Royal Danish Ballet: Bournonville Festival / Royal Theatre, Copenhagen / June 3-11, 2005
As dead geniuses go—especially those whose work, being in dance, is essentially ephemeral—August Bournonville (1805-1879) has done pretty well. The legacies of George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, Martha Graham—all a century younger than the Danish choreographer—are eroding at an alarmingly faster rate than his, despite the fact that modern times have delivered the preservation tools of sophisticated dance notation (Bournonville used a crude—if singularly effective—personal one), film, and videotape.
How did Bournonville manage to last so well? He ruled the Danish ballet long and fairly implacably, and his act was essentially the only one in town. What’s more, other ways and means of approaching classical dance that were evolving abroad were almost unknown to the Danes, other than those filtered through Bournonville himself. From his youthful studies in Paris, Bournonville borrowed the French school of Romantic dancing, which he conjured up explicitly in his Konservatoriet, and co-opted an entire ballet, La Sylphide, from the same source, translating it into Danish terms. He turned a temporary exile by royal decree—never address the king from the stage, no matter the provocation—into rewarding travels in Italy, subsequently evoked in Napoli. Late in his life he journeyed to Russia, and found that the reigning monarch in St. Petersburg, Marius Petipa, admittedly brilliant in his effects, contradicted some of his (Bournonville’s) central aesthetic principles, such as this, set down in his Choreographic Credo: “The Dance can, with the aid of music, rise to the heights of poetry. On the other hand, through an excess of gymnastics it can also degenerate into buffoonery. So-called ‘difficult’ feats can be executed by countless adepts, but the appearance of ease is achieved only by the chosen few” (from Bournonville’s My Theatre Life, translated by Patricia N. McAndrew).
After the choreographer’s death, the dancer and ballet master Hans Beck, who had no choreographic aspirations of his own, worked assiduously to preserve the Bournonville choreographic legacy and devised a teaching system, known today as the Bournonville Schools (or Classes) to preserve the master’s style. Since that time (Beck led the company from 1894 to 1915), changes made to modernize the productions of Bournonville’s ballets have been imposed slowly, still with only minimal influence from outside sources until the early 1930s. Even through the first Bournonville Festival in 1979, renewal of the ballets was accomplished with a reverence for the work and within a wider reverence for tradition.
Despite revisions, the ballets were kept essentially true to themselves through faithful dancer-to-dancer transmission (supported by continual informal supervision from the elders of the company) and, most significant, stagers equipped with keen theatrical instincts and aesthetic vision who were convinced that what the old guy had achieved was a pretty good thing, one worth hanging on to.
The situation today, at the start of the third Bournonville Festival, with dance fans, critics, and scholars gathered to view the full extant Bournonville repertory in performance at the Royal Theatre, is markedly different. Today, facing a posterity as willing to forget (which is easy) as to remember (which turns out to be hard), Bournonville is in a precarious position.
Happily, opening night, with Queen Margrethe II in attendance, offered an extremely welcome forecast of the future. The company’s new production of the comic ballet Kermesse in Bruges by Lloyd Riggins proved that radical rethinking, if governed by a true understanding of the material and sensitive taste, can refresh a venerable work so that even veteran admirers of its traditional production, like me, can see it with new eyes.
For the record, Riggins was neither born in Denmark nor bred in the RDB school. He’s an American dancer who was “discovered” in a summer program for young students who wanted to add a taste of Bournonville’s style to their training. Riggins’s remarkable instinctive affinity with the material was immediately apparent, and he went on to become a prized member of the Royal Danish Ballet. After a time, he left to work with John Neumeier at the Hamburg Ballet, but returned to Copenhagen for this project. The Danes should now insist he stay with them—by persuasion or force, whatever works.
Riggins’s vision of Kermesse essentially clears the air, and Rikke Juellund, who designed the sets and costumes, was an equal partner in this enterprise, turning in some of the most sophisticated work I’ve seen on a ballet stage. Gone is the familiar, homey scenographic style of a bustling square where two pairs of lovers undergo the amusing contretemps suited to their temperaments while a third, more soulful, couple embarks shyly and tenderly on an ardent commitment—all this amidst a bustling society that includes a crafty but warm-hearted mother-in-law in the making, ill-intentioned aristocrats, lusty red-booted folk dancers, street entertainers, clergy, and a passel of kids. Gone too is the murky interior formerly thought requisite for an alchemist whose magical gifts make for absurd adventures ending in happy resolution. Even the home of the wealthy countess, who wants nothing more than to engage in an affair that’s beneath her class-wise, is spared the gilt-candelabra treatment, though the lady is allowed to keep her several disconsolate servants. Juellund has opened all the locales to uncluttered space, light, and air. The basic necessities of architecture and furnishings are rendered as simple, highly stylized shapes—often flat silhouettes—in pale tones. Neither Juellund nor Riggins forgot, however, that Bournonville’s declared inspiration was seventeenth-century Flemish genre painting, and one scene begins with a view of a woman standing at a window, serene as eternity, that is the very essence of Vermeer.
Juellund’s costumes are even more unusual. Cut like postmodern takes on social positions ranging from peasant to noble, they’re executed for the most part in a pale palette sparely accented with offbeat colors—a bit of grayed pea green here, a touch of ochre there. For contrast, the slovanka crew and the itinerant performers of circusy tricks are garbed in a riot of saturated reds. These strange, wonderful outfits suggest Flanders, contemporary Denmark, SoHo, and an unidentifiable outpost of moonstruck fantasy—all at once. The cuts are stark; the fabrics, unadorned. And that very absence of elaboration makes the dancers’ faces, vigorously miming in the grand Danish tradition, all the more readable and fascinating.
Riggins has kept largely true to what we think we know of Bournonville’s choreography from earlier productions. (I’ve seen two of the previous ones and still adore in memory Hans Brenaa’s lusty version from 1979.) Riggins’s rendition is calmer, more subtle, sweeter. But the characterizations—from timid to swaggering, mischievous to loutish, innocent to cunning, chaste to erotically insatiable—are detailed, sincerely played (and seemingly sincerely felt), touching where they should be, very human everywhere, and immense fun. Riggins’s staging doesn’t have the vitality of Brenaa’s; it might even be considered as corrective of it, since many observers found the Brenaa version, as it ripened, over the top. But in small well-considered ways—like reducing the number of minor players, so that the piece takes on the air of a chamber work, urging you to focus on it intently, and subduing the more outlandish, raucous bits—Riggins makes the ballet something that sends you home thinking.
The program was completed by the company’s new production of La Ventana, about which more later. On the curtain calls for Kermesse, Frank Andersen, the company’s artistic director, named Kristoffer Sakurai, making his debut as the ballet’s endearing hero, a principal dancer (solodanser in Danish), a promotion he might have earned on that night’s performance alone.
Photo: Martin Mydtskov Rønne: Kristoffer Sakurai and Susanne Grinder in August Bournonville’s Kermesse in Bruges
© 2005 Tobi Tobias