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Bolshoi Ballet / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / July 18-30, 2005

Sometimes I wish we could TiVo live performances. I’m thinking just now of the Bolshoi Ballet’s Don Quixote. It had some marvelous moments, one of which I’d be happy to revisit in perpetuity—when I saw it the second time I was amazed that such a miracle could be repeated—but, for the bulk of the production, a single sighting was plenty. The choreography has evolved from Marius Petipa’s 1869 original (Petipa led the Kirov Ballet, but made his feisty Don Q for the Bolshoi) through Alexander Gorsky (1900), to the current production (1999) credited to Alexei Fadeechev, and the program acknowledges other contributors-along-the way. The Ludwig Minkus score—tune after dancey tune, many of which will haunt you for weeks—continues to serve its purpose, but the present account of the action fails utterly in meshing, let alone doing even separate justice to, the tragically visionary and the irrepressibly comic. As for the overall performing style–well, the circus is never very far away.

Now about that miracle. About two and a half hours after the curtain goes up, on comes a girl in a pale yellow tutu and dances the briefest of solos. It is composed largely of grands jetés. The girl is small and compactly built, with a look of childlike wonder about her. The jetés are incomparably light, a cross between floating and flying. There seems to be no effort behind them and no ego; they just happen. It’s one of those moments that occurs in ballet from time to time, when issues of classical technique drop out of the picture and all you see is pure dancing. One of those moments in which you understand perfectly what ballet is for or, perhaps, fall under its spell for the very first time. The dancer’s name is Natalia Osipova. She entered the company just last year.

The other swell thing about the production was not the classical material but a series of what I’d call Moorish dances. Slow, sinuous solos for women in long skirts and heeled shoes, with deep backbends as their motif, these were balleticized versions of ethnic dance. In the case of a gypsy number in Act II, performed with intent by Anna Antropova in a flame-colored gown veiled with ash gray, the material was streaked with dark, fearsome passions. It was a pertinent reminder, amid much bravura and comic cavorting, that life—even just the part of life that can be represented in a ballet—has multiple textures and profound depth.

Opening night, Kitri was played by Svetlana Zakharova, the company’s most glittering star and a favorite with the local audience. She exemplifies the ballerina model that both the Kirov (her company of origin) and the Bolshoi now favor—tall, exceedingly long-limbed, frighteningly thin, with a tiny head, bowstring arches, and a hip joint so mobile it permits those eerie extensions in which the leg, flung straight up, permits the dancer’s knee to graze her cheek. All of this is thought to be beautiful.

Zakharova is celebrated for her legato dancing, in which time seems to slow down as her body etches one infinitely graceful line after another on the air. As Kitri, a role better filled by a soubrette type, she goes out of her way to be extroverted and exuberant, proving several times over that, yes, she has mastered Maya Plisetskaya’s flamboyant trick of arching backward in full sail while tossing her leg up behind her to kick the back of her head. Zakharova is right on target here in going for vivacity and bravura feats, but the results have little spontaneity and even less joy.

I preferred Ekaterina Shipulina as Kitri. Her gifts are more modest than Zakharova’s and she lacks Zakharova’s appetite for glory, but her body is closer to the range of normal, and when she dances—even with all the show-off acrobatics and emphatic flourishes endemic to Bolshoi style—what she does looks like something a spirited young woman might really do if she were animated by love and dancing, It looks almost human.

Andrey Uvarov partnered both Zakharova and Shipulina at the performances I saw. He’s a genial presence and expert at ballerina handling in matters of multiple supported pirouettes and one-armed lifts. On his own, he’s notable for legs that work like rapiers on big leaps, like scissors in vertical jumps with beats. Gratifying as all this is, though, he’s not a star, and the role of Basilio (or Basil, as it’s been reduced to here) requires both megawatt charisma and, what’s more, a flair for comedy.

Not much energy was invested in making the mime a telling element in the proceedings. Still, the two leading all-mime roles were well cast to give us a tall, gaunt, Don Quixote (Alexey Loparevich), representing the life of the imagination and moral values, offset by a short, solid, jovial Sancho Panza (Alexander Petukhov), embodying the life of the belly and expediency. The rich fop, Gamache, was nicely observed, too—by Victor Alekhin—and Kitri’s mom, unessential to the plot, was nevertheless rendered deliciously by Evgenia Volochkova.

As for the corps work, only a killjoy could fail to get swept up in the vivacity of the village square scenes with their castanet clacking, fan fluttering, cape swirling crowd. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the sisterhood of dryads aimed appropriately at refined delicacy. But almost everyone, from top to bottom in the casting hierarchy, seemed to be doing nothing more than a conscientious job. Don Q takes its title from a character who’s a visionary, but this production is merely a showpiece in which vision would be a decidedly foreign object.

Photo: Damir Yuspov: Svetlana Zakharova as Kitri in the Bolshoi Ballet’s production of Don Quixote

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / May 23 – July 16, 2005

Ever on the lookout for lavishly decorated program-length story ballets—the sort of entertainment the general dance-going public apparently prefers to sterner affairs—American Ballet Theatre joined the U.K.’s Royal Ballet to revive Frederick Ashton’s 1952 Sylvia.

The ballet is set to delectable music by Delibes: the score composed for the ballet choreographed in 1876 by Eugène Lacoste for the inaugural season of the the Paris Opera’s lavish Palais Garnier house plus parts of the same composer’s La Source. Delibes, dance fans will recall, was the first composer to make ballet music worth listening to even when there’s no dancing to look at; he paved the way for Tchaikovsky.

At its creation, Sylvia received a mixed reception. Ashton himself may have had reservations about it; he tinkered with it periodically, even creating a trimmed version and a radically condensed one. Nothing quite succeeded, and the ballet was gone from the Royal’s rep by the mid-sixties. Fragments of it, appearing subsequently on gala programs, served as tantalizing reminders that there was something in the work—perhaps a good deal—worth keeping.

The present production, which returns on the whole to the original, was staged by Christopher Newton, a Royal Ballet veteran, who admittedly had to do a good bit of “filling in,” his sources being incomplete. A similar restoration process characterizes the current scenery and costumes; the original, Second Empire-style, designs by Robin and Christopher Ironside have been renewed by Peter Farmer. All the beauties of the ballet are still apparent—indicated if not completely realized—as are all the problems: it’s too long; the tale is both too unlikely and too flimsy; the divertissements that flesh out the third act are not, all in all, compelling. I concur with the opinion of the British critic Richard Buckle, who, back in ’52, called the ballet “a confusion of excellence and weakness.” Still, I feel personally grateful to the parties involved for providing me with such a civilized experience in the theater and, for long passages, one of such rarefied beauty.

