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

Bournonville’s Konservatoriet is known and loved both in Copenhagen and internationally for its Degas-like evocation of classes in the dance academy of the Paris Opera. The young Bournonville had studied there in the 1820s, and this is his tribute—created in 1849, just after he had retired from performing—to the scene and, by extension, to the French Romantic ballet. Here, in a studio redolent with echoes of the past, ravishing—and challenging—enchaînements (some of which we meet again in the Friday Class of the Bournonville Schools) are delivered in the charming context of a lesson that involves a ballet master, a pair of sisterly (or is it, ever so sweetly, rival?) ballerinas, a decorative small ensemble, and an appealing cluster of children being apprenticed to the stage.

This atmosphere-infused section, however, was only part of Bournonville’s original Konservatoriet. It was set, in two parts, into a colorful, gaily rendered story in sit-com mode indicated by the ballet’s subtitle, A Marriage Proposal by Advertisement. The full ballet was restored to the RDB repertory in 1995, from memory, by Kirsten Ralov and Niels Bjørn Larsen, who had danced in it as children in the 1930s. The ebullient tale, destined to end happily, involves the Inspector of a dance academy who—without youth, good looks, intelligence, or personal charm to recommend him—seeks a wealthy wife through the personal columns and the gifted little dancing daughter of impoverished itinerant performers, who yearns to gain admittance to the heavenly world of classical dancing. As a child, Ralov played the little girl, Fanny; Larsen had only a minor part, but hoped, in the fullness of time, to play the Inspector and so studied the role closely.

In its Festival performance, the dance academy sequence was well rendered by children, ensemble, and soloists alike. It was here that I saw most clearly how the company has chosen to dance its Bournonville today. It’s a contemporary take on the old style that offers some gains and some truly regrettable losses. In terms of technique, the dancing is conspicuously stronger and clearer than it was at the first Bournonville Festival in 1979; this is evident even in the children’s work, with no loss of the spirited quality that distinguishes the pupils of the RDB school. The work of the adult dancers is bigger and bolder than it used to be, but increased precision and force have come at the sacrifice of some of the delicacy, buoyancy, and fluidity that once made Danish dancing so singular and delightful. And of course, what with the RDB’s repertory expanding to include more and more assignments entirely alien to the Bournonville style, it was inevitable that the dancers would no longer be able to dance their Bournonville as if nothing were more natural. Still, looking at the work of Yao Wei (one of the lead women in Konservatoriet) and that of Gudrun Bojesen and Thomas Lund (just about everywhere else), you could hope that some happy reconciliation might yet be effected between the old ways and the new.

The anecdotal sections of Konservatoriet were, needless to say, dependent on the performers’ mime skills. The stand-out here was Paul-Erik Hesselkilde in the role of the Inspector. As is typical of the RDB’s veteran mimes, Hesselkilde takes a large measure of responsibility for building his character, working from the basics the choreographer has outlined. His Inspector is an aging, self-important, rather stupid fellow, decidedly short on human sympathy. He’s rudely ungrateful to the faithful old housekeeper he’d once promised to marry and curtly dismisses poor little Fanny because she can’t pay for lessons. Yet, as often happens with potential bad guys in Danish ballet, he turns out to be only foolish and, actually, rather sweet. Hesselkilde is got up to look physically unprepossessing, rather Tweedledum/Tweedledee-ish, and he has devised a complementary fumbling manner for the Inspector that belies the character’s superficial bluster. The whole thing is done with a very quiet sense of humor. This performance has absolutely nothing show-offy about it. It simply grows on you until you come to sympathize with the character, who seems to have slipped out of a novel by Trollope.

At the curtain calls for Konservatoriet, the company paid onstage tribute to Hesselkilde, who was celebrating his 40 years at the Theatre—though, mind you, he’s in no way ready to retire. The presentation of an outsize laurel wreath was duly accompanied by kind words, kisses and bear-hug embraces, floral and alcoholic offerings. Immediately afterward, Hesselkilde was feted backstage in typical RDB fashion, with serious, touching speeches from top management and a sardonically funny one from a colleague; still more gifts; a screened excerpt from a past triumph (as a wry, idiosyncratic Drosselmeier in The Nutcracker); and a hilarious live takeoff on another of his signature roles—the Eskimo dance from Far from Denmark. But backstage is another story.

Photo: Martin Mydtskov Rønne: Gitte Lindstrøm, Thomas Lund, and Gudrun Bojesen in August Bournonville’s Konservatoriet

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

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

Some of the most wondrous dancing in the Bournonville Festival came not from the ballet-by-ballet excursion through the master’s extant works on the Royal Theatre’s capacious, ornate Old Stage, but from a half dozen 45-minute sessions on the stark, small Stærekassen stage—one each for the six Bournonville Schools. These set classes formed the backbone of the Danish dancers’ training from the end of the nineteenth century through the first three decades of the twentieth and are still revered (and used) as a lexicon of the Bournonville style.

The classes, named for the days of the week and originally danced on the corresponding day (if we’re doing Wednesday Class, it must be Wednesday), were the work of Hans Beck, who led the Royal Danish Ballet from 1894 to 1915. Fearing that the Bournonville legacy might be lost, he canvassed the older dancers’ personal memories of Bournonville’s teaching. The Danes being, until our forget-everything times, compulsive recorders, many of the elders had made written notes of enchaînements they had particularly admired or—despite their fiendish intricacy—enjoyed doing. These eventually came to be accompanied by tunes that, though mostly lowbrow in quality, had an undeniable dansant quality. Augmenting this material with brief passages from the ballets, Beck made his compilations, which were then passed down, dancer to dancer, in the manner of oral literary tradition. In 1979, the late Kirsten Ralov, after much consultation with the dancers of her own generation and the preceding one, gave the classes their first published form—the choreography set down in words as well as formal dance notation, plus the accompanying scores. (This meticulous, exhaustive recording lacks only the naughty lyrics some of the male dancers devised to accompany the tunes, to relieve the boredom of executing the same exercises over and over again, from pupilhood to retirement.)

