Archives for June 2005

Royal Danish Ballet: Bournonville Festival / Royal Theatre, Copenhagen / June 3-11, 2005

While the Bournonville Festival is dedicated to presenting the complete extant repertory choreographed by the master, with Abdallah the Royal Danish Ballet has also made room for some faux-Bournonville.

This ballet does not claim to be part of what the Danes call “the living tradition”—works that have been passed down in an unbroken line from generation to generation of RDB artists. Choreographed in 1855, Abdallah was decidedly not a hit with either the critics or the public, and by 1858 it was off the boards. Apparently, viewers thought it contained too much pure dancing—ironically the very element to which today’s step-hungry public is perfectly willing to sacrifice the balancing element of mime.

What we’re looking at in 2005 is an ingenious and effervescent, if not entirely satisfying, latter-day concoction brought into being by Bruce Marks, an American dancer who did a stint with the Royal Danish Ballet; his wife, the Danish ballerina Toni Lander Marks; and Flemming Ryberg, a principal dancer and mime with the RDB and an incisive Bournonville stylist. This resourceful little committee based its production on Bournonville’s telling but incomplete choreographic notations in the musical score, preserved in the Royal Library. The three shaped and augmented that information with their own rich knowledge of the extant Bournonville repertory and keen theatrical savvy about what might attract a contemporary audience. The “modern” Abdallah was given its premiere in 1985 in Salt Lake City, Utah, by Ballet West, where Bruce Marks was artistic director. It entered the RDB repertory the following year.

As its title suggests, Abdallah is an Arabian Nights tale—ravishingly decorated in that vein by the late scenographer Jens-Jacob Worsaae. It’s set in Iraq, and its opening act—which features a barrage of Bournonville-style dances—is further churned up by a bit of regime change. The poor shoemaker, Abdallah (a fellow of “very few brains” but infinite ingenuous appeal) courts the local reigning beauty, Irma. He succeeds in winning her heart, though not that of her virago of a mother who’d hoped for a more prosperous match. Suddenly the town is turned upside down by an armed band trying to get rid of the local sheik. Abdallah saves the ruler’s life and is duly rewarded with a five-branched candelabra that will grant him the desires so common to raw male youth they are almost excusable—wine, women, and upscale luxury. All this will be his, provided he observes the admonition to leave the last candle unlit. Abdallah gets his desired change of wardrobe and interior decoration, a slew of servants at his beck and call, and a whole harem of gently seductive lovelies. With these ladies he enjoys a modest dancing orgy until, in drunken abandon, he lights the forbidden candle and is reduced to his former impoverished state, having lost his true love as well. Needless to say, matters are patched up in the final act, with the sheik playing deus ex machina to ensure that the happily reconciled couple begins married life with a lavish dowry and that the scolding mom-in-law is removed from the scene via a trap door concealed by a curtain of flame.

The dancing was capable throughout and, in several cases, particularly distinguished, from the crystal-clear execution of young Tobias Praetorius, playing an impudent little slave boy, to the technical aplomb and ingratiating personality of Morten Eggert in the title role. Among the women, Yao Wei, recently made a soloist, seemed to have taken it upon herself, single-handed, to revive the “type” of the nineteenth-century Bournonville ballerina. She looks like an exquisite porcelain figurine brought to life, precise and delicate in her movement, sweetly shy in her personality. Born and trained in China, she’s the perfect example in a company that now, of necessity, includes many non-Danes, of the fact that Bournonville dancing is not the exclusive province of the “natives.” It can also be mastered through an affinity that is aesthetic—perhaps spiritual as well.

