DANCE : RDB’s Frank Andersen Goes Digging for Roots

“I’m sitting here as the guardian of this (Bournonville) tradition,” says Frank Andersen, artistic director of the Royal Danish Ballet. “And I’m going to make sure that it’s going to be alive after I have left.”

Andersen considers it a top priority to turn the school back to its roots. He says it began veering away from teaching strict Bournonville style in the years before his appointment in 1985, and he believes that the current roster of dancers suffers from that change.

“We just didn’t have enough education and training in Bournonville,” he says. “So some of the dancers today who are 22, 23 or 24 don’t know all the Danish classics like we do. I don’t want that to happen again.”

Andersen himself was a product of the school, beginning his training there in 1960 when he was 7. He joined the company in 1971 and became a principal in 1977.

Despite his emphasis on tradition, he is enough of a realist to acknowledge that the style has changed since the 19th Century.

“These ballets were made more than 150 years ago, and many of them have never been out of the repertory!” he says. “Of course they’ve changed. They’ve all changed. Certain dancers have given a little touch here, a little touch there, and that’s going to be passed on to the next dancers.”

Even beyond these personal additions, ballet technique itself has developed and gotten better. For instance, spotting technique, which allows dancers to turn multiple pirouettes, “hadn’t been invented” in Bournonville’s time, he says. So dancers in those days simply turned fewer times than what we are used to seeing.

As for dancing on pointe, that was reserved, Andersen says, for only a few dancers, such as the women who took the title role in “La Sylphide.” The others “wore soft slippers,” he says. “They went up and down, up and down. If today all the girls were not on pointe, we would say, ‘Isn’t that going a little bit far in being historically correct?’ I think so.

“So we know that the style today is not what it looked like. But it is close. We also know that. And we want it to be that. But we don’t want it to be a museum. So there has to be a certain modification.”

Andersen locates that modification in a new attitude toward Bournonville that comes from dancing works by other choreographers and from guesting with other companies.

In his view, his company has “Bournonville in the middle” of the repertory and “then we have these strings going to (George) Balanchine, (Jerome) Robbins, (Frederick) Ashton, (Kenneth) MacMillan, (John) Neumeier, (Lar) Lubovitch, Laura Dean, (Alvin) Ailey, (Glen) Tetley, you name it.

“We go out, and Alvin challenges us. We work with him, get input, feedback, we bring that back to Bournonville and use it.”

“I’m thinking about the way of working, the way of thinking with the movement, with the steps,” he adds. “I’m not talking about changing the dancing. I’m just saying that Alvin has something to give, in many senses, and so does Robbins. Their thoughts are great, and I’m sure that we can use that in the 20th Century today.”

The repertory scheduled for Orange County includes “La Sylphide,” “Konservatoriet” and a new production of the full-length “Napoli” created partly because the older sets had been ruined and partly because “the second act has always been a problem,” Andersen says.

Andersen and company ballet master Henning Kronstam staged the first and third acts of “Napoli”; Dinna Bjoern, artistic director of the Norwegian National Ballet, reworked Act 2.

Some observers have expressed regret that the Danes are not bringing works that are seen less frequently. But Andersen stoutly defends the choices.

“We haven’t been here for 27 years, and the trademark of the Danish Ballet is probably ‘Napoli’ and ