La Fille mal gardée (from French: The Wayward Daughter, literal translation: "The Poorly Guarded Girl" and also known as The Girl Who Needed Watching) is a comic ballet presented in two acts, inspired by Pierre-Antoine Baudouin's 1765 painting, La réprimande/Une jeune fille querellée par sa mère.[1] The ballet was originally choreographed by the Ballet Master Jean Dauberval to a pastiche of music based on fifty-five popular French airs. The ballet was premiered on 1 July 1789 at the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux in Bordeaux, France under the title Le ballet de la paille, ou Il n'est qu'un pas du mal au bien (The Ballet of Straw, or There is Only One Step from Bad to Good).
Source: wikipedia
People who actually know something about Fille‘s history will point out that its familiar form, with the spanking scene in the first act, was created and choreographed by Frederick Ashton in 1960. That was, obviously, relatively late in the ballet’s lifespan, when it was already 171 years old – an age the Ashton version will not attain until the year 2131, when none of us will be around to see it. But even so, it has a pedigree back to very early times: Ashton’s starting-point was a French scenario for an 1803 production, which he found in the British Museum. It’s worth looking at two key moments in this old document, in order to see how he amended and modeled them in creating the ballet we now know and love.
First, Lise is caught by her mother being wooed by Colas, and excuses herself with the story that she only came out to see what was going on, and wound up getting kissed against her will. Says the scenario:
‘Simone does not believe a word, gives her a few slaps for this untruth and forbids her to go out.’
And though the 1803 document doesn’t say what part of Lise is getting slapped, that is in essence the moment that in Ashton’s hands became the smacking.
There are ‘further reproaches’ and ‘more threats’ from Simone as we go into the butter-churning sequence, followed by the pas de deux with Colas and the arrival of the friends to tempt Lise away from her chores. And then:
‘Simone appears, muttering, and drives the girls away. They make their escape, laughing. Lise anticipates her mother’s reproaches by explaining that it was the girls who prevented her from doing her allotted task. The old woman refuses to believe this excuse and raises her fist to strike her. At that moment Thomas arrives, followed by his son Alain.’
And as we know, Ashton brilliantly removed the brutality of the fist by turning it into the flat of the maternal hand
Source: https://mainstreamspanking.wordpress.com