How the Danes bring this production off, I don’t know. Thinkers and sophisticates would surely dismiss it as idiotic. The story is trite and not rendered particularly magical in this telling. The moral weight Bournonville managed to invest in even the slightest, most frivolous subjects (as in his King’s Volunteers on Amager) is absent here—in part, perhaps, because Abdallah has not yet been enriched by decade after decade of dancers putting themselves into the roles. What’s more, the streams of enchaînements, taken together, are nearly stultifying, though any one solo, duet, quintet—even single choreographic phrases—may be ingenious, exciting admiration and pleasure. It’s just that it’s impossible to watch that much of that sort of thing; the eye simply flags. And yet the company—with its indefatigable quicksilver feet, its charm, and its unforced communal desire to please—does bring it off, making you feel, even as your good sense is crying out, “Enough! Enough!,” that you’ve somehow been delighted.

For the record: The score, by Bournonville’s most frequent musical collaborator, H.S. Paulli, will sound strangely familiar at times, even to audience members new to Abdallah. Hans Beck, the RDB’s ballet master from 1894 to 1915, appropriated stretches of it to add variations to the cascade of ebullient dancing already present in the celebratory closing act of Napoli—another instance in which—though it’s heresy to say it, I suspect less might have been more.

Photo: Martin Mydtskov Rønne: Morten Eggert and Haley Henderson in August Bournonville’s Abdallah

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

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

Royal Danish Ballet: Bournonville Festival / Royal Theatre, Copenhagen / June 3-11, 2005

It’s been almost two years since I wrote about the Royal Danish Ballet’s La Sylphide in these pages. The occasion was the premiere of the new production—by Nikolaj Hübbe—of the celebrated work. Having just seen that staging in the Festival, with nearly all the principals from the original cast, I find that my response to it now is very close to my response then. So, asking my readers’ indulgence, I refer them to my earlier essay.

Since its premiere, Hübbe’s production has amplified its already considerable dramatic power. The entire first act—even the communal reel, which traditionally relied on folk-dance charm—surges forward, just short of melodrama, from one compelling event to another, as if the characters were speeding along a roadway from which there was no escape. This salutary take on the material has the effect of moving it from a familiar past tense to a gripping present one.

Gudrun Bojesen and Thomas Lund have matured in the roles of the Sylphide and James. Bojesen has, as was inevitable, left the dewy innocence of her early career behind her. Now more womanly, she’s positively incandescent, and her Sylphide tempts James away from his bourgeois existence into the ecstatic unknown more as a dangerous siren than as an ethereal spirit. Lund, whose technique, like Bojesen’s, is surer than ever, has boldly continued down the path of spontaneity and sincerity in his acting. He doesn’t simply believe in his role; he is James—lost in dreams, perpetually confused as they begin to materialize, and finally spurred to the decisive action that will be his tragic undoing. One of the most shocking and novel effects between Lund’s James and Bojesen’s Sylphide comes when, frustrated by her luring him on while refusing to let him touch her—that is, possess her—he forcibly binds her to him with the scarf the witch has poisoned, covers her bosom with kisses, and thus destroys her. The action, which looks like a rough embrace, registers as a rape.

Both Lund and Nicolai Hansen, as James’s more down-to-earth rival, Gurn, did themselves proud in the famous back-to-back solos of the first act —with high-charged, space-eating dancing that nevertheless remained buoyant, musical, and immaculate in matters of shape and articulation. In the second act, where the Sylphide introduces James into her own world—nature at its loveliest and most haunted—his dancing became increasingly heroic while hers shifted between an airy quality increasing until she seemed well-nigh impalpable and a seductiveness that fleetingly echoed the malevolence of the witch.

Lis Jeppesen’s portrayal of Madge has grown more solid physically, but it still lacks adequate emotional depth and conviction. The witch is as significant a character in the ballet as the Sylphide and James; to portray her superficially inevitably lessens the work’s impact. In the small mime role of Anna, Kirsten Simone provided a stunning moment when, her son James having jilted her niece, Effy, she gives the young woman permission to decide if she will marry Gurn, decidedly a second choice. As Effy thinks it over (and, being a practical girl, appears ready to accept what’s available to her), Simone’s face becomes a mask of sorrow, that of a mother mourning an irremediable loss.

