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<\/a>New York City Ballet dancers in Bournonville Divertissements<\/em>. Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div>\n In 1930, the year following the death of Serge Diaghilev and the dissolution of his company, Les Ballets Russes, its dancers and choreographers roamed Europe in search of jobs. After a stint in London, George Balanchine found work in Copenhagen as a guest choreographer for the Royal Danish Ballet, where he set or re-choreographed six ballets by Ballets Russes choreographers \u2014four by Mikhail Fokine and two by Leonide Massine. (I\u2019d like to have seen his take on Sheherazade<\/em>.) He also presented evenings of his own ballets and appeared in a pi\u00e8ce d\u2019occasion<\/em> (a duet and a trio).<\/p>\n Patience. The facts I\u2019m recounting do<\/em> lead to the New York City Ballet\u2019s 2015 Spring Gala and ensuing Lincoln Center season. During Balanchine\u2019s five months in Denmark, he saw\u2014probably for the first time\u2014ballets by Denmark\u2019s great 19th<\/sup>-century choreographer, August Bournonville, and observed the classes in Bournonville technique. The busy footwork, the many jumping steps, and the modest, unaffected performing style must have appealed to him\u2014perhaps influenced him. Although Bournonville, unlike Balanchine, preferred to tell stories in his ballets, the dancing itself never depicted anger or struggle. For him it was part of a festive occasion, or an expression of ebullience, or a way of life for supernatural beings. Strong emotions were conveyed by acting or mimetic gestures.<\/p>\n In the 1960s, Balanchine invited Stanley Williams, once a principal dancer with the RDB and a teacher in the company\u2019s school, to come to New York and teach in the School of American Ballet. In 1977, he asked Williams to create Bournonville Divertissements<\/em>, a collection of excerpts from the Danish ballets. The current Ballet Master, Peter Martins, who grew up in Copenhagen taking classes from Williams, danced in its premiere.<\/p>\n This season, the NYCB is reviving this delightful anthology (at any rate, four of its possible numbers), re-staged by Martins\u2019s son, Nilas Martins, a former NYCB principal dancer (also trained by Williams). It shares the program with one of Bournonville\u2019s greatest ballets, the 1836 La Sylphide<\/em>, his version (with new music by Herman Severin L\u00f8venskjold) of the Paris Opera\u2019s 1832 stunner by ballerina Marie Taglioni\u2019s father, Filippo.<\/p>\n Tyler Angle aloft in the duet from Flower Festival in Genzano<\/em>. Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div>\n This year\u2019s Bournonville Divertissments <\/em>is heavy on excerpts from the 1842 Napoli<\/em>. The ballet begins with the Ballabile from Act I and closes with the Pas de Six and Tarantella from Act III\u2019s wedding celebration. Bournonville was a man who relished escaping gravity. In the Ballabile for six couples and one principal pair, almost every springy step in the ballet lexicon gets its moment in the sun. The French names often signal their natures: ballonn\u00e9<\/em>, jet\u00e9, <\/em>etc. And it\u2019s not only a matter of rising and coming down; the dancers, whether skimming along in bris\u00e9s vol\u00e9s <\/em>or soaring into entrechats <\/em>and cabrioles<\/em>, beat their legs together with the speed of a bird\u2019s wing flutters.<\/p>\n Their elevation is emphasized by the fact that often when they jump straight up, they hold their curved arms down at their sides; nothing detracts from the image of an explosion into the air of a rocket-sleek human being. And that simplicity emphasizes the generosity that\u2019s conveyed when a dancer leaps into a slight turn\u2014front leg straight, back leg bent in attitude<\/em>\u2014and opens her or his his arms, palms up, to the audience.<\/p>\n Erica Pereira and Allen Peiffer in Bournonville Divertissements<\/em>. Photo: Paul Kolnik <\/p>\n <\/p><\/div>\n When I first saw Bournonville Divertissements<\/em> (maybe in the 1980s), I thought that, despite Williams\u2019s coaching, the performers still looked like NYCB dancers in terms of their their appetite for space and their often flying arms. This time, they\u2019ve substituted for that \u201cAmerican\u201d style a pleasure in buoyancy and a modest demeanor that would have surely have pleased Bournonville. And an important part of that is their ability to conjure up a society. The unfortunate backdrop (by Alain Vaes) suggests a gloomy, windowless studio, yet the performers pay attention to one another and kibitz\u2014the men whispering and shifting around while the women step saucily out in a chain, and so on.<\/p>\n The principal dancers are treated as friends to be watched. And Erica Pereira and Allen Pfeiffer celebrate with them and for them, rushing offstage, but always returning. One thing about Bournonville\u2019s choreography is that if the dancers are doing the steps splendidlly and in sympathy with Holger Simon Paulli\u2019s music (led at the Gala by Danish guest conductor, Henryk Vagn Christensen), and if they have been directed well,\u2014as they clearly have here\u2014 you think of them as people you\u2019d like to meet.<\/p>\n Sara Mearns in The Flower Festival in Genzano pas de deux. Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div>\n It may have been difficult for Sara Mearns to modify her natural expansiveness and boldness in the well known pas de deux from Flower Festival in Genzano<\/em> (all that\u2019s left of that ballet). But she manages the requisite shyness quite charmingly. Her partner is Tyler Angle, and they communicate delight in each other\u2019s company\u2014alone in a misty sunset garden (by Vaes). In a Russian-style pas de deux, one of the partners traditionally leaves the stage while the other shows off. In this Bournnville duet, each watches approvingly when the other is expressing him\/herself in a tricky little solo. Although Mearns, like the other women, wears modern pointe shoes, the choreography for the duet doesn\u2019t emphasize balancing on one toe-tip for ages while her partner holds her up (that wasn\u2019t so possible in the mid-19th<\/sup> century).<\/p>\n Even a pas de deux like this requires dramatic subtleties. Mearns and Angle haven\u2019t quite mastered the timing of the little saunter they take together a couple of times; to Edvard Helsted\u2019s supporting musical passage, she glances at her beau as they go along; when he notices that, she quickly turns her head away\u2014not wanting to be caught gazing at him. That\u2019s minor; the two of them capture the duet\u2019s flirtatious, but fond relationship wonderfully well.<\/p>\n Bouronville choreographed the Pas de Six for his ballet Abdallah<\/em>, but Hans Beck, his successor at the RDB thought that the last act of Napoli <\/em>needed more dancing and interpolated it. The couple to be married, after all, survived their Act II separation, when she was transformed into a naiad for the sea king\u2019s delectation. So each of her four women friends entertains the village with a wonderfully composed little solo, as do the two men. All the NYCB dancers (Lauren King, Rebecca Krohn, Megan LeCrone, Lauren Lovette, Adrian Danchig-Waring, and Amar Ramasar) perform with happy mastery all the steps that the occasion calls for. There\u2019s also a nimble extra guy: Anthony Huxley. I\u2019m particularly fond of the solo that Lovette performs, with its momentary, suspended balances on pointe (the music, by Helsted and Paulli, waits for her to come down).<\/p>\n The Tarantella from Napoli<\/em>. Foreground: Ashley Isaacs and Amar Ramasar. At back (L to R): Megan LeCrone, Austin Bachman, Harrison Coll, Lauren Lovette, and Indiana Woodward. Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div>\n The entire cast is onstage for the Tarantella, with Angle and Mearns standing in for Teresina and her fisherman lover and rescuer, Gennaro. And almost everyone gets a tambourine to smack and shake in the lively celebration. Bournonville had enjoyed his sojourn in Naples (actually a temporary exile) and the colorful, hot-tempered, conniving, warm-hearted people he observed on the dockside. Their ebullience simmers into this wedding party. And the NYCB dancers set the stage a-boil.<\/p>\n This backdrop by Vaes is handsome, but strange. Judging from its view of Copenhagen from above, the party seems to be happening after a long hike up a mountain instead of in an ocean-side piazza.<\/p>\n Sterling Hyltin as Bournonville’s Sylphide dances her love for the sleeping James (Joaquin De Luz). Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div>\n On a trip to Paris in 1834, Bournonville had seen and been enchanted by Taglioni\u2019s La Sylphide<\/em>. Two years later, he mounted his own Sylphide<\/em> for the Royal Danish Ballet to music Herman Severin L\u00f8vensjold. It is, I believe, the only tragic ballet he made and certainly the only surviving one. It has everything the Romantic Era prized: a restless hero with longings for something beyond humdrum village life; an unearthly temptress representing an unattainable ideal; and a conflict between desire and duty. That it\u2019s set in Scotland shows how mysterious that country\u2019s misty woods and fens could seem to a foreigner.<\/p>\n The NYCB dancers perform for the first time a Sylphide <\/em>that Peter Martins staged in 1985 for the Pennsylvania Ballet. He knew the ballet well, having danced the role of the hero, James, in Copenhagen while a member of the RDB. In this sensitive and excellently re-staging, he was assisted by Petrushjka Bruholm, a former soloist with the Danish company.<\/p>\n Let me get my cavils out of the way. Susan Tammany\u2019s set for Act I, the farmhouse where James and his fianc\u00e9, Effie, are to be married, is appropriate and handsome. On the other hand, her set for the forest that the dangerous sylph calls home looks as if it had been painted to back a tropical extravaganza\u2014a m\u00e9lange of vividly colored stylized foliage that works against the period scenario and atmosphere. Since this two-act ballet balances naturalism with the supernatural, you want \u201creality\u201d to be, well, realistic (or I do). Costuming James in a purple tartan and a purple velvet jacket and other Scottish folk in similarly unusual colors and muted patterns didn\u2019t strike me as ideal either. Finally, the, gray wig that Georgina Pazcoguin wears to play James\u2019s nemesis, the witch Madge, seems overly voluminous.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>
Lauren King (L) and Rebecca Krohn in the Pas de Six from Napoli<\/em>. Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div>\n<\/a><\/a>