Ashton’s libretto derives from a pastoral drama by the Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso. Sylvia, a nymph of Diana, goddess of chastity (and of the hunt and the moon), refuses the adoration of a shepherd, Aminta, and taunts Eros, the god of love. Eros revenges the insult by forcibly (watch those arrows!) opening Sylvia’s heart to softer feelings. At this transformative moment, Sylvia is abducted by Orion, an “evil hunter,” and carried off to his luxurious cave to be bent to his lustful will. Eros, who can now count Sylvia among his converts, duly rescues her (not, however, before she has shown some canny resistance on her own behalf) and unites her with Aminta (handsome and pure-hearted as a hero should be, but oddly passive). In a final—and essential—coup, Eros persuades Diana to countenance the pair’s love, reminding the goddess (via a vision, of course), that even she has known sensual delight—in her infatuation with Endymion. A galaxy of mythological beings and their attendants duly makes the Sylvia-Aminta nuptials festive, decorative, and grand, but it’s the pas de deux Ashton created for the bridal pair that makes the occasion sublime.

When the choreography is wonderful, it is very wonderful indeed. It reveals a lyric poet whose work, intelligent and refined, is also deeply sensuous. The ballet’s first act, set in a shadowy glade populated by naiads, dryads, and fauns, as well as a “statue” of Eros that turns out to be alive, creates a mysterious, magical atmosphere even before the narrative action (and thus an expressive element) kicks in. The entire act provides a constant stream of beauty, delicacy, grace, and invention. An exquisitely fashioned dance for Sylvia and her sister nymphs—a private moment in which they allow themselves a respite from the hunt—is a marvel of construction. Opening with a solo of small, tender movements that suggest what the heroine might be if she shed her feminist agenda, it proceeds to interlace the dancing of the solo figure and that of the eight-member ensemble so deftly that the results, a blueprint for astute manipulation of figures, look like a natural, almost casually conversational, event.

Throughout the ballet, steps are used in unusual ways, and this is quietly arresting, as is their subtle, often maverick timing. Despite the “good taste” that characterizes his choreography, Ashton provides the most astonishing lifts, among them one in Sylvia’s struggle with Orion that leaves her hanging upside down from his shoulder—all seductive flesh being treated as a hunter’s prey. Later, in her final, rhapsodic duet with Aminta, Sylvia leaps fearlessly backward into her lover’s arms to end in fish-dive position, like a crescent moon plunged down to hover over—and illuminate—the earth. As with Balanchine’s choreography, you look at Sylvia and think, Now whoever would have thought of doing that? Yet at the very same time, what is happening seems inevitable. Of course, the choreographer’s signature prevails everywhere—the precise, quicksilver feet coupled with a fluent torso that, as one of his dancers put it, leaves an echo of itself behind.

Ashton created Sylvia for his primary muse, Margot Fonteyn, and it is a paean to her qualities. In the first act Sylvia displays her near-militant chastity, which is erotically alluring in its own way; in the second, she is poignant as a damsel in distress and then, better yet, ingeniously uses her sexual allure to dupe her would-be ravisher; in the last act, all radiant serenity, she embodies the ecstatic love that stands at the border of happily ever after.

In the two casts I saw, Gillian Murphy was excellent according to her own lights. As the occasion required, she was dramatic in her Bette Davis style—proud, resistant, resolute, almost imperious—and then, as the occasion changed, taking her to territory she hasn’t yet fully conquered, enticingly erotic (to foil her captor) and, succumbing to Aminta, melting with the kind of love that involves both body and soul. Michelle Wiles, on the other hand, was utterly at sea in a role where her strong, clean technique was insufficient. She’s a long, lean American-athlete type, like Merrill Ashley, and would do better in the kind of repertory Ashley danced, where emotional expression wasn’t absolutely necessary. Management must have thought otherwise about Wiles, because it promoted her to the rank of principal dancer just after the Sylvia run.

I felt I wasn’t seeing just the right people in the two male leads, rather several Mr. Almost Rights. Marcelo Gomes was given a shot at both the love-struck but essentially ineffectual Aminta and the wicked Orion. He was better in the latter role. A born danseur noble, Gomes often looks more interested in his bad-guy roles. Maybe he finds stock-character goodness boring; playing against type seems to stir his imagination—and activate his sense of humor. Maxim Beloserkovsky as Aminta and Gennadi Saveliev as the villain were both too bland. Further performances will improve matters; they almost always do. Let’s just hope the ballet stays in the repertory. At the curtain calls of the performances I attended, enthusiasts—I among them—were clapping with the kind of fervor audiences use to save Tinkerbelle’s life.

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor: Gillian Murphy in the title role of Frederick Ashton’s Sylvia

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / May 23 – July 16, 2005

American Ballet Theatre seems to ricochet between desperate attempts at “making it new” and revisiting its past repertory and honoring it with revivals. A quartet of this season’s golden oldies formed a program of their own—the “Fokine Celebration”, a retrospective bill comprising Les Sylphides, Petrouchka, Le Spectre de la Rose, and the Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor. The first two works are major; the second two, minor—but each in its singular way characterizes Fokine’s freeing classical ballet from its earlier restraints. The ballets were choreographed—or, in the case of Les Sylphides, drastically revised—under the aegis of Serge Diaghilev and his legendary Ballets Russes and were danced by the likes of Nijinsky, Pavlova, and Karsavina. Eye witnesses to the works’ first incarnations are gone, but many photographs, to say nothing of written accounts, survive to convince us that the original productions were a hard act to follow. Attempts are made the world over, but ABT has a particular interest in doing justice to Fokine, Les Sylphides and Petrouchka having been staged for the company by the choreographer himself early in the 1940s, when ABT was merely Ballet Theatre—and newborn.

Mind you, apart from Polovtsian Dances, these ballets are not relics. They are wonderful elements of the classical dance canon that are viable today. That viability, however, is in large measure dependent on their staging and performance. If you see an execrable performance of As You Like It, you can still believe it’s one swell play on the evidence of the text alone. Ballets have no easily accessible text to assure their reputation. They exist largely in the here and now.

The ideal Les Sylphides, the Sylphides of my dreams—I’ve seen ravishing fragments of it over the years, most often at ABT—would look utterly spontaneous, a vision that arose on the spur of the moment. ABT’s current staging of the ballet, by Kirk Peterson, is one of those ventures that tries so hard to be stylistically correct—an achievement to be sure, but not essentially an aesthetic one—that it ends up devoid of breath. Suffocating under this demand for refinement, the dancing takes on a mausoleum quality. I wished the participants would have a rehearsal or two at which they danced the ballet straight through at a markedly swifter pace than the one the orchestra now assigns it, and another at which, instead of being instructed to parse the choreography, the dancers were urged to “just throw it away.”

