The Royal Danish Ballet is performing at Kennedy Center, Washington DC, January 13-18, 2004.
Denmark is a very small country compared to Russia, France, England, and America, yet, like those dance superpowers, it boasts a world-class ballet company with a venerable academy attached to it. Danish dancers trained from childhood at the school housed in Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre can be identified by particular aspects of technical prowess: an ebullient jump; light, swift footwork; and fluent épaulement. These qualities are their legacy from August Bournonville, the choreographer and ballet master who spent a good part of the nineteenth century shaping the Royal Danish Ballet and its school according to his vision.
Bournonville’s ballets, which have remained the backbone of the RDB
repertoire, also fostered the dancers’ acting prowess, which has been further encouraged by latter-day additions of dramatic ballets to the company’s repertoire. Yet while we admire Danish dancers for their technical and theatrical accomplishments, we love them in equal measure for their charm. They fill the stage with warmth, intimacy, and a contagious joy in motion, seeming to dance and mime for one another, at the same time taking the audience securely into their confidence.
Most prominent among the Danish dancers are the company’s stellar men, a good number of whom left the small duck pond–as the Danes, masters of ironic self-deprecation, refer to their country in contrast to the wide world–for careers on the international scene. Among their number are Erik Bruhn, Peter Schaufuss, Peter Martins, Ib Andersen, and Nikolaj Hübbe. Others, of comparable gifts, chose to stay at home: Henning Kronstam, the most soulful of noble princes and a consummate actor; Niels Kehlet, a kamikaze virtuoso and fine character dancer; and the incomparable mimes Niels Bjørn Larsen and Fredbjørn Bjørnsson. This pantheon also includes Stanley Williams, the celebrated RDB instructor who emigrated to the States midway through his career and became arguably the most influential teacher in Balanchine’s domain apart from the master himself.
What, I’ve always wondered, could be the secret of a ballet academy that has consistently produced dancers of this caliber with such a modest number of candidates to choose from?
The school of the Royal Danish Ballet has been in existence since 1770, providing its pupils with their dance training and, since the mid-nineteenth century, their academic education as well, and giving them opportunities to perform in the ballets, operas, and plays that constitute a repertory housed under one roof. Today children are admitted to the school as beginners from ages seven to twelve. (Provision is made for late starters–most often boys–by placing them with their age group and giving them supplementary coaching as necessary.)
First-year pupils are selected by means of a three-stage audition that includes a two- to four-week trial period of daily classes. Students are subsequently weeded out annually in the course of the academy’s nine-year program. The winnowing is hard on the youngsters, sometimes tragically so. A faculty member observes, “In our work, there are many tears.” Yet it is essential to ensure well-equipped graduates for a tough profession.
At 16, the survivors are apprenticed to the parent company; at 18, if all has gone well, they join it permanently. In recent years, feeder schools have been opened in a pair of outlying cities, Holstebro and Odense, the object being to enlarge the talent pool without wrenching the younger kids from family and home town. Even the main school in Copenhagen is small. This year it has some 65 pupils, 25 of them boys; the apprentice group holds just four young men.
One might assume that the secret of the Danish school lay in a particularly ingenious or efficacious training system. Yet, with certain exceptions, the program now being followed is significantly different from the various methods used in past generations. The late Niels Bjorn Larsen (who entered the school at six, in 1920) liked to reminisce about the prevailing practice in his day: The new recruits were plunked down in the daily class given for students up to 16 and expected to follow, as best they could, complex, rigorous exercises that remain a challenge even to professionals. At that time, the training for company members as well as students consisted solely of the six set Bournonville Classes–one for each working day of the week–designed to preserve the technique the great ballet master had evolved from the basis of his own French schooling and fragments of his choreography.
Needless to say, the Danes have adopted more modern methods, but since these have been subject to continual change, the success of the school can’t be attributed to an exemplary syllabus. It must reside in elements that lie deeper.
The Bournonville legacy is clearly of major significance. Once the set classes were abandoned as the gospel of the training system, they were used only intermittently. However, the material they contain has been continuously cannibalized for classes by faculty members who have danced the ballets throughout their performing lives and draw upon it both instinctively and with a conscious appreciation of its instructional worth. “If you can dance Bournonville, you can dance anything,” they like to say.
