Great Dane
Bournonville's ballet legacy lives on, if only in Copenhagen.

By Rita Felciano

Photo by Martin Mydtskov Rønne Pointe guard: Royal Danish Ballet members Gudrun Bojesen and Thomas Lumd perform August Bournonville's tragic La Sylphide.
'I REALLY WOULD like to wrap it in plastic and hermetically seal it off," San Francisco Ballet (SFB) soloist Peter Brandenhoff said outside the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, where we were about to take in another ballet by 19th-century Danish choreographer August Bournonville. "And yet, I don't really want to do that." Brandenhoff expressed the mixed emotions that other longtime observers also felt about the Bournonville heritage as presented during the third Bournonville Festival, held June 3 through 11 in Copenhagen. Organized by the Royal Danish Ballet, the nine-day event celebrated the 200th birthday of the choreographer of French descent, considered the father of Danish ballet.

Bournonville's name is bandied about in the same breath as that of Marius Petipa and George Balanchine, but his choreography – created during the 47 years he danced with, choreographed for, and directed the RDB, from 1830 through 1877 – is almost never seen outside Denmark. La Sylphide, an early and in many ways atypical work, and excerpts from Napoli, are the exceptions.

While wondering about whether to make the journey (which turned into a pilgrimage) to Denmark, I received conflicting opinions: "Better go now; this will be the last time." "Don't go; it's awful what they have been doing to the ballets." "The dancers are no longer properly trained." "The casting is all wrong." "The stagers don't know what they are doing." Once I was there, the postperformance malaise of seasoned Bournonville watchers, such as Danish historian Charlotte Christensen and German dance photographer Petra Bober, both of whom have followed the company for more than 30 years, spoke volumes. Clearly, what they experienced was a paradise lost.

For relative newcomers, of which there were plenty (including myself), the Bournonville festival was a revelation. Witnessing Bournonville's humane vision and the clarity of his dance language became a once-in-a-lifetime event. Bournonville was a citizen-choreographer who represented the whole of his society onstage: cobblers and washerwomen, grandmothers and merchants, musicians and peasants. And children, lots of them. A performing extra who works at the post office during the day told me that the choreographer once grabbed a policeman and dragged him into the theater because he liked the way the man looked.

Bournonville packed his story ballets (as all of them were) with individualized, recognizable characters – most of whom have proper names and are referred to as such by the dancers. In his remarkably similar narratives, the characters may stray from the straight and narrow, but they eventually return to the fold. (James in La Sylphide is the exception – hence its standing as Bournonville's only tragedy.) They present an idealized perspective on Danish life, one in which different social classes coexist harmoniously because everyone has a place. Bournonville's belief system – like that of mid-19th-century Danish society – is rooted in Christian concepts of failure and redemption.

Bournonville's ballets also convey a sense of shared values and community – in settings as varied as Naples, Basra, and Scotland – where people care for each other and, overall, behave rather decently. Though they are dressed in quaint Flemish peasant costumes, Danish military uniforms, and Italian fishermen's pants, this affectionate aspect of Bournonville's vision still resonates powerfully across the footlights.

Bournonville's dance language is extraordinary. It includes extensive use of mime, and a step vocabulary that emphasizes feathery-fast footwork, constant changes of direction, and a springy elasticity to the jumps, which are performed in equal measure by men and women. The dances are much more vertical than we are used to seeing today, which is no surprise given the small, crowded stages Bournonville had to work on. Instead of gobbling up space, the dancers bob in it. Among the most intriguing steps are the many types of pirouettes, rarely more than two turns at a time, primarily performed sur le cou-de-pied (on the instep): The dancer, instead of lifting his or her foot to the knee of the standing leg, places it low – in front of, behind, or wrapped around the ankle. The result is one of ease and elegance instead of athletic display.

The mime work, always intrinsically linked to the music, consists of specific gestures – some of which are somewhat obscure to a non-Bournonville watcher. But more than just gestural, the mime comes from inside; it is the most expressive form of nonverbal acting. In a well-trained Bournonville dancer, mime and steps work together to create a fully rounded persona.

Brandenhoff is a good example of what Bournonville schooling can do. At SFB he is somewhat of an outsider. He doesn't have the speed, bravura, or athleticism of many of his colleagues, but give him the right role and he'll burn up the stage. As Hilarion in this spring's SFB production of Giselle, he embodied not only the spurned lover but also the centuries-old resentment of a peasant repeatedly taken advantage of by an arrogant aristocrat. A mix of self-hatred, aggression, and helplessness inflated his Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, performed this spring at SFB, into a blind rage that increasingly threatened to explode.

So why the ambivalence about these most recent Bournonville stagings? Is it a case of generational wailing, like that surrounding Peter Martins, ballet master of New York City Ballet, who gets accused of everything from allowing sloppy dancing to a coarsening of (and indifference to) Balanchine's choreography? Or is this specifically Danish version of Romantic ballet really an endangered species?

It's probably a little of both. Brandenhoff doesn't think the separation of Bournonville style from general ballet training is a good idea: Bournonville classes are taught only once a week, and some believe this is just not often enough. Others feel the ballets themselves need to be performed more often. (Next season's RDB program includes only two of them.) But the repertoire, great as it is, was a product of its time. Today's dancers and their Danish audiences want more varied fare.

I have to admit that after a week of glorious immersion in this extraordinary tradition, I also was ready for something less sunny, less cheerful, and less musically oom-pah-pah. On my last day in Copenhagen, Tim Rushton's Silent Steps, for the New Danish Dance Theater, served the purpose: rough, nonlinear, floor-embracing, and set to Bach. Fabulous. As for Brandenhoff, he does his part to keep Bournonville alive. Last spring he coached the students of Oregon Ballet Theatre in excerpts of Napoli.