As the central sylphide, however, Stella Abrera looked windswept, miraculously so. After many a season of efficient but mechanical operation, she seemed to have awakened to the dancer she could be. This was wonderful for the ballet, and wonderful for a performer who has been characteristically steely, not gauzy; determined, not aspiring. Here she took wing, soared, was thrilling. She was weightless and buoyant as gossamer, yet impelled by surging energy. I haven’t seen anything like it in Les Sylphides since the days of Lupe Serrano and Sallie Wilson.

Her partner, Marcelo Gomes, offered the familiar beauty of his weighty, velvety dancing, but his performance was over-scrupulous. It was as if someone had painstakingly explained to him how a neo-Romantic poet would behave in a spirit-filled midnight glade and he, affable artist that he is, was doing his best to comply. His work was very picturesque, but not for one moment was I convinced that he inhabited that figure, body or soul. Towards the end of the ballet, he suddenly came tearing through the space like a man possessed, another creature entirely from the one he’d been playing up until that point—as if a coach had seized him in the wings just before his penultimate entrance and whispered urgently, “Loosen up! Go for it!” The moment was incongruous with everything that had gone before, but vividly alive.

The two secondary female leads in the Abrera-Gomes cast—and another pair in an alternate cast I saw—made a conscientious job of the rarefied quality Petersen’s staging focused on but were either so over-refined as to be eerie or simply saccharine and bland. Many observers found them lovely, but I can’t see how the word “lovely” applies to an effect that’s so studied. As for the all-important work of the ensemble of sylphs—which, in motion, complements the soloists, and, in lacy group poses, serves decoratively as their landscape—it, too, was well-intentioned and dutifully executed, but the end result was gluey and dogged by a step-by-step quality that’s death to musical phrasing.

The almost unquenchable merits of Petrouchka are, first and foremost, its glorious Stravinsky score, then its opulent, raucous designs by Benois, its imagination-invoking tale of a puppet with a soul, and the fact that the choreography is sound as a drum—both in its construction and its choice of movement vocabulary for each of its principals. Its staging for ABT by Gary Chryst (once a memorable Petrouchka with the Joffrey Ballet) needs to acquire the patina a production accumulates with repeated performance, but seems to be pretty much on the right track.

The individual performances I enjoyed most were Angel Corella’s in the title role and Monique Meunier’s as the Chief Nursemaid, a character that might slip by unnoticed unless its interpreter made her remarkable. Meunier, lifting her radiant face to the wintry sun and slapping back her long, heavy golden skirts, was both earthy and ecstatic, alive to everything going on in a fairground roiling with diverse personalities and agendas. I wondered how Corella made his benighted then tragically triumphant puppet so telling. Partly, he followed Chryst’s canny admonition not to play the role for its pathos. Partly, it’s the specificity of his interpretation (every move seems impelled by an idea) and his ferocious concentration. The rest? Perhaps, as Henry James proposed, “the rest is the madness of art.”

When I last wrote in these pages about Le Spectre de la Rose, I was astonished to read, subsequently, so many of my colleagues’ dismissing it as slight, silly, or impossibly unsuited to this day and age. I still love it a lot. This is how I described it in the fall of 2004: “Le Spectre de la Rose is a nine-minute ballet choreographed by Michel Fokine in 1911 for Vaslav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina. It is set to Carl Maria von Weber’s Invitation to the Dance and based on a poem by Gautier that opens “I am the spirit of the rose / That you wore last night at the ball.” A young woman, having danced in society, comes home to her Biedermeier boudoir. The ecstatic dreams of young romance surround her like a perfume. She draws a full-blown rose from her décolletage and holds it to her face, absorbing its fragrance, then falls, languid, into her easy chair and drowses. A male spirit, costumed as the embodiment of the rose, leaps through her open French doors and dances—all voluptuous virtuosity. The incarnation of nature and its intransigent impulses, he induces the virginal dreamer to join him, then releases her to sleep and vanishes with a faun-like leap that, when Nijinsky performed it, made history.”

When I wrote this last season, I thought Herman Cornejo was unlikely to be bettered in the leading role. While I haven’t changed my mind, I’ve enjoyed seeing others do the part this season. As the Spirit of the Rose, Angel Corella chose to emphasize not the phenomenal leaps, but the arm work that, ornamented with unexpected angles and baroque curlicues, makes this figure compellingly strange instead of merely beautiful. He also chose—and I wasn’t so keen about this—to make his dancing a flowing stream. Operating on a single, midrange, level of energy, he sacrificed the driving impulse that suits the role and minimized the light and shade that usually enriches his work. Dramatically, he was utterly convincing, conveying the Spirit’s urgent purpose in getting the dreaming girl to participate in the headiness of the dance, urging her passage from virginal romance to erotic passion. The young Danny Tidwell, of whom we can expect great things, made a tentative but touching debut in the part—sweet, lyrical, correct. I look forward to seeing what happens next.

The Polovtsian Dances provided a diversion in Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, and, if legend doesn’t exaggerate, plunged the Parisian audience attending its premiere in 1909 into a state of tumultuous enthusiasm. The piece, devoid of plot, is a travelogue on Tartarland, where the male warriors are gracefully savage; the teenage girls, tomboyishly spirited; and the adult ladies, beauties who veil their faces and bare their midriffs, temptingly sinuous. If the choreography seems hokey and forgettable today, its theme tune—co-opted for that Kismet song “Stranger in Paradise” —will stay with you for weeks. Be warned.

I was happy to see it as a historical artifact, in its present lively staging by Frederic Franklin, the spryest nonagenarian in town. (He knew the piece from his years with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and miraculously got today’s dancers to perform the material without condescension.) I was far from persuaded, though, that this ballet is indispensable to my delight in dance. Yet the second grader I took to a matinee of the Fokine program—despite her tender age, a seasoned and discriminating aficionado—liked it best of the four works she was seeing for the first time. Go know. She had the honor, in an accidental intermission encounter, of meeting Franklin, a few minutes with whom could persuade anyone to like anything, so benign and filled with eager, innocent vitality is his temperament. Perhaps only he could stage Polovtsian Dances in good faith.

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor: American Ballet Theatre dancers in Michel Fokine’s Les Sylphides

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

From June 3 – 11, 2005, at Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre, the Royal Danish Ballet celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of August Bournonville, the dancer, choreographer, and ballet master who made the company unique and gave it its international cachet. In a SEEING THINGS series called “Total Immersion,” I wrote 15 essays about the performances, which encompassed the entire extant Bournonville repertory, and about the many complementary events that were scheduled. As an introduction to the subject, I posted my essay on the first Bournonville Festival, published in Dance magazine in 1980.

