A ballet of pure sunshine. Escape to the countryside with Frederick Ashton’s ballet about a capricious girl who hopes to marry her love. Brimming with humour and choreographic invention, La Fille mal gardée is the perfect ballet for all the family. 

Lise is the only daughter of Widow Simone, the owner of a prosperous farm. She is in love with the young farmer Colas, but her mother has higher ambitions for her, hoping to marry her off to Alain, the son of the wealthy proprietor Thomas. Desperate to marry Colas rather than Alain, Lise contrives to outwit her mother’s plans.

A love letter to the English countryside  

When La Fille mal gardée premiered in Covent Garden on 28 January 1960, it instantly won all hearts. Inspired by Jean Dauberval’s French ballet, Ashton’s version combines exuberant good humour and an affectionate portrayal of village life. The Royal Ballet’s Founder Choreographer, Ashton hoped to capture the ‘leafy pastoral of perpetual sunshine...the suspended stillness of a Constable landscape of my beloved Suffolk, luminous and calm’. Osbert Lancaster’s colourful designs bring the charm of the countryside to life.  

Ashton’s choreographic brilliance  

Testament to Ashton’s boundless creative invention, the ballet is constructed like a brilliantly complex piece of clockwork with technically demanding choreography that stretches the world’s best dancers. Ashton made full use of the technical talents of his original cast – Nadia Nerina and David Blair – and this is reflected in the virtuosity of much of the ballet’s choreography: multiple pirouettes, grand lifts and fleet footwork. Highlights include the pas de ruban (ribbon dance), where Lise and Colas dance together, their bodies intertwined by a ribbon – a symbol of their tender love. In order to evoke the bliss of the rustic countryside, Ashton also included elements of national folk dance – from maypole dancing to a Lancashire clog dance for Widow Simone.

In 1959, the choreographer Frederick Ashton began creating a completely new version of La Fille mal gardée for the Royal Ballet of London. This production premiered on 28 January 1960, with the ballerina Nadia Nerina as Lise, David Blair as Colas, Stanley Holden as the Widow Simone, and Alexander Grant as Alen. Since its inception Ashton's staging has become a celebrated classic of the ballet repertory.

Ashton created what is considered to be among his most masterful choreography for his new version of La Fille mal gardée. He resurrected the Pas de ruban for Lise and Colas, in which the lovers perform a charming pas with intricate tricks using a pink satin ribbon. Ashton took this idea to an entirely new level with the Fanny Elssler pas de deux, devising a spectacular Grand adage for Lise, Colas and eight women with eight ribbons. Ashton also included Petipa's original mimed sequence known as When I'm Married, a passage that was performed by all of the great ballerinas of old when they danced the role of Lise. He was taught this passage by Tamara Karsavina, former Ballerina of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres and the Original Ballet Russe. She had in turn learned it from her teacher Pavel Gerdt, once the Imperial Ballet's leading male dancer who partnered all of the great ballerinas of the late 19th century and early 20th century in the role of Lise, including Virginia Zucchi.

Ashton's 1960 version of La Fille mal gardée has been staged for many companies throughout the world and has become the more or less "traditional" version, replacing the productions derived from the Petipa/Ivanov/Gorsky versions danced in Russia to the music of Hertel. Among such companies are the Bolshoi Ballet (2002), and American Ballet Theatre (2004). In spite of this, the famous La Fille mal gardée pas de deux, which is taken from the Petipa/Ivanov/Gorsky versions of the ballet, is still performed with regularity as a gala excerpt, and is often used by various young dancer on the ballet competition circuit.