Simone was giving her last performance in the role, her last in the ballet, in which she has, in her time, played both Sylphide and witch. At 70, Simone has reached the age when even the hardiest of the Danish dancers retire from the stage, so these days her appearances are in the nature of farewells. She took her La Sylphide curtain call hand in hand with the featherweight feisty-spirited little girl entrusted with the featured children’s role in the show. The pair made an emblem of continuity. Rooted as the Royal Danish Ballet is in tradition, in renewal unequivocally dependent upon its links to the past, one could not wish the company anything better than this.

Accompanying Kermesse in Bruges on opening night and, later in the week, La Sylphide, was a new production of La Ventana (The Window). Though it’s a short, unassuming ballet, it’s memorable for two set pieces: the Señorita’s dance with her mirror image and a pas de trois for nameless figures up to some serious technical high jinx. The trio, which can be successfully performed out of context (as it is in the New York City Ballet’s Bournonville Divertissements), does nothing to further the plot, which is negligible anyway. The piece is essentially a bagatelle, all situation without the conflict-requiring-resolution that would make for drama. It’s simply an occasion for demonstrating technical panache under a gossamer veil of grace and, of course, in its Señorita and Señor, personal allure and panache.

The challenges of the pas de trois are fiendish, among them simultaneous unsupported pitched arabesques for the two women, and fleet, intricate batterie for the man. The Señorita’s dance revives a venerable theatrical trick of having a well-matched pair of dancers reflect each other’s moves so accurately, the viewer is tempted to think the reflection couldn’t possibly be flesh and blood. The trick is augmented by the having the lady and her double turn their backs to each other several times, so that they’re bringing off the feat blind, so to speak. The rest of the ballet is charming but generic—the Danes being Spanish. The Señorita, rightly played, is a mix of sweetness and allure.

The new production of the piece has been mounted by a pair who have been with the RDB since childhood: Frank Andersen, presently the company’s artistic director, and his wife, Eva Kloborg, now a character dancer and a teacher in the school. These two have certainly got history on their side, but their new staging has three things wrong with it: Christian Friedländer’s new set; a pointless prologue that’s been tacked on to Bournonville’s choreography; and dancing that, despite the usual Danish spirit and charm, is only fitfully Bournonvillean in style.

Instead of the traditional set showing the Señorita’s boudoir (a private space) and, subsequently, the courtyard beneath her boudoir window (a public space, to which the lady moves to meet her lover and their friends—the pas de trois folks and a vivacious little ensemble—only after we’ve gotten to know her), Friedländer first gives us a humongous painting in the style of Old Spain depicting, at one remove, so to speak, a bustling nineteenth-century courtyard. In front of this painting, Andersen and Kloborg have set a mini-prologue that introduces, in brief inconsequential solos, first the spirited, captivating Señorita, then her duly ardent admirer, the Señor. This accomplished (for no reason that I can fathom; Bournonville understood that we shouldn’t meet the Señor until we were intimate with the lady), the painting flips around to reveal an unconvincing boudoir that surrounds the all-important curtained mirror with a museum-like wall of paintings. Why, I wonder, would a beauty be putting the finishing touches on her toilette in an overcrowded room at the Prado? Most baffling is the fact that this boudoir-in-the-abstract has no window from which the lovely lady, preparations for her rendezvous completed, can throw a rose down to the courtyard where her lover eagerly awaits her, not for a secret tryst but accompanied by the liveliest of crowds.