Here is a list of these pieces, giving the specific subject of each and the direct link to it:

“The Festival in Copenhagen,” TT’s Dance magazine essay on the 1st Bournonville Festival in 1979
http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias/archives/2005/05/the_bournonvill.shtml

NO. 1 (Introduction; Kermesse in Bruges) http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias/archives/2005/06/total_immersion_12.shtml

NO. 2 (Exhibition of costumes for the Bournonville ballets at the National Museum)
http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias/archives/2005/06/total_immersion_11.shtml

NO. 3 (Napoli)
http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias/archives/2005/06/total_immersion_10.shtml

NO. 4 (La Sylphide; La Ventana)
http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias/archives/2005/06/total_immersion_9.shtml

Related material:
Link to TT’s SEEING THINGS review of the premiere in 2003 of the Nikolaj Hübbe production of La Sylphide:
http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias/archives/2003/09/the_danes_at_ho.shtml

NO. 5 (Three exhibitions, curated by Knud Arne Jürgensen, on Bournonville and Hans Christian Andersen)
http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias/archives/2005/06/total_immersion_8.shtml

Related material:

Link to the online version of Digterens Teaterdromme (The Poet’s Theatre Dreams), curated by Knud Arne Jürgensen:
http://www.kb.dk/elib/mss/hcateater/

Link to an English translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ice Maiden:
http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheIceMaiden_e.html

Link to an English translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen:
http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheSnowQueen_e.html

NO. 6 (Abdallah)
http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias/archives/2005/06/total_immersion_7.shtml

NO. 7 (Far from Denmark)
http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias/archives/2005/06/total_immersion_6.shtml

NO. 8 (The Bournonville Schools)
http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias/archives/2005/06/total_immersion_5.shtml

Related material:
Link to TT’s SEEING THINGS essay, “Ballet Boyz, Danish Style”:
http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias/archives/2004/01/ballet_boyz_dan.shtml

NO. 9 (Konservatoriet)
http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias/archives/2005/06/total_immersion_4.shtml

NO. 10 (Exhibition of photographs of the Royal Danish Ballet down the decades)
http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias/archives/2005/06/total_immersion_3.shtml

NO. 11 (The King’s Volunteers on Amager)
http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias/archives/2005/06/total_immersion_2.shtml

NO. 12 (A Folk Tale)
http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias/archives/2005/06/total_immersion_1.shtml

Related material:
Link to TT’s Dance Insider essay on A Folk Tale:
http://www.danceinsider.com/vignettes/v0926.html

NO. 13 (“Bournonvilleana”—the gala closing performance of the Royal Danish Ballet’s 3rd Bournonville Festival)
http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias1/archives/2005/06/total_immersion.shtml

NO. 14 (Miscellany)
http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias/archives/2005/06/total_immersion_14.shtml

NO. 15 (Operan—the Royal Theatre’s new house for opera and ballet)
http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias/archives/2005/06/total_immersion_13.shtml

Royal Danish Ballet: Bournonville Festival / Royal Theatre, Copenhagen / June 3-11, 2005 / Operan, the Royal Theatre’s new house for opera and ballet

With the Bournonville Festival, the Royal Danish Ballet looked back to the past and offered telling examples of how it intends to preserve its singular choreographic and stylistic legacy. Appropriately, the Festival performances took place at the Royal Theatre’s Gamle Scene (Old Stage), the ornate, perfectly proportioned opera house on the King’s Square for which Bournonville restaged some of his best works when it opened in 1874, towards the end of his career. Just last fall, however, the Royal Theatre opened a brand new, forward-looking opera house—sleekly modern in design, ultra-modern in its technical facilities—that has significant implications for the Royal Danish Ballet’s future.

The Opera (Operan), as it’s called, is not intended to replace the Old Stage—which has sheltered both Denmark’s national ballet and opera companies for over 125 years—but to complement it. The dimensions of its stage and its spectacular technical capabilities are considerably grander than those of the Old Stage, and its seating capacity of 1700 is more generous too. The Royal Theatre’s opera company will transfer itself lock, stock, and barrel to the new location, while the Royal Danish Ballet intends to perform in both houses—the old and the new. Bournonville’s ballets and others requiring an intimate setting will be given in the old house; “big” ballets, both old (Swan Lake, for example) and new (such as John Neumeier’s The Little Mermaid, recently created for the RDB) will take advantage of the spaciousness and mechanical wonders of the new quarters.

It might be observed that the Royal Danish Ballet ranks among world-class troupes for its custodianship of the Bournonville oeuvre. It has never distinguished itself internationally through productions of the nineteenth-century Russian classics. In the past it has had neither the size nor the dancers bred for the particular strength and style the job requires. Its virtues, remarkable ones, lay elsewhere—in the realms of buoyant grace, the subtle observation and communication of human feeling, and an élan that glows rather than attempting to dazzle. But, inevitably, times have changed, and the company’s aspirations are now heroic in scale and avid. The big question remains: If the RDB, responding to the opportunities and challenges the Opera offers, sets its sights on producing a Swan Lake or a Sleeping Beauty that will rank with the stagings of, say, the Paris Opera Ballet or the Kirov, will it still be able to give Bournonville his due? At the moment, it’s pleasanter to leave this troublesome question in the background and experience the Opera as a piece of beguiling architectural theater.

If, from the entrance of the Old Stage, you walk down the picturesque canal street of Nyhavn, you’ll see the imposing Opera across the water, on the island of Holmen. You get to it by boat. The ride across the water takes exactly three minutes, and the boat is merely a small ferry, but still . . .

The building itself, with its curvilinear shape and an overhanging roof that seems to float, makes you think “ship.” This is only appropriate, since the formidably costly structure was the gift of a man, one A.P. Møller, whose family made its fortune in ship building and transporting cargo over the water.

The Opera is masterly in its command of space and light and typically Danish in its harmonious juxtaposition of materials: glass (miles of it, it would seem), stone (in subdued shades of grey and sand that give it an eerie lightness), steely metal, and lovingly treated wood. The interior of the building continually echoes the curved shape of the façade. At the hub of the public space is a gigantic bowed form clad in glowing maple veneer. Fantasy suggests it’s the work of a violin maker operating on a Brobdingnagian scale. Exquisitely varied in its grain, burnished to a rich copper sheen, the wood looks as if each piece had been chosen for its singular beauty and placed so as to make a spectrum of subtle contrasts with its neighboring pieces. The convex side of this structure is the spatial and decorative heart of the building’s tiered promenades. Functionally—as if it were there merely to be useful—it forms the outer shell of the auditorium. Discovering its double life is a small but very particular delight.

