Digterens Teaterdromme: H.C. Andersen og Teatret (The Poet’s Theater Dreams: Hans Christian Andersen and the Theater) / Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Den Sorte Diamant (Royal Library, The Black Diamond), Copenhagen / March 11 – October 22, 2005
Digteren og Balletmesterens Luner: H.C. Andersens og Bournonvilles Brevveksling (The Caprices of the Poet and the Ballet Master: The Correspondence of Hans Christian Andersen and August Bournonville) / Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Den Sorte Diamant (Royal Library, The Black Diamond), Copenhagen / June 2005
Europaeeren Bournonville: En udstilling om balletmesteren, kunstneren og åndsmennesket (Bournonville—the European: August Bournonville—ballet-master, choreographer and theorist) / Stærekassen, Copenhagen / May 30 – June 12, 2005
The indefatigable research librarian Knud Arne Jürgensen has mounted no fewer than three exhibitions in connection with the bicentennial celebration of the birth of August Bournonville and Hans Christian Andersen, colleagues in art and friends as well.
The most comprehensive—and enchanting—of these shows is Digterens Teaterdromme: H.C. Andersen og Teatret (The Poet’s Theater Dreams: Hans Christian Andersen and the Theater) at The Black Diamond, the ultra-modernistic branch of the Royal Library, an immense, thrusting black glass shape that seems to cleave space to look out over the water.
It goes without saying that Andersen is best known for his stories. (If you don’t know the great ones in their original form, stop reading this article immediately, please, and go to here for The Ice Maiden or here for The Snow Queen. The simpler tales—The Ugly Duckling, The Little Match Girl, even The Red Shoes—that you met with when you were very young consisted, in all likelihood, of dumbed-down “retellings.”) But Andersen succumbed to the lure of the theater very early in his childhood and aspired to become part of that world, which he considered, quite simply, a realm of magic and ecstasy. To this end, he made various attempts to take his place in it through acting and dancing, though performance was clearly not his métier. More fittingly, he wrote for it, eventually with considerable success. In the course of these efforts, he collaborated with Bournonville on several occasions.
Jürgensen, who characteristically operates in an orderly, thoroughgoing mode, has arranged the wealth of his chosen material in distinct categories. These begin, most usefully, with a survey of the theater, both classical and popular, in Andersen’s time (in other words, the world Andersen hoped to enter) and photographs of the creative and interpretive artists who inhabited it. Then we see—through manuscripts, programs, the writer’s irresistibly ingenuous sketches, and the like—Andersen’s own creations for that world. The Andersen-Bournonville connection is brought to life through letters the two exchanged, ballet libretti and scores, costume designs, actual costumes, photographs of executed scenography, and—best of all—toy theater set-ups. The obligatory personal objects belonging to Andersen are also there for the ogling—the ivory paperknife, the porcelain inkwell in the form of a ship—though I must say I find the small “daily” possessions of dead artists a macabre (or is it ludicrous?) means of invoking them. For me, the most revealing item among these artifacts was Andersen’s personal photo album. It’s occupied not by images of family or ordinary friends from assorted trades and professions, as are your album and mine, but by portraits of the artists, dead or living, whom he considered his soul mates. If all this weren’t enough, there is the pair of human-height panels from a folding screen that Andersen collaged and that he gazed at from his bed in the last year of his life. Called “Childhood” and “Theatre,” the panels are haunting studies of Andersen’s singular vision of those aspects of his being. Freud would have had a field day with them.
One needn’t travel to Copenhagen before October 22 to relish this treasure trove of material. The armchair traveler need only go here to experience it close-up and in astonishing detail. He or she should be sure to seize the opportunity the site offers to enlarge the images, which are so well photographed they seem uncannily real—telling, in the manner of Andersen himself, an extraordinarily vivid and resonant tale.
The genius of this exhibition, experienced in situ, is that it takes a multitude of small objects that need to be looked at closely, one after another (a surefire recipe for tedium), and creates for them a world—one that reflects Andersen’s unique imagination—in which they can cohere. Jan de Neergaard, a well-known designer for the stage, is its architect. He has fashioned a theatrically dark, compact space and, working with panels pierced with shapes borrowed from Andersen’s fanciful paper-cuttings, has created a fence that separates the familiar reality the visitor is leaving from the intriguing, perhaps slightly dangerous fantasy he’s being tempted to enter. Inside, this wary yet willing guest must thread through cunning half-secret curving passageways, his orientation pleasantly dislocated by a crazy-quilt patterned floor, some of its segments mirrored. Everywhere, the mysterious gloom is illuminated by pinpoint lights that allow him to discover the exhibition’s wonders. At the center of this space lies an improvised theater—an oval with a dozen chairs visitors can shift at whim—where, onscreen, a wise professor with the kindliest voice in the world (think of a grandmother with a Ph.D.) narrates (alas, only in Danish) the marvelous tale of Andersen’s life and achievement. As a whole, this inspired environment suggests a child’s playhouse, where, without forsaking a fragile tether to reality, dreams and illusions may be granted full sway.
