In 1960, Frederick Ashton decided to re-create an old ballet from 1789, a comic two-act work by Jean Dauberval. He later wrote, “At the time I was reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals and I was swept by a longing for the country of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: the country of today seems a poor noisy thing by comparison.” He envisioned a place of “eternally late spring, a leafy pastorale of perpetual sunshine and the humming of bees.” The ballet is La Fille mal Gardée (The Poorly Guarded Girl) and it tells the story of Lise, whose mother wants her to marry a rich simpleton even though she is in love with Colas. This witty ballet is also ineffably lyrical. As David Vaughan wrote in his book on Ashton, “Perhaps the greatest of all Ashton’s inspirations was to take the motif of the ribbon … and extend its use through the whole of the action until it becomes one of the most resonant metaphors in the whole of ballet.” Companies the world over perform Ashton’s masterpiece of delight, but this spring you can see it done by the company it was made for, complete with Osbert Lancaster’s colorful designs. —Laura Jacobs