At every level of the promenades—there are four of them over the ground floor—you can look out over the water, through the horizon-wide curved windows, setting your drink, libretto, or glittering minaudière on the narrow steel shelf placed at ship’s-rail height, and pretend you are on a pleasure cruise, sailing for the destiny of your dreams. You can dine on the promenades too; one malcontent observed that the Opera was conceived as a bar/restaurant with entertainment. The audience likes it, though, and dresses up marvelously to be players in the scene—the elder and wealthier in an expensively tasteful mode Scandinavian fashion has brought to a high and perfect pitch, the young with unquenchable rakish imagination.

Like the best Danish design for the home, particularly the sublime “Danish Modern” furniture of the mid-twentieth century, the Opera manages to be both austere and welcoming. Its sole concession to a lower-brow yen for glitter rests in a trio of round chandeliers—more than ten feet in diameter, I’d guess—that are suspended over the first tier. Faceted like supersized Swaroski crystals, the globes gaudily refract tones of silver, cool gold, rose, and ultramarine. A grid inside them is studded with tiny lights on stems—for all the world like a giant’s matchsticks.

From the promenades, gangways lead to the auditorium’s seating areas, adding to the visitor’s general impression of being on a luxury ship, safely ensconced in elegance, with a view of the world outside that he or she is blithely gliding past. The most splendid view of that world is to be had at the two highest tiers. That perspective best reveals the small ornate towers of Old Copenhagen, springing up from the otherwise modestly low cityscape, as if they were cunningly fashioned pop-up toys.

After reveling in the extravagant light and space of the public areas, you’re shocked by the enclosed darkness of the auditorium. The contrast constitutes a theatrical coup in itself. The interior is paneled with a Japanese-style arrangement of slatted wood in two tones of brown—deep and deeper. The wood is pierced with little lights so that, once seated, you can actually read your program, but the room as a whole, with its balconies seeming to embrace the stage as you look towards it, instills a feeling of intimacy. In this it declares its cousinship with the Royal Theatre’s Old Stage.

Turning your back to the stage and casting your glance upward, however, you see the auditorium’s second coup de théâtre. The depth of the four curved balconies creates a sense of immense sweep. This impression of vastness is augmented by the overarching vault of the ceiling (clad like the walls in striated wood). Everywhere the dark wood is pierced with tiny dots and fine lines of light, suggesting the elements that sparkle from an immense distance in a nighttime sky. The whole creates an effect of galactic grandeur.

In the intermission you can stroll the long swath of a curving outdoor promenade and, at this time of year, early June, watch the sun go down. The last fiery rays drop below the horizon just before 10:00, yet the sky remains luminous and the water graciously reflects it. This coup de théâtre by Mother Nature, co-opted by the Opera’s architect, Henning Larsen, makes you feel the universe is holding its breath.

Photos: Lars Schmidt

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

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

When I titled my series of articles on the Royal Danish Ballet’s 3rd Bournonville Festival “Total Immersion,” I truly meant total. In the 13 pieces preceding this one, I aimed to concentrate on covering all the performances of the existing Bournonville ballets—which were, after all, the heart of the Festival—and what seemed to me the most compelling Bournonville-related exhibitions. But there was more, much more—some of it open to the public, some of it organized especially to familiarize foreign journalists and other interested parties with Bournonville’s world.

In addition to the exhibitions I’ve written about at length in the “Total Immersion” series, there were a few I didn’t have the time and strength to report on. These included Alt dandser, tro mit ord! (Everything dances—take my word for it!) at Thorvaldsens Museum, curated by the musicologist Ole Nørlyng. It explored the link between Bournonville and the neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844), whose dulcet idealization of the human form greatly influenced the choreographer. The prolific research librarian Knud Arne Jürgensen produced yet another exhibition—this one at Bournonville’s home in Fredensborg, a suburb of Copenhagen favored by the Danish royal family—placing the choreographer in the circle of his family and in the wider but similarly intimate circle of his friends in the arts. And so on. I couldn’t help feeling it was a pity that the life of the exhibitions was almost as ephemeral as dancing. Still, as I’ve written, Digterens Teaterdrømme (The Poet’s Theater Dreams) is available in a splendid online version, while Tyl & Trikot, the imaginative display of costumes for the Bournonville ballets, has been extended until July 10 and is accompanied by a useful catalogue, available through the National Museum.

In addition to Anne Marie Vessel Schlüter’s six lecture-demonstrations on the Bournonville Schools—open to the public and a huge hit with the Festival audiences—there was an illuminating and vastly entertaining invitation-only program on mime, organized by the effervescent Dinna Bjørn. It explored—with piquant demonstrations—the connection between the mime in the Bournonville ballets and the mime used in the playlets given nightly at the Peacock Theatre in the pleasure gardens of Tivoli, the site of Europe’s longest unbroken tradition of commedia dell’ arte performance. Bjørn, who now heads the Finnish National Ballet, after a distinguished career as an RDB dancer, began her theater life as a diminutive devil in one of the Peacock Theatre pantomimes, when her father, Niels Bjørn Larsen, headed both the RDB and the Tivoli troupe. Bjørn’s program was given on the raked stage of the eighteenth-century Court Theatre, where Bournonville himself once danced, and which now houses the Theatre Museum, an enchantment in itself. On another day, journalists were treated to a full performance of a pantomime play at the Peacock Theatre and a tour of the minuscule backstage quarters where all the stage machinery, including the device that unfurls and retracts the peacock-tail curtain (it’s constructed like a fan), is worked by hand.

Other mini-excursions included a trip to Fredensborg to view Bournonville’s home (see above) and to visit the Bournonville family’s burial site in the Asminderod churchyard—all simplicity, greenery, and peace. There, according to Jewish custom, I lay a small stone on the grave markers of the master and his father, Antoine Bournonville, who headed the Royal Danish Ballet when his son was young and, presciently, took the boy to Paris, where he learned—and then co-opted—the French Romantic school of dancing.

The RDB company and school, which were operating behind firmly closed doors at the first Bournonville Festival in 1979 have adopted a new policy of openness in recent years, so journalists were allowed to observe a number of classes and rehearsals. Though I didn’t attend any this time, I’ve happily done so on earlier visits, since a behind-the-scenes view can provide piercing insights into what you see on stage. Last year, in these pages, I explored the issue of the extraordinarily high caliber of the RDB’s male dancers by looking into the training of the boys and young men in the company’s school. To read Ballet Boyz, Danish Style, go here.

The Festival also celebrated the recent or upcoming publication of a slew of Bournonville items. A complete list of them appears here. I’m looking forward to reading Bournonville’s travel letters to his wife, who stayed home with their six children while her husband spent half a year in France and Italy, though, as the inscription atop the Royal Theatre’s proscenium says, “ei blot til lyst” (not for pleasure alone); the choreographer’s observations and experiences abroad, we’re assured, became part of his ballets.