The 2005 Bournonville Festival has been the occasion for an amplification of Ralov’s project, with the enchaînements reedited after further research and, most significant, a DVD on which one can see the dancers of today executing the material. The importance of the visual component is enormous. Dance scholars and teachers will no doubt benefit from reading the texts of the choreography, but dancers themselves live by watching and doing. The gift of the material in embodied form is so generous as to constitute folly. As one of the Danes associated with the project commented wryly, “Would Carlsberg give out, almost for free, its recipe for beer?”

The Stærekassen lecture-demonstrations of the Schools were led by Anne Marie Vessel Schlüter, once a spirited demi-caractère dancer with the RDB and now the energetic head of its school, who celebrated her 40 years with the company during the Festival. Her pithy introductions to the material were seconded by guest speakers who’ve had a lifetime’s association with the Bournonville legacy, among them Flemming Ryberg, one of the company’s senior Bournonville stylists; Erik Aschengreen, fondly called the dean of Danish dance critics; and the musicologist Ole Nørlyng. Then, as is only right, the talking gave way to dancing. On a given day, a lavish selection of the enchaînements belonging to that day’s class were performed by a handful of company dancers and children from the school—all as disarming in their modest demeanor as they are formidable in their prowess.

This was Bournonville laid bare. Without the support of story or scenography, here was the pure dance material, the ingenious combination of steps that excited the admiration of no less a dance master than Balanchine. These are some of the things I noticed:

First off, a pervasive buoyancy and musicality. And then . . .

Pirouettes of every sort, often taken with the working foot held demurely low, at the ankle, rather than the knee, as is now the custom. Turns on half-toe for the women, who are now used to executing them on pointe. These throwbacks to the past confront today’s dancers with humbling challenges.

Small jumps adorned with flickering beats; huge sailing leaps with the back leg curved as if to outline a crescent moon.

Whirling turns and straight-up jumps springing without hesitation from juicy deep knee-bends.

Unusual shifts in balance; unexpected changes of direction; sly timing that keeps both dancer and viewer alert.

Formidably long enchaînements that zigzag through the space, incorporating everything but the kitchen sink—allegro and adagio; steps that make much of returning to a single spot on the dancing ground; others that skim over it in a diagonal path or shoot away from earth into the air; filigreed stuff suddenly splurging out into grand gestures; big moves returning to a home base that is all quiet composure.

Shifts off the vertical on the ground and, uncannily, in the air.

Unanticipated brief halts in the action so that the finish of a step is held in a frozen picture, revealing any flaw that ongoing action might kindly have concealed.

And, while the legs and feet are so busy, a complementary use of the arms (often held low, still and relaxed), the shoulder girdle, and the head—even the eyes’ glance. These tactics, called épaulement, give the dancing its beautiful plasticity and its look of sculpture that has miraculously taken on flesh and breath.

The intention throughout is to execute the killer combinations (altogether there are some 150 of them) with playful grace, so that the spectator’s impression will not be that of an amazingly built physical machine attempting the impossible but, simply, one of danseglæde, the joy of movement. Buy the DVD and its accompanying book and try it.

Photo: Henrik Stenberg: Caroline Cavallo, Mads Blangstrup, and Gudrun Bojesen in Friday Class from the Bournonville Schools.

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

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

Bournonville’s Far from Denmark is a seemingly frivolous, trifling ballet about life at sea, but it’s anchored by poignant feeling. The Danish navy, from grizzled veterans to barely adolescent apprentices, finds itself harbored in Argentina—one of the exotic Elsewheres of Bournonville’s imagination—where passions are given a brief holiday from the decorum of Danish conduct. Though he has a fiancée (whom we never see) waiting for him back home, Wilhelm, a young lieutenant, succumbs to the seductions of Rosita, a South American belle. By turns languorous and fiery, she’s something of a man collector as well, though she has her own local steady beau, predictably hot-tempered in his jealousy. Mind you, this is Bournonville, so Wilhelm’s infatuation with Rosita never goes beyond flirtation. The Danish sailors invite the Argentineans to an evening ball on board their ship, where the two cultures mutually offer gracious respect and homegrown entertainment. In the course of the hectic festivities, Wilhelm realizes where his heart truly lies. When the visitors depart, the Danish sailors let loose in a succession of shenanigans frat partyers might indulge in if they were given to dancing and happened to have a chest of outlandish costumes handy.

The story, with its themes of loyalty—fidelity in love, patriotic fervor—unfolds, largely in mime balanced by social and character dance, in the most leisurely, relaxed manner imaginable. It juxtaposes the gentlest of sentiments—love of the familiar and of the exotic, longing for what one has lost or will never have—with rough, raucous humor. To say that it is typically Danish would be redundant.

A word to the p.c. police: You’re warned to stay away from this ballet, because once you see it, you’ll feel obliged to shut it down. The Argentinean upper class it represents, entirely Caucasian, is served by mulatto servants rendered as garish caricatures. The tolerant will view this as an aspect of vintage theatrical convention. Others will be understandably appalled, embarrassed, insulted, even outraged. The fact that, in its second half, the ballet makes gross fun of a handful of other non-dominant communities—Eskimo, Native American, Chinese—and, perhaps, in the various uses of cross-dressing, of non-standard sexual preferences as well, doesn’t help any. While the viewer is in exasperated mode, he or she might care to note, moreover, that the only black faces in the Royal Danish Ballet’s productions owe their existence to the deeper hues of pancake makeup.

My own main complaint about the present production is that it looks as if the company has lost confidence in the ballet. The dancers don’t seem to inhabit their characters, to know—or to be interested in—who they are. (Mads Blangstrup is certainly the right Romantic type for Wilhelm, but he doesn’t seem to have invested enough imagination or energy in the role.) What’s more, there hasn’t been much perspicacity in the casting. (Marie-Pierre Greve makes a pretty Rosita but not an alluring one.) The practice of using senior members of the company to add an important social dimension and a gracious dignity to the shipboard party has been abandoned. (The presence of the elders may now be thought a minor concern, yet I’ll never forget Lillian Jensen, playing one of these roles in her sixties, dancing gravely and just “being there.”)