Another contributing factor to the success of the school is its location. In the corridors of the Royal Theatre, where they receive both their dance and academic schooling, the ballet pupils constantly encounter the personnel of the three companies performing there in tandem: ballet, opera, and drama. The youngsters themselves are frequently used in the productions, gaining stage experience even before their age registers in double digits, and they attend dress rehearsals as a matter of course. Along with the three R’s, they drink in the three arts. This opportunity for intimate contact with a world they hope to join as professionals enriches their education in ways that can’t be measured, but everyone is justly worried about its impending loss. The Royal Theatre’s new opera house, scheduled to open in another part of town in 2005, threatens to break up the family.
Even less tangible, but still an element highly pertinent to the Danes’ formation of dancers is the Danish character. The culture prioritizes warmth, camaraderie, and sensitivity not
merely to other people’s feelings but also to the prevailing mood of the moment. The first question a Dane will ask you about a critical encounter is “What was the atmosphere?” Such matters are as consequential in dancing as a crackerjack technique.
Still nothing–not even the up-to-date methods of luring talent into the profession like sound outreach programs and jaunty flyers directed to the boys that ask “Can you lift a girl over your head?”–quite explains the phenomenon of the steady stream of admirable male dancers coming from the Danish school. So, being in Copenhagen, I went to have a look for myself, starting with the group called Team 2.
“Chest high!” begins the stream of directives, friendly but firm, to this little co-ed bevy of second graders. “Stomach in!” “Knees straight!” “Feet pointed!” Each injunction is a key to the kingdom of classical dancing, delivered bright with that promise. “Remember your arms!” “Remember your eyes!” Demonstrating this last, the instructor looks out and up–to a distant sight in an imaginary landscape. Every good dancer keeps an eye on this intangible place.
As is the custom in such institutions, the teachers in the RDB school are former company dancers, of major or minor rank, who have the gift of passing on their craft (perhaps even glimpses of their art) to youngsters, the youngest of whom are just learning to read, the eldest being in the throes of full-blown adolescence. The former soubrette who teaches this class of seven- and eight-year-olds achieves the perfect mix of mentor and mom.
Her pupils, veterans of a year’s training, already seem different from ordinary kids. Distinguishing marks? Their well proportioned, flexible bodies and their highly developed rhythmic sense. Their capacity for intent concentration on physical minutiae, if still discontinuous, sets them off from pedestrian children too. Not more than five minutes into the class, though, they reveal the essential quality that separates them from the kid in the street: the ardent desire, the obsession even, directed toward an impalpable vision–something they saw once, fleetingly, or perhaps only dreamed.
At the start of the class, they stand at the barre like tiny military recruits, obedient and evenly spaced, their feet parallel. Then, at a word from the teacher, the small pairs of feet flick into turned-out first position (heels touching, toes of the left and right feet pointing in polar-opposite directions). Dance aficionados know the move from the opening of Balanchine’s Serenade. It’s the switch from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from life to art.
Today, as they did yesterday and will do again tomorrow, anchored to the barre or rooted to one spot in the center of the high-ceilinged studio, these children go about the chore of mastering ballet’s basic positions and steps. It’s a difficult, dry business that seems to have little to do with dancing, but it is indisputably the core of a classical dancer’s training. Courtesy a new theory about encouraging beginners to persist in the process, the youngest RDB pupils are given little reprieves in which, embedding a given exercise in a looser dance phrase, they’re allowed to move more freely through the room instead of waiting for the last segment of the class to release them into space.
Danish ballet’s teaching style emphasizes a warm understanding between instructor and student. The younger the RDB school’s pupils are, the more they are cosseted in this way. Often, the instructor stands as close to her pupil as would a Siamese twin to her other half, arm slung over the child’s shoulder, transmitting shape and rhythm body to body. A child who hasn’t quite seized the mechanics of a traveling phrase will be accompanied across the floor by his teacher, who dances full out by his side.
Neophytes though they are, the children are considered artists of the Theatre. Their teacher reminds them constantly of the future they’re aspiring to. Decorum is expected in the classroom as it would be in rehearsal or in the wings during a performance. Standards of comportment are related directly to the fact that an audience will be watching them. Accordingly, yawning and fidgeting are nipped in the bud: “How would it look if you did that on stage?” Aptly, today’s class ends with the children’s dance from the festive Act III of Napoli (the Bournonville ballet known as the RDB’s calling card), in which the little ones, skipping in boy-girl pairs, trace a winding path through the crowd of their elders, as if binding up the generations. Despite a few inevitable missteps and lapses of coordination, the children move with engaging vivacity, swept up in danseglæde, a favorite term in the Bournonville universe–the joy of dancing.