Throughout the Festival, hospitality, a Danish specialty, was lavished on the visiting journalists and, of course, their local colleagues. Each participant—and there were over one hundred of us—was greeted as if he or she were a combination of dignitary and close family friend. Each was presented with a sturdy slate gray carry-on discretely marked with the Royal Theatre logo (in a gold that managed not to glitter) and weighted with publications connected to Bournonville and the Festival, from books to pamphlets to detailed lists of enticing events. Every round of activity seemed to conclude with the provision of (at the very least) sandwiches and glasses of wine, and every professional need, from general information to Internet use, was answered, with infinite cordiality, by the Royal Theatre’s press department staff. After every performance, there was a reception, at which speeches, food, and drink flowed lavishly, and excitement at being part of a telling moment in dance history ran high. Most of us went home to terrifying amounts of work that had piled up in our absence. What we really needed, instead, was a week on a deserted beach where we could lie inert, staring at the sea and sky, letting memory sort out and store up our experiences.

Photo: One of the two Danish postage stamps issued to commemorate the 200th anniversary of August Bournonville’s birth. The art is by Mette and Eric Mourier; the engraving, by Lars Sjööblom.

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

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

The evening of the final, gala, performance in the Royal Danish Ballet’s Bournonville Festival opened with Queen Margrethe II’s entering the Royal Box—as she had every night of the nine-day celebration—to smile down benignly at the audience that had risen in respectful silence at her entrance. Now she was accompanied by her consort, Prince Henrik, and, as she had been several times before, by one of her sisters, Princess Benedikte. The orchestra proceeded to play the Danish national anthem, followed by the imposing “March of the Gods,” from J.P.E. Hartmann’s score for Bournonville’s Nordic-mythology ballet The Lay of Thrym. Two significant realms of authority having thus been invoked, Frank Andersen, the Royal Danish Ballet’s artistic director, gave a speech before the curtain, which then rose on the company’s future—the children of its school, performing the elementary exercises of a profession Bournonville’s ballet-master father called “the most glorious career in the world.”

The dancing that ensued consisted of lively excerpts from ballets shown in the course of the Festival, but now, in several cases, with principals we hadn’t yet seen in the leading roles; short pieces that are all that remain of longer works, such as the beguiling pas de deux from The Flower Festival in Genzano and the cheeky duet from William Tell; and a sprinkling of historical curiosities. The brief numbers were danced, appropriately, before an enlarged engraving of the old Royal Theatre, where Bournonville did most of his work. (That house was torn down in 1874, upon the opening of the present theater, which has served the Danish ballet so well, though the new Operan, as I’ll explain in the final installment of “Total Immersion”—No. 15—now threatens to eclipse it.)

In another backward glance, fragments of film shot by Peter Elfelt in the first years of the twentieth century provided a glimpse of Bournonville dancing as it looked 100 years ago. Perhaps unintentionally (perhaps cannily), it reinforced the point that the Andersen makes over and over again when present-day Bournonville aficionados succumb to overdoses of nostalgia: The Bournonville style can’t be frozen in time but must move forward to suit today’s bodies, today’s technical capabilities, and today’s taste. (As for me, I’m guilty of the nostalgia and worried, in this death-of-poetry era, about the issue of taste.)

The program concluded with a rip-roaring performance of the third act of Napoli, with dancers of all ages crowding the stage at the ebullient climax, the most agile dividing the solo work among themselves; those of riper age taking their turn at a few phrases or banging an encouraging tambourine on the sidelines; and what appeared to be the entire student body up on the bridge from which, traditionally, the young pupils look down on the soloists performing the pas de six and tarantella and memorize their parts.

At its close, the program, broadcast live over Danish television, was greeted with a prolonged, tumultuous ovation. Balloons were duly let loose, and confetti, in the form of tiny Danish flags, rained down from above. Andersen gave the first curtain calls to the dancers. When he finally appeared for his bow, in front of the applauding ranks of performers, facing an audience that had risen to its feet (not an everyday occurrence in Copenhagen), if I’m not mistaken—I saw his face from a distance, in a dazzle of stage light—he was in tears.

I think Andersen had earned the adulation he received. Whatever quibbles one might have over some of the artistic choices (and I have several fairly serious ones), this Festival was a triumph simply as an event, and Andersen, though he has continually given ample credit to the stagers, dancers, coaches, teachers, and staff “without whom,” was the leading force in bringing it about. Who else would have thought of finishing the festivities with a glorious display of fireworks on the King’s Square, right in front of the Royal Theatre, spelling Bournonville’s name out in lights, as it were, and firing up the sky with a brilliant fantasy of explosions in which stars turn to flowers, and comets acquire rainbow tints?

Photo: Official poster for the Royal Danish Ballet’s 3rd Bournonville Festival, June 3-11, 2005, created by Peter Bonde

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

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 almost no one in the audience apart from the company’s current personnel and its venerable retired dancers.) At that time, Bournonville had not yet been fully “discovered” by the international dance world; most of us visitors were ignorant even of the ballet’s plot—to say nothing of the virtues that place it easily among the great achievements of Romantic art. Between the ballet’s two acts, as the small number of privileged spectators from abroad stumbled from the darkness of the auditorium into the sunlit foyer, I encountered the dance critic and historian David Vaughan, a longtime colleague and friend. I remember that neither of us could speak; we were both weeping. The work was so tender, so luminous in its fantasy—and so very Danish—that it seemed beyond the reach of words. This is how I described it eventually in the essay I wrote on the 1979 Festival for Dance magazine:

“Bournonville’s A Folk Tale . . . 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.”

I have written about A Folk Tale many times since I made the above wonder-struck report, most recently in an essay for Dance Insider, on the ballet’s theme of “home.” My love of this ballet survived the new production in 1991, by Anne Marie Vessel Schlüter and Frank Andersen, with costumes and décor by Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II, that I thought coarsened it—and, where the trolls were concerned, thoroughly Disneyfied it. This production is still in use today; overall, it has not acquired nuance or luster with time.

The 2005 Festival cast was distinguished, nevertheless, by the performances of Gudrun Bojesen as Hilda, Kenneth Greve as Junker Ove, and Tina Højlund as Birthe. All glowing innocence, Bojesen embodied, as Hilda should, the unsullied loveliness of the young. Today, Bojesen is more conscious of her effect than she was earlier in her career, but if—as is only natural and inevitable—some of her former dewiness and reticence has vanished, it has been replaced by the growing knowledge of her particular dancing persona and the confidence in her powers that are marks of a ballerina coming into her own. Greve fulfilled, excellently, the “type” he was playing—a beautiful, brooding young man instinctively aspiring to perfect love. Højlund, as always, performed with enormous energy and spontaneity, creating a lightheaded, lusty Birthe who relishes her own deviltry, yet spares an occasional wistful sigh for the joys of a virtuous, civilized world that she will never have.

