Denmark Celebrates a Legacy of Dance

The famed Tivoli Gardens are still closed for the season and even the Little Mermaid seems to shiver from the cold on her rock by the sea. Officially, however, it’s Danish summertime and onstage at the Royal Theatre the dress code is shorts for the fishermen and short-sleeved dresses for the peasant women in a brand-new, 150th anniversary production of August Bournonville’s ballet “Napoli.”

The big news of a glittering, eight-day Bournonville Festival, only the second such event in the history of the Royal Danish Ballet, the “Napoli” production exemplifies the balance between tradition and innovation sustained by the current company leaders. As always, the first and third acts bustle with Italianate energy along with that mixture of classical dance and character mime lending Bournonville’s ballets their special flavor.

Act Two, however, is the staging’s major challenge. Corresponding to the “white acts” of such Franco-Russian classics as “Giselle” and “Swan Lake,” it shows the two young lovers tempted and tested in the Blue Grotto on the isle of Capri. Cuts and changes since Bournonville’s time have left scarcely any of his original choreography intact here, so the production team had to reinvent dances to discarded music.

Southern California balletomanes will be able to see the result for themselves when the Royal Danish Ballet performs the complete “Napoli” four times as part of a June 9-14 engagement at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, the full company’s first West Coast visit since 1965.

Two other ballets scheduled for Costa Mesa graced the Bournonville Festival’s official weekend opening: the familiar “Flower Festival in Genzano” pas de deux and “Konservatoriet,” both of them excerpts from longer works now lost. Created six years after “Napoli,” the “Flower Festival” duet again combines suggestions of Italian folk style with the elegant French classicism that is the focus of “Konservatoriet,” an 1849 ensemble piece set in a ballet classroom.

If “Konservatoriet” can be considered a living textbook of Bournonville classicism at its purest, the two-act 1860 ballet-vaudeville “Far From Denmark” (performed on the same festival program) provides a manual of Bournonville mime.

But “Far From Denmark” will not be coming to America--perhaps ever--because of its objectionably antiquated view of some of our minority cultures. In the second act, for example, the plot involves Danish sailors performing a pseudo-savage American Indian war dance as well as cute and playful quasi-Eskimo and Chinese divertissements. Not exactly politically correct.

Even worse: the comic mime and antic “Negro Dance” by performers in blackface portraying family servants. That’s right, blackface. You sit there wishing you were somewhere else. Anywhere. It doesn’t help if you understand the historical context of the work--or recall Bournonville’s many liberal deeds and opposition to slavery. It doesn’t even help to remind yourself that Alvin Ailey worked productively with this company more than once toward the end of his life. You’re still watching the balletic equivalent of a mammy doll.

Happily, his 1991 staging of “Far From Denmark” is the exception to artistic director Frank Andersen’s stated policy of rethinking Bournonville’s works with each new production so that they never degenerate into museum pieces or mere technical showcases. He says that the first festival in 1979 initiated the process by inspiring company members to investigate a performing tradition that all too often had been sustained by mere force of habit.

Fully 150 critics, dance historians and ballet directors are in Copenhagen steeping themselves in Bournonvilleana night and day. Seating them all in the antique, intimate red, white and gold Royal Theater must have taxed the Danes’ celebrated sense of diplomacy, for it’s immediately obvious that where you sit is where you stand in the Royal Ballet world. For those lesser mortals not absolutely centered, sitting to the left may be marginally more prestigious, if only because one is closer to the Royal box where, each night without fail, Queen Margrethe II watches the ballet with members of her family.

Not merely the monarch that Frank Andersen calls “the protector” of the Royal Danish Ballet, Her Royal Highness also takes private Bournonville classes with her ladies in waiting and designed the sets and costumes for the acclaimed 1991 production of the choreographer’s “A Folk Tale.” During the festival, Her Majesty also plans to officially receive the foreign press--regal generosity indeed.

As for the dancers, they’re facing nightly changes of program and constant company-related demands on their post-performance hours with enough enthusiasm to suggest that they look upon the festival as a growth experience and maybe a chance to make history. Certainly Nikolaj Hubbe seems to be aiming at definitive interpretations whether he’s dancing the lead in “Napoli” (the premiere) or just leading the tarantella (the second performance). Hubbe joins New York City Ballet at the close of the Danes’ American tour, but the fire, scale and precision of his festival dancing sets an imposing standard for those who remain behind.

Among the women, Rose Gad and Silja Schandorff have excelled in temptress roles, the former in “Far From Denmark,” the latter in “Abdallah.” But for the ultimate statement of neo-Romantic feminine wiles, nobody can touch veteran Royal Danish Ballet star Kirsten Simone in the mime role of the greedy, manipulative mother-in-law elect of “Abdallah.” Simone puts a lifetime of dancing “Carmen” and “Miss Julie” into every venal glance and gesture. And when Riggins as Abdallah finally sends her to hell in a burst of flame, the audience can’t restrain its glee.

Simone says she’s playing Madge in “La Sylphide” at one of the Orange County performances, an event in itself that, due to other casting priorities, won’t be a part of the Bournonville Festival. So even those festival mavens who leave Copenhagen feeling like instant experts may have more to learn about Bournonville dancing far from Denmark.