follows: entrée and pas de huit (Brown Couples), pas de patineurs (Blue Girls and Brown Couples), pas seul (Blue Boy), pas de deux (White Couple), ensemble, de suite par groupe (entire cast), pas de trois (Blue Boy and Blue Girls), pas de deux filles (Red Girls), pas de six (Brown Boys and Red Girls), pas de deux filles (Blue Girls), and finale (entire cast).

Despite the presence of Fonteyn and Helpmann in the romantic pas de deux for the White Couple, the true star of the ballet was Harold Turner as the Blue Boy. Ashton's main aim in creating Les Patineurs was to create a dazzling showpiece that would rival the popularity of works presented in London by Colonel de Basil's Ballets Russes the previous summer. In Turner, he had an unusually gifted dancer, and he took full advantage of his technical prowess. The Blue Boy is an exceptionally difficult role to perform, and the Blue Girls hardly less so. Further, the Brown Boys are given choreography more usually performed by soloists than members of the corps de ballet, as their bounding, buoyant dances require considerable elevation and stamina.