The once-tender elements of the ballet are no longer properly realized. The piquantly matched pair of cadets (young women playing young men) exaggerate their pertness, rather than delivering the sweet melancholy that’s required in the scene in which one of them gets a letter from home and the other doesn’t. Another key moment barely registers—the one in which, despite the formal hands-across-the-sea courtesies between the Danes and the Argentineans, a young naval recruit, barely into his teens, impetuously comes forward to kneel before the Danish flag and reverently kiss its hem. The “ethnic” dances, for the most part, lack the raw energy, the gleeful abandon in the absurd portrayals, and, most significant, the irony at which the Danes are so expert.

The diminished Far from Denmark demonstrates, once again, the fact that the company is no longer as eloquent in mime as it once was. The current production of this ballet suggests, further, that it no longer finds yesteryear’s forms of theater as compelling as it once did. This development was inevitable, I suppose, but it bodes no good for the Bournonville repertory.

Photo: Martin Mydtskov Rønne: Marie-Pierre Greve in August Bournonville’s Far from Denmark

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

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?

Photo: Martin Mydtskov Rønne: Tina Højlund and Thomas Lund in August Bournonville’s Napoli

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

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

2005 is the 200th birthday of August Bournonville, the dancer, choreographer and ballet master who gave the Royal Danish Ballet its distinctive profile. To mark the occasion, the company has organized the 3rd Bournonville Festival, which will take place in Copenhagen, June 3-11. All of the Bournonville ballets that are still danced today will be performed on the stage of the Royal Theatre, along with the codified classes devised to preserve the choreographer’s unique style. A host of museum exhibitions will complement these events. The first Bournonville Festival took place in 1979, the 100th anniversary of Bournonville’s death, and the occasion has become legendary. I wrote an account of it for Dance magazine (March 1980) that I offer here as background for the reports I’ll be making on the coming Festival.

THE FESTIVAL IN COPENHAGEN

It’s almost impossible to dismiss affection in talking about the Royal Danish Ballet’s dancing Bournonville. Perhaps one shouldn’t.

To mark the centenary of the choreographer’s death, the company staged a week of performances, November 24-30, 1979, of the Bournonville ballets that have survived into the present: La Sylphide (1836), Napoli (1842), Konservatoriet (1849), Kermesse in Bruges (1851), A Folk Tale (1854), La Ventana (1854; 1856), the pas de deux from The Flower Festival in Genzano (1858), Far from Denmark (1860), and The King’s Volunteers on Amager (1871). Although August Bournonville is among the three or four pivotal choreographer-ballet masters of the nineteenth century, and indisputably the most significant figure in the history of Danish dance, the majority of these works are rarely seen complete outside their native environment. The mounting delight of the audience in the course of the week’s showings—culminating in jubilant ovations unprecedented in this sedate theater—established a bond among the spectators and between the spectators and artists that promised to be cherished and enduring.

The audience was an international one: dance fans, scholars, and critics—Americans especially—converged on Copenhagen for the Festival. Nightly performances were given in the jewel-box Royal Theatre (built in the last years of Bournonville’s career), which allows an intimacy lost in our formidable opera houses. In addition, there was a profusion of complementary exhibitions and events. Among them, the Bournonville collection assembled at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts was a miracle of particularizing and revivifying the past—through its displays of costumes and stage designs, convoluted manuscripts and diagrams that notated the ballets’ choreography and production details, the brown-inked diaries that became My Theatre Life (the choreographer’s autobiography, recently published by Wesleyan University Press in Patricia McAndrew’s long-awaited English translation), the raised chair from which Bournonville oversaw classes, his ballet-master stick, and old postcard-photos of several decades of performers. Depicted among these charming souvenirs were Juliette, Sophie, and Amalie Price, for whom Bournonville made the affectionate Pas des Trois Cousines, and their descendant, Ellen Price, the model for the statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, who gazes out wistfully over Copenhagen’s harbor.

Some forty ranking professionals (one wishes the protocol had been somewhat more relaxed) were also treated to events such as a lecture-demonstration by Kirsten Ralov (the company’s assistant director) on the raked stage of the old Court Theatre, where Bournonville danced as a boy, and to a fascinating inch-by-inch tour of the present theater. This visit disclosed an intricate backstage world with inventive, old-fashioned mechanics for stage magic—the device that flies the Sylph heavenward, for example, complete with its two child-sized safety harnesses for her attendant sylphlings.

There were videotape and film screenings of Bournonville-related material, ranging from the Peter Elfelt fragments showing Royal Danish Ballet dancers at the turn of the century, through homemade footage of the “lost” Romeo and Juliet Frederick Ashton choreographed on the company in 1955, to contemporary television productions tackling the subject of “Bournonville now.” (This is a thorny problem for the Danish dance world, which tends to be ambivalent about its national treasure.) Aside from lively intermission conversations, there were impromptu convocations (fueled by supplies from the all-night smørrebrød shop) to marvel at and argue about what was being seen and formal receptions glowing in their traditional Danish candlelit welcome. One felt embraced by the occasion.

And then there was the city itself. Copenhagen is a walker’s town. One comes to believe, without much exaggeration, that one can encompass the entire city on foot, strolling from the Town Hall Square with its landmark clock-in-the-tower, to the Royal Theatre at Kongens Nytorv, to the antique-and-rare-book haunts of the University Quarter; from canal to harbor to the park-with-a-windmill built on the spiraling city ramparts. The major streets are graciously wide, with long stretches closed to traffic; these are lined with shops, many of which specialize in gleaming china and glass dining ware. The main thoroughfares branch off into crooked byways that invite you to discover, serendipitously, the charm of an old house—a tiny, turquoise-tinted row house, perhaps, where Hans Christian Andersen (a would-be ballet dancer once, and Bournonville’s friend) lived for a decade, or tranquil Old World courtyards overlooked by the windows of fastidiously cared-for homes.