Alternating as the Señorita in the two Festival performances, Gitte Lindstrøm and Izabela Sokolowska, were both radiant with erotic promise, the latter, just elevated to soloist rank from the ensemble, irresistibly so. The dancing, from principals through ensemble, was animated throughout, though in the main both Señoritas and Señors seemed to be operating in what the Danes call the International Style, by which they mean post-Bournonville—more like, say, the polyglot manner in which American Ballet Theatre performs. Diana Cuni, one of the women in the second-cast pas de trois, achieved the single fully Bournonvillean moment in her solo, where suddenly the venerable technique, with its great beauty and even greater challenges, looked not like something dutifully learned in the classroom and conscientiously practiced in performance, but like gorgeously shaped movement blessed with the air of improvisation, it was so buoyant and free. Bournonville always insisted on danseglæde (the joy of dancing), and this was it.

Photo: Martin Mydtskov Rønne: Gudrun Bojesen in the title role of August Bournonville’s La Sylphide

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

Royal Danish Ballet: Bournonville Festival / Royal Theatre, Copenhagen / June 3-11, 2005

Having boldly opened its Bournonville Festival with two new productions—of Kermesse in Bruges and La Ventana—the Royal Danish Ballet devoted its second night to a traditional staging of Napoli, the ballet it accurately terms its calling card. The curtain went up on the familiar vibrant panorama of a mid-nineteenth-century Italian quayside packed to the hilt with all manner of colorfully dressed people—earthy locals, street vendors, clergy, wealthy tourists, the neighborhood’s kids—bustling about on their own agendas, singly and in tight-knit clusters, yet forging an entirely cohesive whole that symbolized the richness of life lived, spontaneously, to the hilt. I’ve seen Napoli danced dozens of times, but it was as if I’d forgotten how very wonderful this ballet is, and I fell for it all over again.

The Danes themselves are the first to say that their Royal Ballet reserves its best efforts for grand occasions like premieres, galas, and festivals—especially when having lots of foreign visitors in the house adds to the excitement. From my own experience, both in Copenhagen and in the States, I’d say there may be some truth in this. Yes or no, this was as full-blooded a rendition of Napoli as one could hope for, its only dampening feature the ever-problematic second act. This midsection of the ballet takes place in the underwater kingdom of the Blue Grotto, ruled by a sea demon given to changing nubile young women into naiads. (The ballet’s heroine, Teresina, on the cusp of marrying her fisherman boyfriend, is threatened with this fate.) Despite a cool, hypnotic atmosphere that makes a useful dramatic contrast with the two sunny, ebullient acts surrounding it, the Blue Grotto episode was tepid, it’s held, even in Bournonville’s original version. It has continued to discourage the viewer’s enthusiasm with tedious stretches—mostly in the ensemble work—in subsequent attempts at revision. The current production uses Dinna Bjørn’s version, which is probably the best effort made in living memory. Still, torn between respect for genteel nineteenth-century dance conventions and a desire to make psychological sense of the action, it fails to be definitive.

Acts I and III, however, went from strength to strength, steps and phrases clear, beautifully shaped, musically rendered, and informed with bubbling energy. A communal confidence and elation among the dancers seemed to grow and grow until, in the pas de six and tarantella, a veritable torrent of dancing that climaxes the third act, the performance reached that let-joy-be-unconfined state that can only occur spontaneously, among artists who have been working at it together for years.

Napoli is a cornucopia of dancing both classical and folk. Tina Højlund and Thomas Lund were terrific in the leading roles of Teresina and Gennaro. Lund, who looks like a character dancer and has, indeed, made a fine start on such roles (playing Geert in Kermesse in Bruges, for example), also happens to be the most adept Bournonville stylist on the male side of the RDB roster. On this occasion, he coupled perfection of technique with acting so observant in its detail, so guileless and deep in its feeling, you wished Bournonville himself could see how this faithful heir was tending his legacy.

Højlund, who combines delicious looks and wiles with a penchant for hot-tempered roles, was perfectly cast as Teresina. Though she hasn’t been awarded the official rank of principal dancer, she’s one of the most interesting, gifted, and unusual performing artists in the company—a natural mover and dramatic to the core. Sometimes I imagine her doing Lynn Seymour’s roles (say Frederick Ashton’s Six Dances in the Manner of Isadora Duncan), sometimes Nora Kaye’s (Hagar in Tudor’s Pillar of Fire, in particular).