Curiously, the biographical tale this show tells reveals an Andersen far happier and self-confident, his career unfurling in a calm, logical, almost inevitable course, than the Andersen contemporary scholarship portrays—with its early miseries, its continuing frustrations and self-doubt. In many ways, this halcyon picture relates to Mit Livs Eventyr (published in English translation as The Fairy Tale of My Life), the autobiography the poet, for so we must call him, wrote to portray himself as he wished the world to see him. Both views of Andersen, of course—the full spectrum of wretchedness to ecstasy—are there for all to see in his stories.
Jürgensen has supplemented this ambitious exhibition with a small—it’s confined to a single wide vitrine—but enticing display called Digteren og Balletmesterens Luner: H.C. Andersens og Bournonvilles Brevveksling (The Caprices of the Poet and the Ballet Master: The Correspondence of Hans Christian Andersen and August Bournonville). The title is a play on Amor og Balletmesterens Luner (usually translated as The Whims of Cupid and the Ballet Master), the only ballet by Vincenzo Galleotti, the Royal Danish Ballet’s first important choreographer, that the company still performs.
The display samples the exchange of letters between Andersen, the stage-struck storyteller, and Bournonville, the Dane who made the most profound contribution to the realm of classical dancing. The Royal Library holds 59 of the pair’s letters, ranging in time from 1837 to just before Andersen’s death in 1875. In this richly productive period of both artists’ lives, Jürgensen reports, they wrote to each other of matters aesthetic, professional, and personal.
The original manuscripts of three letters are presented here. The sight of them quickens the heart, making all the tales one has heard of the connection between the two artists seem, somehow, truer. The words, handwritten in ink now brown with age, on paper with a highly tactile quality, seems to speak—even if you can’t decipher the elegant nineteenth-century orthography, let alone the Danish language. Though the letters, sadly, aren’t translated here, labels inform us that one of Bournonville’s was composed on the occasion of Andersen’s 62nd birthday, and that the one from Andersen was written when the choreographer was in Vienna in 1856, staging a production of what has become his signature ballet, Napoli. Jürgensen also offers these complementary/complimentary quotations from the correspondence: “You are a poet and I put much in this small word!” (Andersen to Bournonville, 1841); “You interest, entertain, and move. You convince and give strength, one cannot request more from a poet” (Bournonville to Andersen, 1862). Jürgensen has annotated and introduced the complete correspondence for imminent publication by Gyldendal.
The letters are supplemented—in the vitrine and, more extensively, in the book—with several reproductions of Andersen’s intricate, whimsical paper-cuttings that feature ballet motifs. One of them creates two rakish mirror-imaged dancing men in suits, blithely perched on the wings of a tolerant pair of swans. Another shows a proscenium stage seemingly made of cloth, topped with a ghostly hooded human head; it frames a pair of matchstick-limbed ballerinas in Romantic tutus, dancing in the shade of some generic scenographic foliage. One might claim that Andersen was choreographing with his scissors. He himself said, “Cutting out paper, that is the beginning of writing.”
As most of us have discovered, with the Internet’s rabid expansion, there are some things that of necessity used to be experienced in public, and standing up—such as routine shopping—that are actually better accomplished privately, sitting down, in a place and time of one’s choice. Such is certainly the case with Jürgensen’s third exhibition, Europaeeren Bournonville: En udstilling om balletmesteren, kunstneren og åndsmennesket (Bournonville—the European: August Bournonville—ballet-master, choreographer and theorist). It is currently enjoying a brief life as an illustrated text on a group of hanging panels in the lobby of the Royal Theatre’s Stærekassen, a gloomy venue for small productions that is interesting to architecture buffs for its Art Deco style. But it achieves a fuller and more accessible (to say nothing of ongoing) existence not, as with the Theatre Dreams show, on the Internet, which guarantees seemingly eternal life, but in the form of a handsomely produced booklet. This publication, which shares its name with the exhibition, offers an expanded text in both Danish and English (the Stærekassen panels are English-only) and realizes the well-chosen illustrations even more beautifully.
Jürgensen’s text places Bournonville—whose ballets seem to us today so quintessentially Danish—in the wider spectrum of his European heritage; his considerable travels to further his knowledge of his art (beginning with his youthful training in Paris); and the Mediterranean setting of several of his ballets (notably Italy, for Napoli, Flanders for Kermesse in Bruges, and Spain for La Ventana). It also explores the continental scope of the choreographer’s intellectual and theoretical pursuits. Bournonville’s place in the dance world, Jürgensen argues, was never merely local during his lifetime. He connected assiduously to a wider cultural domain. Since his death, his influence has continued to expand to worlds far from Denmark, the home base he continued to love with touching patriotic fervor.
As demonstrated by the two larger of these exhibitions, Jürgensen’s work exemplifies a welcome—and long overdue—surge of scholarly investigation of the Bournonville phenomenon that is no longer confined to those who, by Fate’s maverick decree, can read Danish.
© 2005 Tobi Tobias