The predominant style of architecture is a Dutch Baroque, which gives any building short of a palace a cottagey look. The palaces themselves—the Amalienborg, where tin-soldier sentries pace up and down, guarding their queen, and Christianborg Castle, which might be the setting for a medieval fable—are human in scale, as is everything in the city. The Round Tower, designed for astronomical observation, is a mere 115 feet high. The bourgeois temperament prevails everywhere: While Copenhagen is undeniably one of the world’s pornography capitals, the pharmaceutical matter-of-factness with which sexually titillating devices are displayed is more amusing than arousing, while subtler examples of eroticism are rather like the sculpture chosen by the Glyptotek Museum for its house poster—Gerhard Henning’s Reclining Nude, ingenuous in her sensuality.

The complement of this snug, delectable comfort and human proportion is the sudden incidence of chimerical architecture—the Stock Exchange, built for sober, pragmatic transactions, is crowned with the twined tails of four copper dragons—and of sites like illusions: rising out of nowhere there’s a cobblestone hill, studded with slender, gnarled trees growing out of little clearings.

The November weather was characteristic of early winter in Scandinavia: wet, often stingingly cold, the daytime sky taking on the silvery gray-green tinge of the nearby sea. By four each afternoon, the long, luminous twilight had set in and a sliver of moon hovered over the dark, grooved roofs of the city. Intriguing as it was to walk by the hour in this strangely silent fantasy land, it was then all the more pleasant to come inside and envelop oneself in the peculiarly Danish hearth-culture, where heat, light, the hospitality of the table, and easy, open friendliness provide not just homely luxury but a sense of immutable security.

Bournonville’s ballets do constitute a special—and inimitable—kind of theater. The classical-dance element of it, which has been excerpted for presentation to audiences in the United States by both Danish and American performers, is but one strand in the fabric of a complete Bournonville work. The distinct character of this element—its buoyant, dancey quality, the purity and modernity of its reliance on the very essentials of movement: steps themselves and the links between them—is worth detailed study; I’ve written some about it earlier in these pages (Dance magazine, August and September 1976).

Of the works shown in the Festival, Konservatoriet best elucidates the choreographic intelligence Bournonville exercised with this material. Using a demonstration of the danse d’école as its pretext, the ballet begins by slyly captivating the eye with its nostalgic pictorial evocation of a Parisian ballet studio in the Romantic era. It strews visual cameos throughout—typically, fragile jeunes filles in gossamer skirts, bending to tie the ribbons of their pointe shoes. But dancing itself is predominant from the very first moment, which introduces a company—in a devilish unison adagio combination—and proceeds by means of a chain of little cluster dances. A duet for a pair of women, which begins in canon and segues into unison, is followed by a trio, then a second duet—now for a man and a woman—and so forth. The edges even of the solos seem erased, so that the singled-out performer flows from, and back into, the ongoing wave of activity. The groupings mildly imply information about relationships—for instance, that of the faintly peacockish ballet master to a pair of sisterly yet rivalrous prize pupils. But the dance material demonstrates what this assemblage of people has in common: Konservatoriet is a ballet about ballon.

La Ventana, a chamber ballet, evidences the same choreographic sagacity. It is a suite of fiery but chaste Spanish-influenced dances, linked by an anecdote. A señorita is presented in a witty version of a venerable theatrical trick: She and her mirror-image double often move back to back, maintaining the “reflection” without eye contact. Next we have the solo unabashedly made to show off the señorita’s charms—the élan of her dancing, as much as its technical prowess. Then we meet her admiring señor, a trio of their “friends” who supply the virtuoso turn (with its treacherous pitched arabesques, its redoubtable batterie and aerial work), and a small ensemble that serves as a kind of animated-scenery back-up. The remarkable thing about this epicyclic construction is that the organization of the dance appears utterly causal on the surface; interestingly, the work had its genesis as a pièce d’occasion.

The ballet’s use of local color is typically Bournonvillean—a benign, tamed version of the Romantic artist’s longing for the exoticism of faraway places. (Similarly, La Sylphide is set in the Highlands, Kermesse has a Dutch locale and flavor, while Napoli, like several other Bournonville ballets now lost, takes its inspiration from Italy.) The dancing never forsakes its balletic base, but the succeeding numbers grow gradually more ethnic in flavor, building to the desired flashy and festive climax.

One of the points brought home by the Festival was that the most inventive and seemingly self-contained of Bournonville’s pure-dance sequences acquire an added dimension when they are seen embedded in the ballets to which they belong. Flower Festival in Genzano has fallen into regrettable—perhaps reprehensible—oblivion, so its lovers’ duet, a favorite in the international repertory, could be presented at the Festival with no supplementary information beyond what two very different casts might
afford. By contrast, the complete production of Kermesse in Bruges exposes the narrative and emotional significance of what seem merely grace-note gestures or congenial spatial designs when its popular Act I pas de deux is performed out of context. The hands extended and withdrawn, the young man’s and woman’s leaning toward each other, then traveling sideways to meet, cross, and retreat, only to step forth again with burgeoning confidence, are all part of the characterization of shy lovers-at-first-sight.

Similarly the Act I ballabile of Napoli, which seems happily self-sufficient in the contextless Bournonville Divertissements Stanley Williams staged for the New York City Ballet, tells us a great deal about Bournonville’s sophisticated strategies of story-weaving and multi-layered construction when it is presented in its intended surround. The dance, dense with interest in itself, serves also as a matrix for the plot. Threaded through its craftily varied group-dance expressions of youthful joie de vivre are the crucial steps in the story: the hero and heroine’s departure for a midnight sail that will end in an encounter with the supernatural and near-tragedy.

Elsewhere in Bournonville’s ballets, it would seem that pure-dance sequences are inserted merely to provide that type of heightened—athletic and highly stylized—dance interest, because of a felt need on the choreographer’s part, or simply to complete the menu of movement ingredients at a given point. In this category I’d put the third act pas de deux of Kermesse in Bruges, the gypsy pas de sept in A Folk Tale—both masquerade, a bit flimsily, as “entertainment” within the situational structure—and the pas de trois in the second act of The King’s Volunteers. These entries strike me as nearly superfluous in their context, given the more organic meshing of the other components and, particularly, the richness of the mime. An idiosyncratic opinion, no doubt, but then I’m repeatedly astounded by critics who applaud the “real” (read bravura) dancing in Bournonville and find the mime dull. It seems to me that if you’re not intently interested in the mime element in Bournonville’s ballets, you can’t possibly like, or even comprehend, Bournonville’s theater.