The pas de six, one of the ballet repertoire’s grandest occasions for dancing, was peopled by stars (Gudrun Bojesen, the most typically Danish of the company’s ballerinas; Caroline Cavallo; Gitte Lindstrom; Mads Blangstrup; and Andrew Bowman—and one possible star in the making, Femke Mølbach Slot, a diminutive young woman with a piquant face and long limbs that imprint bold calligraphy on the air.

Among the slew of character dancers that the ballet features, I especially enjoyed the work of Jette Buchwald, who makes a salty Veronica, the mom who tries to get her daughter to marry rich, then succumbs to the persuasions of true young love, and of Flemming Ryberg, who creates a duly amusing yet etched-in-acid Lemonade Seller.

All of the ensemble work was distinguished for its energy, precision, and intense desire to please. For this, surely, the company’s regisseurs should share in the glory due to the dancers.

My main reservation about the present staging has to do with the rushed pace at which the score is now played. Allegro passages are taken so fast that the mime, of necessity, has grown smaller, lighter, and sketchier. In the past few years, it’s become more like careless throwaway pedestrian gesture—the physical vocabulary of ordinary life—than a theatrical language that has weight and meaning, one that is an imperative foil to the danced passages in Bournonville when the ballets are presented in their full-length form. With the mimed “conversations” conducted at top speed, the ostensible listening party has no time to listen before responding. After we’ve seen our heroine embark on a midnight sail with her fiancé in his fishing boat and witnessed the subsequent furious, lightning-laced storm (meteorologic turbulence indicating dramatic furor), the fearful answer “Out there on the water!” from a person in the crowd comes before another’s desperate question “Oh, God, where is she?”—and its import—has been absorbed. No wonder the audience is at sea.

This flaw affects most of the ballets, not just Napoli, and it is a grave one. Capable of remedy, yes, but only if the company is willing to reconsider its attitude toward the mime element in the Bournonville ballets and entertain the idea that, in this area, older ways are best. There is a senior generation of RDB dancers—some retired, some still performing character roles—who remember “how it used to be.” Might they not be summoned to transmit this essential aspect of Bournonville to their successors before it disappears?

Tyl & Trikot—Bournonvilles Balletkostumer / Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen / May 14-June 12, 2005

An essential part of the Bournonville Festival now under way in Copenhagen is the plethora of exhibitions mounted all around town—and in some outlying, Bournonville-associated, districts as well. These shows complement the thrill, the rush, and the essentially ephemeral nature of the Royal Danish Ballet’s stage productions with a contemplative consideration, in various aspects, of the master choreographer’s work. Faithful readers of SEEING THINGS, knowing my love for costume, onstage as well as off, will understand why I chose to discuss threads first.

Curated by the theater historian Viben Bech, Tyl & Trikot—Bournonvilles Balletkostumer (think of it in English as Tutus & Tights) has all the right ideas. Even the posters for the show that you encounter as you enter the fabulous National Museum (a Viking-rich contender among the world’s top natural history institutions) tell their story well. One poster shows a man’s costume; the other, a woman’s. Both images are blurred, as if they’ve been set in whirling motion by the dancers inhabiting them. Then, just before you enter the exhibition itself, you can examine a quartet of three-dimensional mock-ups of the scenography for the Royal Theatre’s Bournonville productions, including the strikingly stark, half-abstract one just created for Kermesse in Bruges by Rikke Juellund. These maquettes can be viewed not only from the front but also from both sides, as if you were scoping out the stage from the wings.