As I’ve commented, discussing other Festival productions, the music here was played too fast for the mime to register properly—and mime, an expressive mode that refuses to be rushed, is every bit as essential to A Folk Tale as dancing. On the other hand, mime portrayals that I thought slim a while back have deepened, notably Eva Kloborg’s Muri, which has accumulated a gratifying weight and some psychological complexity, and Lis Jeppesen’s Viderik (the “good” troll brother), which is not so flighty as it was early on. Thomas Lund was outstanding in the “Gypsy” pas de sept (classical fireworks inserted to liven up the dulcet wedding scene that concludes the ballet). He’s still the only guy in the company able to make the Bournonville style look entirely natural.

The wedding scene itself should, with its calm, ever-modest radiance, sum up everything that has gone before, yet now it doesn’t, quite. It’s as if the collaborators on the production—the stagers, the coaches, and a majority of the dancers—either didn’t understand its intrinsic qualities (which are, at heart, spiritual) or simply didn’t value them. In its present state, there’s still enough magic in A Folk Tale to enchant Bournonville newbies, even to retain the affection of veteran Folk Tale fans, but this time round, it didn’t make me cry.

Photo: Lithograph from the cover of the piano score for August Bournonville’s A Folk Tale

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

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 that it’s slighter than the Big Two, but I find it uniquely touching in its account of quiet events and barely spoken feelings. I’m highly susceptible as well to its notion that one can have a second chance at happiness. Among Bournonville’s ballets, The King’s Volunteers on Amager holds a similar special place in my affections. At least it did.

A ballet exists fully only in the here and now. The rest is merely history and capricious memory. I’m sorry to report that the current production of King’s Volunteers, the only one my little dance-avid granddaughter can see, is nowhere up to the version—staged by Hans Brenaa, with décor and costumes by Bjørn Wiinblad—that captured my heart at the first Bournonville Festival in 1979.

The one-act ballet, created in 1871, at the sunset of Bournonville’s career, is based on the choreographer’s nostalgic recall of the Fastelavn (Shrovetide) celebrations on the island of Amager that he witnessed as child. Something of a suburb of Copenhagen, Amager was home to a farming community that had originally emigrated from Holland and had, for several centuries, retained its Dutch dress and Dutch customs. (Today, Dutch names can still frequently be found among the area’s residents, and the marvelous Amager Museum holds examples of the unique clothes and furnishings of the settlement.)

In the ballet, a party of Copenhagen townies visits a farmhouse on Amager, where, as it happens, a squad of select upper-crust soldiers has been stationed to guard the vulnerable coast against enemy bombardment. Unfolding amidst the quotidian events of the scene is the bittersweet romance of a couple in midlife—Edouard, a womanizing husband, and his sorrowful but still loving wife, Louise. (Bournonville based the character of Edouard on a real historical figure, Jean Baptiste Edouard Du Puy—versatile musician, dashing soldier, and constantly inconstant lover. He was known, with admiration and dismay, as the “Don Juan of the North.”) Saddened by the incessant amorous exploits of her philandering spouse, Louise—a role for a ballerina with some history behind her—tricks him, in a masked dance, into attempting to seduce her. When they unmask, he comes to his senses and then, slowly and gravely, declares his lasting love for her. “You are the only one,” he mimes, and, for the moment, both of them pretend to believe it. This interchange is ingeniously embedded in an exuberant community dance that happily mixes young and old, elegant city dwellers and salt-of-the-earth farmers, folk dancing, classical dancing, and hectic carnival pageantry. The reconciliation, which, Bournonville suggests, may or may not prove enduring, is effected at a moment when Edouard and Louise are the only two, on a stage crammed with boisterous revelers, who are standing still.

In general, the new staging, by Anne Marie Vessel Schlüter, is neither subtle nor sensitive enough. It’s marred, moreover, by an addition meant to explain matters when they need no explanation—a dream sequence in which, to spell out Edouard’s proclivities, he’s made to dance with a quartet of anonymous beauties in pink nighties. The choreography devised for this segment is so banal as to be beyond comment.

The new décor and costumes by Karin Betz are even more unfortunate. The city girls are dressed in a medley of persimmon, hotted-up pinks, and reds blatantly hostile to the eyes, while the Amager folk, whose actual native costume for women featured lavish embroidery in glowing tones, are garbed so as to emphasize the flat, uncompromising black, red, white, and blue of the clothes’ background. You’d think, from the look of things, that the community embraced stringent denial rather than reflecting life’s richness.

The décor manages to be harsh and quaint at once, in the latter aspect much like a stylized picture postcard conveying a tourist’s greetings from Amager. Betz goes wrong again by placing, upstage center, a huge painting of a rural landscape in summery flowering, while the community’s children are seen sledding and throwing snowballs. The use of a picture—the kind you might hang on a wall, if you had the space and it weren’t so inept—is in itself disturbing. Like the designer of the new, misconceived set for La Ventana, Betz has opted for indicating semi-abstractly what used to be represented realistically. Please God, this does not indicate a trend.

If a ballet fully exists only in a current staging, its life depends equally on the current interpreters of its key roles and—in the case of character parts—of its minor roles as well. The King’s Volunteers cast for the Bournonville Festival came nowhere near the richness of the cast for the first Festival in 1979, which still burns bright in my memory. It featured the consumate dancer-actors Tommy Frishøi, Kirsten Simone, and Lillian Jensen—all from a genre of players that has traditionally given the RDB its distinctive luster and that nowadays seems ignored in favor of other concerns.

True, in the present production, Silja Schandorff has made a credible start on the role of Louise, even if her mime is a shade too close to classical dancing, and Peter Bo Bendixen is adequate as Edouard, though, handsome and stalwart as he is, he doesn’t radiate the sexual confidence of a born womanizer. Simone, who offered a heart-rending Louise in 1979, now does a vivacious job as the grandmotherly rural hostess—all housewifely bustle and robust appetite for life. Two other company veterans, Poul-Erik Hesselkilde and Flemming Ryberg, are equally convincing in smaller roles. But despite these individual efforts, the production doesn’t cohere as a story that, however slight, can gather the power to move its witnesses to tears. As a result, the inserted classical pas de trois—for dancers not involved in the story—takes on inordinate importance for the present-day audience, which responds more readily to bravura steps than it does to the deeper drama of emotional life.

Photo: Martin Mydskov Rønne: Poul-Erik Hesselkilde, Mogens Boesen, Mette Bødtcher, Ulla Frederiksen, Kenn Hauge, and Kirsten Simone in August Bournonville’s The King’s Volunteers on Amager

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

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 Lens: A Photographic Journey Through Bournonville’s Ballets) is a modest, pleasurable exhibition produced by the Royal Theatre and designed by Mia Okkels with the assistance of Kirsten Simone. Organized by ballet, it traces each of the main extant Bournonville works through the casts that have enriched it over time. The display feels like a family album, the family happening to be one of Denmark’s most significant in the realm of culture.

