Royal Danish Ballet: Bournonville Festival / Royal Theatre, Copenhagen / June 3-11, 2005 I first saw Bournonville’s A Folk Tale in 1979, at a dress rehearsal to which journalists who’d made the pilgrimage to Copenhagen for the first Bournonville Festival had been invited. (A Royal Danish Ballet dress rehearsal means a full-fledged, uninterrupted performance with […]
TOTAL IMMERSION: THE BOURNONVILLE FESTIVAL, NO. 11
Royal Danish Ballet: Bournonville Festival / Royal Theatre, Copenhagen / June 3-11, 2005 Just about everyone agrees that, among Jane Austen’s novels, Pride and Prejudice is the “perfect” one, the technical dazzler, and that Emma is the most profound. But Janeites usually have a personal—idiosyncratic—favorite, and mine is Persuasion. I’d be the first to admit […]
TOTAL IMMERSION: THE BOURNONVILLE FESTIVAL, NO. 10
Sylfider, Trolde og Linselus: En Fotografisk Rejse i Bournonvilles Balletter (Sylphides and Trolls Caught in the Lens: A Photographic Journey Through Bournonville’s Ballets) / Round Tower, Copenhagen / May 13 – June 12, 2005 Housed in Copenhagen’s Round Tower, Sylfider, Trolde og Linselus: En Fotografisk Rejse i Bournonvilles Balletter (Sylphides and Trolls Caught in the […]
TOTAL IMMERSION: THE BOURNONVILLE FESTIVAL, NO. 9
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 […]
TOTAL IMMERSION: THE BOURNONVILLE FESTIVAL, NO. 8
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 […]
TOTAL IMMERSION: THE BOURNONVILLE FESTIVAL, NO. 7
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 […]
Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg; ABT Studio Company
Love and death, in their myriad guises. Village Voice 6/10/05
TOTAL IMMERSION: THE BOURNONVILLE FESTIVAL, NO. 6
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 […]
TOTAL IMMERSION: THE BOURNONVILLE FESTIVAL, NO. 5
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 […]
TOTAL IMMERSION: THE BOURNONVILLE FESTIVAL, NO. 4
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 […]