The most exquisite and sustained illustrations of Bournonville’s nuanced use of pantomime are the first acts of his surviving “vaudeville ballets”: the deliciously bizarre Far from Denmark—which culminates in a series of guilelessly defamatory dance cartoons of national types (nose-rubbing Eskimos, raunchy American Indians)—and The King’s Volunteers on Amager. In both, an entire story is unfolded in leisurely mimed conversations. These gesture colloquies move to the music in phrasing that is rhythmic, but more relaxed and irregular than that of dancing; it makes you think of a spoken song. As in Frederick Ashton’s Enigma Variations, which is the only dance work I know that is anything like these, the action proceeds in vignettes delineating ordinary and rather unemphatic behavior that is intermittently flooded with deep feeling. A poignant sequence in Far from Denmark begins with the delivery of the sailors’ mail: The second of a heartbreakingly young pair of cadets gets no letter from home; turning to the piano to assuage his grief with music, by bittersweet irony he plays an accompaniment to the luckier cadet’s reading his letter. And, from the shifting play of expression over that dancer’s face, you can guess the contents of the page, word for word. (I should mention here that the sociable dimensions of the Royal Theatre allow you to “read” the performers’ faces, and their smallest gestures, from nearly every seat. The dancers behave accordingly; no detail of the pantomime is falsified by being pushed.)

In the more complex and ambitious King’s Volunteers, the drama of the story is seamlessly woven into a double layer of daily household pursuits: Two interrelated planes of activity are visible at once—a hearth-warmed indoors and a snowy outdoors. This is not simply a lovely bit of craftsmanship. An observation is being made of how people’s little romantic adventures—meaning anguish or ecstasy to them—slip with only the slightest ripple into the ongoing, workaday life of a community. The sum of Bournonville’s extant works clearly indicates that this choreographer put a moral value on the stability and continuity promised by middle-class homeliness. In these mime scenes an artistic value is implied too. In the loving depiction of commonplace detail, Bournonville shares the pleasure and wonder evinced by the seventeenth-century Dutch genre painters in “the thingness of things.”

The second act of The King’s Volunteers, in which the romantic plot winds through a communal Shrovetide celebration, reinforces these ideas and posits yet another, again typical of Bournonville: that of dancing’s being the perfect metaphor for people’s personal and social intercourse. In a paradigmatic sequence, a ring of chairs occupies the major, central portion of the stage. Prosperous elderly peasants dance around it, then plump themselves, breathless, into the seats to watch a bevy of blooming young women and men perform a hoop dance. This group next separates into couples, who turn their U-shaped wreaths so that pairs of children—a third generation—can jump them, as if skipping rope. Finally the three generations join for a round dance, their concentric, counter-revolving circles an emblem for the group’s vigor and unity, yet never to the point of subsuming an individual body type or character or relationship—the stringy-figured, prissy-mouthed lady, for example, and her reluctant husband, grouchy and sciatic when he takes his wife’s hand, but already ogling his next partner.

All kinds of dancing are represented in this second act of The King’s Volunteers—with the emphasis aptly on the “folk” sorts—against a background of diverse human types engaged in eating, drinking, music-making, and conversational by-play. The drama builds to a climax in a burlesque dance laden with irony and is resolved with a long look exchanged by the two principals who are noticeable at that moment just because they are the only motionless figures on the stage. As with comparable passages in the Bournonville repertory—the opening and closing scenes of Kermesse come particularly to mind—you feel you can take in barely a tenth of what is going on; repeated viewings prove how carefully arranged and modulated these fecund stage pictures actually are.

For all the richness of the world Bournonville creates, there are worlds apart that he pointedly ignored. Missing from Bournonville’s theater is any sustained grappling with the elements of the erotic and the demonic with which most of the major Romantic inventors intuitively connected—and reveled in. Perhaps the vein of prudishness in his Biedermeier temperament that is acknowledged in his autobiography steered him away from the imaginative lures and presumed dangers of such material. Only in La Sylphide, which belongs to a relatively early phase of his choreographic development, does Bournonville come to grips with these subjects: In what can be taken as a parable of the artist’s pursuit of his muse, James forsakes the domestic security assured him in marrying Effie—his sweetheart in the prosaic world—to pursue the Sylph who represents the other-world of dreams and forbidden desires. He does so to his peril. It is only in this, of all his known ballets, that Bournonville allows an evil (personified by Madge, the witch who may in fact be the Sylph’s alter-ego) virulent enough to produce tragic consequences.

There’s no denying that, by following the path he did of sanguine sobriety, Bournonville cut himself off from a fertile area of creative investigation. I wonder, though, if an artist steeped in the turbulence and soul’s-jeopardy of the prevalent Romantic vein would have been capable of a work as singular and enchanting as Bournonville’s A Folk Tale. It is as shimmering, delicate, and self-contained as a soap bubble—the product of a unique imagination.

The argument of the ballet is a fairy-tale staple: an exchange of infants from dichotomous backgrounds who grow up to uncover their true nature. Here a human child of the gentry is secretly replaced in her cradle with a baby of the troll colony that lurks, half-hidden, in its under-the-mountain (that is, subconscious) domain. The switched girls grow to maidenhood, each instinctively revealing or seeking her roots. Although the human Hilda is promised by the dowager troll to the more loutish of her two sons, she yearns for an ideal goodness, which the ballet symbolizes, endearingly, by Christianity and the handsome young hero, Junker Ove. On the other hand, despite the gentility of her upbringing, Birthe remains a troll at heart and, aptly, in body. In one of the ballet’s most entertaining and psychologically keen sequences, she dances before a full-length mirror, in narcissistic, lyrical phrases—into which contorted troll-motions break uncontrollably.