“Use the floor!” the instructor calls over the pianist’s upbeat accompaniment. “Use the music!” In two years time, the same pupils will be doing this dance on stage.
Fast forward now to Team 4, ten- to twelve-year-olds in their fourth year of training. These veterans maintain a rigorous schedule. Six days a week, at 8:30 a.m., they begin their hour-and-a-half ballet class. Quick shower, swift change of clothes, and it’s off to academic education, which continues until early- to mid-afternoon on weekdays. The “reading school,” as it’s called, keeps the ballet children at public school level or better, thanks to its small classes (five or six pupils to a grade), which allow much individual attention. The students’ rehearsals for their roles in Royal Theatre productions come out of the academic hours, but the kids make up the missed work. Even when a child has been onstage in the evening, he or she is back at the barre early the next morning, looking alert.
Once they turn 12, the boys in this division and higher meet for a 
weekly gymnastics class–to build upper-body strength for lifting those girls over their heads and for, as an instructor put it, “joy and playfulness.” Team 4 boys also have an extra, guys-only, ballet class once every two weeks (the alternate weeks being devoted to a similar one for the girls). This year’s Team 4 boys’ class, eight strong, is evidently geared to producing thinking dancers. It opens with an extended discussion of proper placement–before a single plié or tendu is attempted. After barre work and stretches, the boys cluster in a collegial circle around their teacher to discuss matters pertinent to their trade, as if they’d already served a decade in the corps de ballet. The center work of adagio, jumps, and pirouettes that follows is examined and executed inch by inch. At one point each boy in turn is required to perform a particular combination of steps by himself, closely watched by his comrades and teacher, and then to say what his mistakes or difficulties were. Throughout the session, the boys are urged to think about what they’re doing and to articulate what it requires. In contrast to the monkey-see, monkey-do method that has prevailed traditionally, they are learning to take responsibility for their own dancing.
The approach might seem over-analytic, but it doesn’t seem to quash the boys’ innate physical fervor. Their teacher dissects a traveling phrase that climaxes the class to make certain each key position is correctly placed. Then, after several painstaking repetitions, she declares, “All the positions are right. Now you must just giv løs! (let ‘er rip). And, legs shooting out to devour the space, leading arm flung high, charging recklessly along the diagonal as if walls would fall before them, they do.
The system doesn’t seem to squelch their individuality either. In under an hour, four of them have made themselves unforgettable to me. Mads is the smallest one, with feet to die for and a face that is utterly appealing. He’s a creature of the stage, fully aware of his charisma; class, for him, is performance. Though he still has only tentative control over his body, he seems to live to move. He may well be the most promising talent of them all. Frederik is the phlegmatic one. He looks like a suavely handsome banker, all gravitas. He works ably and calmly, as if resigned to his fate. Oliver of the mercurial charm knows he’s someone worth watching and keeps glancing at the visitor to make certain he has her attention. While Mads instinctively plays to the house, Oliver is playing to you. Another boy whose name I didn’t catch–was it Andreas?–introduces a welcome air of ordinariness into this artistic hothouse. Dark haired and olive skinned, with a scruffy look about him, he seems–despite his effort and ability–to be an ordinary kid who wandered in from the soccer field. His type is significant in our composite portrait of the Danish male dancer. He is the regular guy.
The day I see the co-ed Team 4 class, it’s augmented by pupils from the Holstebro feeder school. One of the visiting boys immediately eclipses Mads, Frederik, Oliver, and (if this is his name) Andreas, though he’s not their equal in accomplishment. He stands out simply as a danseur noble in the making. He has the tall, slim body, wide shoulders, and narrow waist of a fledgling prince. The poise of his head on his long neck is perfect. His quixotic face, framed in close-clipped auburn hair, might belong to a Tivoli Harlequin. His placement is still tentative; students in the early stages of their training lack the strength to maintain consistently ballet’s alert stance, with the legs turned out like a fencer’s. But this boy, operating with instinctive harmony and grace, makes the artificial posture, the classically sculpted positions, and the codified manner of moving look as if they were almost natural to the human body. Once the lesson progresses to big traveling steps, he displays a strong sense of rhythm, as do many of his comrades; this young fellow, though, seems to posses the more subtle gift of musicality.