One way to look at this exhibition is to choose a single dancer and trace his or her career through the repertoire. A number of the artists represented are first seen as mere children, since Bournonville created countless roles in his ballets for the RDB school’s young students, to provide them with stage experience from their earliest years. The late Kirsten Ralov, for example, appears here first in Konservatoriet, as little Fanny, the child of impoverished itinerant performers, who aspires to a place in the classical-dance academy. Ralov went on to be a sparkling principal dancer and, subsequently, a teacher, a stager of Bournonville’s ballets, a company administrator, and the first to preserve the Bournonville Schools fully and formally. Nilas Martins, who was to switch his allegiance to the New York City Ballet, can be seen as one of the children taking dance class with their elders (fulfilling Fanny’s dream, as it were) in a later production of the same ballet; he’s the blond boy with the cherubic face and the gorgeous instep.

Subsequent artistic directors of the RDB are shown in their dancing days: Frank Andersen, the current incumbent, who has masterminded the third Bournonville Festival, and Henning Kronstam, under whose aegis the first—and stilll most glorious—Bournonville Festival took place in 1979. Both are “dancers who stayed,” as the company puts it. The “defectors” to Balanchine—those who were tempted away from the Danish ballet early in their careers—appear here too, on the stage that gave them their training: Ib Andersen, Peter Martins, Nikolaj Hübbe.

A number of actual families crop up: Kirsten Ralov, married first to Børge Ralov and then to Fredbjørn Bjørnsson, all three indispensable to the Danish ballet in their time; the siblings Kirsten Simone and Flemming Ryberg, classical-dance stars in their heyday who have evolved into vivid, resourceful character dancers; father and daughter Niels Bjørn Larsen and Dinna Bjørn; as well as a three-generation group consisting of Peter Martins; his uncle, Leif Ørnberg; and his son (with Lise la Cour), Nilas. Such clusters may seem to be of merely anecdotal interest, but I think they suggest something about the RDB’s tight-knit nature and long-lived traditions.

The pictures also capture history at the moment it’s being made. A 1945 photo of Far from Denmark, showing Margot Lander and Børge Ralov in the leading roles, includes Kirsten Ralov and Margrethe Schanne as the two cadets, roles traditionally given (and, in this case, aptly) to a pair of young women whose promise is on the brink of fulfillment.

As one might expect, the older photographs are the most resonant. A shot of Gerda Karstens as the witch, Madge, in La Sylphide, towards the end of her career in 1952, and two of Niels Bjørn Larsen in the same role, one from 1957, another from the 1994-95 season, show you the glories of the past. They also tell you what to look for in the role today: a keenly observed persona that is physically and emotionally developed in detail and coupled with ferocity of projection.

Two of the most striking images in the display record a pair of haunting embraces from La Sylphide. One, from the 1966-67 season, shows the consummate danseur noble Henning Kronstam cradling the head of the dying Sylphide (Anna Lærkesen) as she falls back in his arms. His face is a mask of sheer poetry, summing up love, longing, and loss in a single sublime moment. In the other, from the 1979-80 season, Sorella Englund, as Madge, embraces Arne Villumsen’s half-fainting James from behind, inserting her face, all grinning malevolence, next to his as if she were some terrible twin to the beautiful man whose ruin she has helped Fate execute. Viewers may notice that both Kronstam’s and Englund’s hands echo what their faces express. This congruity—half instinctive, half consciously honed—is something to look for in a performing artist likely to go down in the history books.

Girding the real photographic history of Bournonville’s ballets at the center of this show is a series of photographs commissioned by the Royal Danish Ballet for its 2005 calendar. It offers some dismaying evidence of how the company sees its future, how it intends to cope with making Bournonville appeal to a young generation of spectators who couldn’t care less about the treasures of the past. The photographer, Per Morton Abrahamsen, fancies himself a “visual provocateur.” By his own admission, he knew next to nothing about Denmark’s great nineteenth-century choreographer and his ballets before undertaking the assignment. After the fact, apparently, he understands even less. Nevertheless he produced a dozen mise-en-scenes in which—claiming to modernize the tales told by the ballets, to free the action from, as he puts it, the repressions of “Victorian piety”—he trashes them with a vulgarity so cheap and superficial, it would make you laugh if only you weren’t crying. (Let’s assume the translator meant “propriety.”) For the sake of fairness, let me add that, in a few cases, as in his response to sylphdom, Abrahamsen merely sentimentalizes his subject, in the manner of an ad for perfume.

For the most part, the work reflects the cool young crowd at play, with lots of slick, noir eroticism, complete with criminal violence and conspicuously populated with victimized women. One svelte-bodied beauty seems to have been raped. Another is being flung out of a high window (grinning, mind you) into the dubious embrace of a firefighter’s net manned by a bunch of guys stripped to display their pecs—if, indeed, by good or ill luck, she misses hitting the pavement below. I forget which of Bournonville’s ballets these images purport to represent. For Abdallah (think “harem”), Abrahamsen gives us the club scene, artfully streaked with fire and crowded with glossy bronzed bodies. The available ladies are nude (breasts much in evidence, pubic area coyly turned away or airbrushed), while the sole gentleman (I use the word advisedly) keeps his shiny black boxers on—for fear, I guess, of offending some oldster who may still be hewing to Victorian hang-ups.

This exhibition also includes a collage of film and video taken from the archives of the Royal Theatre and arranged by Ida Wang Carlsen. It was too dim to see the day I visited the Round Tower, so I must take its virtues on faith. Its background music, co-opted from the scores of the Bournonville ballets, was inescapable. I do wish—in vain, I know—that the fashion for augmenting visual exhibitions with sound scores of any kind would go away. I am a slow looker (one of the few left on earth, no doubt), and it drives me to distraction to hear the same tape loop played over and over again while I’m trying to see something. I consoled myself for this aural abuse by walking the full route of the spiraling cobblestone ramp that winds through the Round Tower. The roughness of the walkway and its just slightly precipitous pitch alert you to matters of texture and balance. And, for the eye’s delight, as you ascend or descend, you get glimpses of the gentle cityscape through the small deep-set windows that punctuate the tower’s rough white plaster walls. The Round Tower is a simple and perfect exercise in architectural purity. To experience one’s body moving through this space is, especially for a dance fan, one of the myriad small but intense delights that Copenhagen has to offer.

Photo: Mydskov: Anna Lærkesen and Henning Kronstam in August Bournonville’s La Sylphide

© 2005 Tobi Tobias