The ballet contains a vestige of the themes of Romantic preoccupation—in the elf-maidens (a cross between the wilis and the nightgowned muses-with-flowing-hair in the Élégie section of Balanchine’s Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3) who emerge from their mountain caverns and swirl through the dry-ice fog to entrap Junker Ove, and in Ove himself, a sketchy indication of the morbidly dreamy temperament of the model Romantic hero. But the ostensible villains of the piece, the troll folk, feel harmless—because they are so quaint. (The second brother eventually grows as lovable as one of Snow White’s dwarfs.) This is a common folkloric device—subverting the potency of figures of mystery and fear by rendering them whimsically. But the real mark of Bournonville’s genius is that, at the same time, he is able to make the entire troll community a riotously accurate personification of the human race in its less attractive guises. I’m particularly fond of the show of self-congratulatory indulgence in the minor vices revealed at their orgy, but Bournonville’s deftest shaft may be in making the most characteristic attribute of these appalling creatures their bad manners.

Of course Bournonville, that inimitable proselytizer for joy, gives his story a happy outcome. What is remarkable about this closing scene in A Folk Tale is that one is wholly disarmed by the sweetness and purity of his means. The ballet ends, naturally, with the wedding of the lovers made for each other, Hilda and Ove. Imagine this sequence of images: six very young women (blond nymphets in pale green dresses, holding blossoming branches) softly waltzing; a slow processional, bland as a walk, for the wedding party, under wreaths of flowers; then, oddly slowed, the simplest of love pledges—the hand to the heart, then extended to the partner; a brief dance around a pastel-ribboned maypole; and the final assertion of the dulcet waltz motif accompanying a flurry of rose petals. Few artists could work with such trusting innocence.

The essential importance of the Festival for an observer new to the complete existing Bournonville repertory was simply to introduce the materials; a visiting critic’s first task was to understand the nature and scope of the ballets, not to attempt decisive judgments about their presentation. Still, some sort of evaluation of the productions and performances may be in order here.

Unfortunately, the primary question—that of authenticity—cannot begin to be answered by a foreign critic. It’s a hazy one even for Copenhageners. For lack of a continuous performance life in the Royal Danish Ballet’s repertory, many of Bournonville’s works have been lost altogether or eroded and altered. Even the scant documentation available to Danish-illiterate investigators tells us that substantial changes in the ballets have occurred through successive attempts to make them “more relevant to their times.” (This usually mean beefing up the technical virtuosity and cutting the mime.) Even the traditional and faithfully intended process of dancer-to-dancer transmission distorts choreography, in ways that are particularly invidious because they are at first nearly imperceptible. One wishes those responsible for the ballets over the decades had made a more conscientious and thoroughgoing use of notation and, when the media became available, film and videotape; one also wishes they had loved the works more.

Given the vagueness of our knowledge of what is echt Bournonville, it would be impudent for me even to say, This looked stylistically correct, that seemed false. It was a warning that the most incongruous-seeming piece of acting in the Festival, Arne Villumsen’s Bolshoi-style histrionics as Gennaro in Napoli when he thinks his beloved is drowned, is supported by the evidence of Bournonville’s own writings (cited in Allan Fridericia’s study of the ballet): “[Gennaro] is seized by despair. He breaks out in lamentation, demanding the return of his bride from the sea, from the sky, from the grave which has swallowed her. He rolls in the dust; mankind has forsaken him.”

I think most of us who visited Copenhagen in November are willing to admit we’re still at the grade-school level of studying Bournonville.

It’s safer and easier to talk about today’s Bournonville dancers. Axiomatic in the theater is the fact that casting will please only some of the artists and viewers concerned, and the casting of the Festival performances was no exception. Often it appeared illogical, unjust, even perverse. American dance observers, introduced to the excerptible portions of Bournonville danced by the small, independent touring group of RDB dancers, may have come to Copenhagen prejudiced in favor of those performers whose dance personalities they’d already taken to their hearts. Certainly many of us hoped to see more than we actually did of Dinna Bjørn’s delicate, lacy style; Lise Stripp’s brittle, angular elegance—so eerily reminiscent of Tanaquil LeClercq’s; and the young Bjarne Hecht’s quietly dazzling technique. True, Anne Marie Vessel’s gift for robust comic characterization was given scope in several plummy secondary roles. She and Bjørn were unforgettable in Kermesse as a pair of village girls temporarily jilted by their callow lovers—Vessel furious and Bjørn blubbering, both meanwhile dancing up a storm. Still the fact that Vessel’s vehement, volatile quality can permeate her pure-dance roles with equal effect was thoughtlessly ignored. Similarly, the Festival used Niels Kehlet’s vivid naturalness in mime roles—he was an ingenious Gert in Kermesse, playing several layers of comedy at once. But Kehlet, at forty-one still the company’s signal example of the ebullience that is Bournonville, was given only the reprise of Napoli in which to display that unique virtuosity that is a metaphor for joy.

On the other hand, the casting of Frank Andersen, whose classical dancing is rather craggy, in the character part of Gurn in La Sylphide—a role he invested with new sympathy—seemed to open a promising avenue for his development. The company’s finest male classical dancer is indisputably Ib Andersen, and he’s of the caliber of his illustrious predecessors, Peter Martins and Erik Bruhn. The Danish critics like to call him a typical Bournonville dancer, because of his vitality in allegro, but I think the clarity and brilliance that’s epitomized by the sizzling stretch of his legs and feet, coupled with his long, rangy line and casual style, make him a natural for the New York City Ballet, which, indeed, he joins this spring. Perhaps in anticipation of this event, he was relegated to leading the classical inserts in several works—where he shone consistently—and allotted only one fleshed-out role, the male lead in Kermesse, which he played with appropriately reticent charm.

If we are to predict by favor in casting, the company has picked Arne Villumsen as his intended successor. To me, Villumsen is one of those dancers who is all gift and no desire. He is tall, ideally proportioned, handsome in a jet-haired, olive-skinned, sleepy-eyed way that would give him Gennaro in Napoli on looks alone. He moves with a languid velvety ease that’s distinctive and agreeable, and his technique is pure. But his performance is all too frequently lackadaisical, as if he simply can’t bestir himself to bring his full attention and energy to the stage. The deficiency is not so glaring in A Folk Tale since its spacey hero is a cipher of a role, but James in La Sylphide requires enkindled dance intelligence in addition to scintillating virtuosity. Here Villumsen walked picturesquely through the part, waking up only to do his variation.