After this prologue, you enter a vast room, darkened as if for performance, down-lights illuminating just the things you need to see and shutting out, as performance at its best does, whatever is extraneous—in other words, the distracting particulars of the so-called real world. The display seemed so rich, I cautiously started on its periphery. Lining three walls of the space are still photos of the Bournonville ballets that date back to the very start of the twentieth century and record, in close-up, what the choreographer’s unforgettable characters wore over the decades. Often, images of the same moments in a given ballet, as performed in different eras, are displayed side by side, allowing you to see—distinctly, incontrovertibly—the evolution of the costuming. You can compare, say, what Eleonore and her Carelis wore in Kermesse in Bruges for their pas de deux of shy yet ardently escalating young love in 1900 and then in 1966 or how the cadets in Far from Denmark (traditionally played by a contrasting pair of soubrette-type girls piquantly masquerading as naval youths) were fitted out in 1866 and 2004. The surprising conclusion these comparisons offer is proverbial: the more things change, the more they remain the same. Costumes for Bournonville, from his time to our time, tend to show more family resemblance than they do difference. Periods in which rebellious experiment produced radical changes (as is happening right now with Kermesse in Bruges), were often followed by a “corrective” return to more conservative design, as if Bournonville’s visualization of his ballets still had considerable power. A footnote, as it were: The photos also provide a telling indication of how the pointe shoe has evolved. Indeed, you could spend a rapt hour with these images, studying the footgear alone and inferring from it a good deal about the ongoing development of the dancers’ technique.

A fourth wall is devoted to costume designers’ sketches, including the watercolors of today’s Danish queen, Margrethe II, for both the uncouth trolls and the soulful hero of A Folk Tale. (Just the other day, a dancer acquaintance of mine reported that Queen Margrethe was at the dress rehearsal of the ballet she designed, “making sure that all the hats were on straight.”) A good many of these sketches, done primarily for practical reasons (some even have swatches of the fabric to be used appended to them), are also pleasing examples of the illustrator’s art. I especially admired those of Edvard Lehmann, contemporary with Bournonville, and those of Lars Juhl, from the last quarter of the twentieth century.

And then you come to the beating heart of the exhibition—angled rows upon rows of actual costumes, suspended at leg’s length from the floor on black torsos that fade into the prevailing darkness so that the costume itself appears to float in space, taking on, for the moment, a life independent of a dancer. Most important, the arrangement deftly permits you to see each costume from various angles, as if it were a piece of sculpture, which is no more than it deserves.

The most brilliant stroke in the display is a line of identical La Sylphide tutus, a bodiless corps de ballet that diagonals up to the faraway ceiling of the space as if soaring to the heavens, all gossamer lightness, the sole adornment on the clouds of white tulle a few pale, fragile petals. On the floor beneath these truly Romantic tutus, caged in a Lucite box, is a near-transparent pair of wings, the attachments that will allow them, with luck, to fall to the ground as the chief Sylphide herself dies, the victim of miscalculated love, clearly visible to the insatiably curious balletomane.

As always, the display of costumes literally within one’s reach is fascinating, allowing you to understand how each one must feed the spectator’s (and perhaps the dancer’s) fantasy and yet withstand the brutal wear and tear it’s subject to in performance. The items on view here have all been lovingly and immaculately preserved. Their condition made me think of the Gertrude Stein line (used, incidentally, in a ballet by Ashton) about “a gown newly washed and pressed.” The labels add further resonance, telling you not merely which ballet (and specifically which scene) an item comes from and which character it was designed for, but also which dancer wore it. For the aficionado, this naming of names evokes ballet history with a personal punch.

One advantage of an exhibition like this is that you learn far more about the costumes than you possibly could merely from the on-the-run glimpses of them you get in performance. As the promotional flyer for the show claims, “Costumes usually only seen at a distance on stage will be right there in front of you.” But the display is more than simply useful. It is oddly poignant as well, bearing out the claim of Tine Sander, who heads the Royal Theatre’s costume department, that “a good ballet costume has its own artistic soul.”

Photo: Nationalmuseet

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

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