One of the great wonders of dance is how much it can pack into a short amount of time and how many layers of meaning can co-exist.

Frederick Ashton’s highly distilled, vastly enjoyable version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is done and dusted in less than an hour. The tragedy Marguerite and Armand, inspired by the semi-autobiographical novel La dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, is over in 40 minutes. In neither case do you feel short-changed, such is the richness of Ashton’s imagination.

Early on, Ashton was entranced by Anna Pavlova, whose electrifying presence seemed to alter the air around her. He called Pavlova “the greatest theatrical genius” he had ever seen. Not dance genius, theatrical genius. As for the ground-breaking Isadora Duncan,  “I suppose she was the first person to interpret music,” he said. “Others danced it.”

Much later Margot Fonteyn, who started working with Ashton when she was only 15 and was dancing Marguerite and Armand into her 50s, said: “I always felt that Fred was seeing Pavlova and that I wasn’t living up to her by any means.”

These dance pioneers – including Fonteyn – had a lasting effect on Ashton’s work. Personal allure, musicality, dramatic expressiveness and...