The Festival introduced foreign viewers to a number of ascending female dancers, among them Ann Kristin Hauge, notable for her pertness and sparkle, and the ground-skimming Heidi Ryom, who stands out even in a company full of audience-charmers. At present the RDB’s great white hope is the twenty-three-year-old Lis Jeppesen, who made an enchanting Hilda in A Folk Tale by playing nothing more than her own ingénue qualities: April freshness, downy softness and airiness in the dancing, and a canny use of her wide-set dark eyes, which made the changeling girl’s mime utterances, with their artless, impulsive emotions, precise and telling. The Danish critics are besotted with Jeppesen; I don’t yet see the artistry or the formidable technique they’d claim for her. I didn’t think she displayed the dance imagination required for the title role of La Sylphide—somehow she seemed only human, in spite of her gauzy dancing—and I suspect she can’t turn very well.

I had the feeling that Jeppesen’s star was rising at the expense of Mette-Ida Kirk (who was the company’s princess-apparent on the 1976 American tour). In the Festival week we saw Kirk as Hilda in one of the two immaculate, performance-like dress rehearsals of A Folk Tale to which critics were invited and as Eleonora, the shy young heroine of Kermesse in Bruges. While Kirk hasn’t the advantage of Jeppesen’s kittenish prettiness, her dancing is a marvel of clean-cut precision—almost to a fault, actually. You wish she’d relax and flow a little more—explore an elasticity she seems to display only inadvertently.

The Folk Tale rehearsals that were so important in allowing the visiting critics to learn an unfamiliar and utterly delightful ballet better than a single performance could permit also gave them an opportunity to see Annemarie Dybdal, in the alternate cast, as Birthe, the troll girl. Dybdal’s attractive solidity and exuberance suited her to the juicy role, which she performed with intuitive respect for the richness and integrity of the ballet’s style. Linda Hindberg took the part at the official performance and camped it. The week gave us rather more Hindberg than was necessary. Her slangy style is just right for her long limbs and sultry face and it contrasts refreshingly with the Danish Ballet’s customary rounded-and-polished manner, but her technical reliability is uneven. A lot of the time she’s exhilaratingly on target, but she’s careless about intermittent wobbly approximations.

On the whole, the company is weakest when it comes to the sheerly technical aspect of classical dancing. Although solo performers are more often than not adequate to the occasion, if not triumphant at it, you’re never confident that the ensemble is reliable through and through in terms of exactness and strength in allegro dancing, of fluidity, equilibrium, and purity of line in legato movement. Bournonville’s pure-dance sequences were performed with ravishing accuracy and aplomb one night, indifferently the next.

I presumed the reasons for this might be apparent in the classroom, particularly since the Royal Ballet’s classes—both the school’s and the company’s—are customarily firmly closed to observers. (A Danish colleague told me he’d been unable to see Stanley Williams teaching until Williams—the Danes’ most gifted and influential pedagogue since Vera Volkova—emigrated to the United States and the Danish critic visited his classes at the School of American Ballet.) A certain amount of determined persuasion allowed foreign critics to watch a single company class during the Festival week. I was assigned to the group attending Fredbjørn Bjørnsson’s men’s class; through luck, and a dancer’s generosity, I was able to watch a second—women’s class. Both were taken by some ninety percent of the personnel they were intended for, including nearly all the leading dancers, even if those soloists were slated to perform the same evening. While this indicates admirable discipline, loyalty, or both, and ensures consistency of style, it also barricades the company from the beneficial stimuli of outside influences and competition.

Neither class was the sort of truncated, carefully restrained tune-up affair common in our native companies during a strenuous performance season, but a thoroughgoing workout in which the dancers were evidently applying themselves seriously to correcting and expanding their technique. Everything was very finished and complete, beginning with a a calm methodical barre which, most noticeably in the women’s class, was faithfully executed with every last complementary port de bras and tilt of the head. A sober-spirited mood of daily drill pervaded both classes—a kind of civil-service atmosphere—which was offset here and there by a senior ballerina’s exquisite narcissism, the avidity of a handful of ambitious newcomers, a mischievous soloist’s giving a rakish twist to every other exercise, and Niels Kehlet’s dancing his entire barre.

Although neither session was one of the codified Bournonville classes, the ostensibly “international style” men’s class included many elements of the Bournonville school: an emphasis on accuracy and speed in footwork, combinations that included unsupported grands pliés and frequent unexpected volte-faces and that characteristically alternated light, small, beat-laden steps with broad, forceful leaps. Bournonvillean too were the equal emphasis on inside pirouettes, the dead-stop finishes in an immaculate fifth position, and the self-contained demeanor of the body in its shroud of personal space.

The men’s class was dogged but consistently interesting in its dynamic variety and the challenge issued by the demanding enchaînements; by the final twenty minutes only a third of the participants were capable of executing them. No specific attention was paid to pointe work in the women’s class—although the dancers are conspicuously deficient in this area, even granted the fact that a relaxed foot is attractive in the Bournonville work. I thought the session maddeningly foursquare rhythmically, but the dancers seemed not to notice; aside from one or two veterans who slipped out after the barre, the rest kept up with alacrity, struggling good-humoredly with some gargouillades, until the end.

A great distraction for me, in analyzing what I was seeing, was not just that the exposure was so curtailed and my naïveté about the milieu still so enormous, but the very novelty and pleasure of being there—the sense I had of layers and layers of history suddenly being animated. (Jørgen Leth’s recent film, On Dancing Bournonville, offers a view of the Degas-picturesque classroom, with its walls washed a soft gray-green, its elevated wooden dance floor that is like a miniature stage, complete to the lithe female dancers hauling away the moveable barres before the center work begins.) Watching the men fly across the space in huge assemblés and cabrioles, or hurtle in turning leaps straight downstage toward the observers as they do in the Napoli finale, seeing the succinct perfection of their small batterie executed in unison, watching the women zigzagging neatly two by two in feathery brisés—I found my judgment, already muted by the resonance of the past, suspended by the sheer kinetic wonder of the moment. In retrospect I can see that there may be a significant degree of incompatibility between the requirements of Bournonville dance and the Russian Vaganova training, that the orderly security and insularity of the Danish dancers’ situation may hold them back from daring certain levels of achievement. I doubt that I would have thought that five minutes after either class, though.