The boy catches my eye immediately and holds it throughout the class, but I have no idea at this point that he might be genetically predestined for a dancing life. After class, I ask a staff member his name, just to complete my notes. “Luke,” comes the answer. “Luke what?” I persist. “Luke Schaufuss,” says my reluctant informant, perhaps an adherent of jantelov, the unwritten Danish law that holds that no single person should be allowed to be better than other folks. Luke, it turns out, is the son of Peter Schaufuss (himself the offspring of two noteworthy RDB dancers), in his performing days a virtuoso of international repute, one-time artistic director of the Royal Danish Ballet, now head of his own ballet company, based in Holstebro. If that weren’t enough, Luke’s mom, Zara Deakin, is a dancer, too. All in the family, I say to myself, but I think no more about it until I see the apprentice class.
Male students in the Danish school are referred to as “boys” until 
they reach the age of 16. From the day they become apprentices, they’re called “men,” which indicates the gravity of their situation. The next two years (three if their development’s sluggish) will constitute the most intensive period of their training. Having completed their academic schooling, they now frequently take their morning dance class with the company in addition to understudying the repertory and performing in entry-level roles. They take other classes with their female counterparts–the girls transformed into women–and have a couple of concentrated sessions a week just for themselves.
The current crew of male apprentices, four in number, is coached by Niels Balle, a dancer known for his meticulous execution. He gives an exacting barre and remains equally scrupulous in the last third of the class, when the young men hurtle their bodies through space in feats that look near-suicidal. Just as they’re about to pitch themselves into one of these thrilling ventures, Balle drawls, teasingly, but still expecting an answer, “And what should we remember?” Curbing their animal enthusiasm, his protégés cite the details that will keep the shape of their steps clear in the air and permit them to land with accuracy. Only then does Balle clear them for take-off. At one point, while they’re aloft, Balle hushes the accompanist’s full-blast support so the young athletes will hear, upon descent, if their footfalls are too loud.
These late adolescents, in whom the RDB is investing so much effort and hope, have gotten a good part of their growth now, but their bodies–in terms of posture, musculature, and control–are still under development. Their faces are typical adolescent masks of sullen passion. Their footwork at the barre–intricate as befits Bournonville’s progeny–is unexpectedly light. By contrast, their legs unfolding in arabesque indicate huge commanding power. In the center, their jumps are buoyant in the air, cushioned in their descent; this is a Danish trademark.
Three in this group are commendably able artisans. They may yet develop artistry; the Danish men mature slowly. The fourth, Sebastian, already promises something else entirely. The youngest of them, and still slight, he has an elfin face; he looks like Ib Andersen in his youth and has the same poetic air. His big eyes are expressive, and he knows how to use them. His dancing is everywhere fluid, harmoniously coordinated, and infused with the luminous quality that, for lack of a more concrete word, we call soul. It’s this–not the incredible feet and similar lucky assets, though they deserve admiration–that make him look like a born dancer and an incipient artist. Today he’s wearing a dark gray t-shirt that darkens further in the course of the class as his sweat soaks it. On the back of the shirt, hitting its wearer just between the shoulder blades, like the target for an arrow shot to pierce the heart, is a tiny gold symbol. It’s the royal insignia–a crown.
Sebastian uses his mother’s surname. His mother is Eva Kloborg, a prominent RDB dancer and a teacher for both the company and its school. His father is Frank Andersen, who capped his stage career by becoming the present artistic director of the company.
So what’s going on here? Am I any closer to understanding the circumstances that have favored the making of Denmark’s marvelous male dancers? I’ve had a grand time observing; it’s so much more vivid, complex, and revelatory than toying with theories. But what’s the answer? Yes, genes do play a part in spawning talent, as many artistic dynasties testify. Bournonville’s father, Antoine, headed the Royal Danish Ballet before August took over, eclipsing him. Peter Martins’s uncle Leif Ørnberg and Peter Schaufuss’s dad, Frank Schaufuss, held the same position after substantial careers on stage. Still I suspect that August Bournonville, an artistic father to succeeding generations of Danish dancers, is most responsible for their achievement. One can only hope that, despite contemporary pressures to modernize everything in sight, the Royal Danish Ballet will continue to keep this firmly in mind.
Photo credit: Martin Mydtskov Rønne
© 2004 Tobi Tobias