While the company may not be as athletically brilliant throughout as other world-ranking troupes, these dancers surely possess the most ingratiating and human manner of all. The unassuming modesty and frankness with which they present themselves is singularly refreshing in today’s dance world, which seems more and more to sustain itself on damn-it-all bravura and egocentric charisma. By contrast, the personal charm of the Royal Danish Ballet’s dancers is natural and reticent, as understated as their dancing. A viewer in their theater hardly notices the process through which his feeling of friendship with these artists grows into intimacy, it is so gentle and unforced.

One of the chief glories of the company is still its mime work. I don’t know that there are currently any virtuosi of the caliber of Gerda Karstens (now retired from the RDB). Just her photograph in the Royal Theatre’s retrospective as Madge in La Sylphide—a disheveled, gat-toothed, half-crippled old woman demonically laughing and gesticulating—is amazing in its reality and power. Still there were, continually, gratifying illustrations of the loving attention paid to mime work. In a single ballet—Napoli—half a dozen adroit dancer-actors appeared in hilarious, meticulously observed characterizations: Fredbjørn Bjørnsson’s endearingly gross macaroni seller, for example, hopelessly vying with Henning Kronstam’s lanky, only slightly cannier lemonade vendor for the flawless Teresina’s hand, and Niels Bjørn Larsen’s goggle-eyed street singer, soundlessly belting out his aria.

If I had to single out just one mime for verve and range, I think it would be Lillian Jensen, for her apple-cheeked farmer’s wife in The King’s Volunteers—the waddling, bobbing walk alone is masterful; for her earthy, self-possessed, petit-bourgeois mother in Kermesse, rubbing her hands together with cheerful greed when a pair of effete noblemen flirt with her daughters; and, above all, for her Muri in A Folk Tale, where each succeeding moment is a perfect accretion to her portrait of a flamboyantly vulgar troll matriarch whose deplorable instincts are absolutely human. In several ballets Mona Jensen seemed typecast as her counterfoil, in roles requiring a nun-like countenance and the kind of serene deportment that stands for unadulterated goodness. It was a wild and rewarding departure, then, to have her as the outrageously caricatured Creole inamorata non grata in Kermesse, padded out to opera-diva amplitude, flashing her garish train and maquillage as she swept along in pursuit of her wayward lover.

All of the mimes mentioned so far are past their strenuous dancing days, as are Solveig Østergaard, who gave us a gay and unembarrassed reading of the blithe, eye-rolling Medea—Bournonville’s innocently racist concept of a Negro servant—in Far from Denmark, and Sorella Englund, who played an unusual Madge, which she seemed to have built out from her body; her witch was long and bone-skinny, with a nervous, hysterical personality to match. The performance of these former ballerinas was satisfying evidence of the continuity a performing career in this company can have—beyond the dancer’s physical prime.

Perhaps the most touching example of this was the appearance of Kirsten Simone (the company’s prima of the 1960s) in The King’s Volunteers on Amager, as Louise, the wife temporarily betrayed by her husband, Edouard, who is an incorrigible ladies’ man. The sweetness and perfume Simone gave the character—entirely through mime—related directly to the stage personality she once projected through dancing. Her maturity and considerable beauty lent an interesting weight and autumnal sadness to the character’s situation without making it cloying or over-dramatic; the ballet is, in the end, a comedy, and Simone astutely brought off the fleeting changes of mood—the impetuous, mischievous inspiration, for instance, with which Louise resolves the affair, tricking her fickle husband into falling in love with her once more.

Simone was wonderful again as the rich widow in the final scene of Kermesse, where an entire village of characters is forced to dance uncontrollably and without respite—for her comic abandon. The willingness of the company’s “aristocracy” (Kronstam, the director and a former danseur noble, and Niels Kehlet, one of its greatest virtuosi, must be praised as well) to accept comedy’s most exacting challenge—allowing oneself to appear absurd—is as commendable as it is rare.

The richness of the mime element in the Bournonville ballets is not solely the creation of gifted individuals. In the famous crowd scenes—of Napoli, say, and Kermesse—it depends upon the action and interaction of the entire company, augmented by experienced extras, many of whom have been supering in these ballets since their university days. In the Festival performances the celebrated third act of Napoli was somewhat frozen, compared to the 1976 performances at the Met, in which every bystander seemed to have a name, an occupation, and a history, but Hans Brenaa’s staging of Kermesse was well-nigh perfect both in its mass effect and its detail. (This production and Kirsten Ralov’s mounting of A Folk Tale beg to be shown abroad while they are still fresh.)

The children of the venerable ballet school attached to the Royal Theatre are an intrinsic part of these scenes, displaying a beguiling combination of naturalness and precocious theatrical skill. It’s difficult to believe that the distorted little bodies and rude personalities—each carefully individuated—of the troldbørn in A Folk Tale belong to the same youngsters who appear as beautifully bred miniatures of the Romantic ballerinas and danseurs in Konservatoriet: sober-faced boys with already remarkable jumps, girls with corn-colored hair, grinning as they fling their legs ear-high.

Another of the company’s trump cards is its wholehearted concern and flair for the folk dance materials with which Bournonville flavors his works. The balleticized Spanish dancing in La Ventana, the Italian tarantella in Napoli, the Scottish reel in La Sylphide, the robust regional dances in Kermesse and The King’s Volunteers—each is rendered distinct in its movement attributes and with lusty pleasure. It’s perhaps through this particular dance component in the ballets that the viewer comes closest to a feeling of actual participation with the artists who recreate Bournonville’s world, sharing with them in a communal energy that gladdens the spirit.

Photo: August Bournonville, painting by Carl Bloch, 1876. Courtesy of the Royal Theatre, Copenhagen

© 1980 Tobi Tobias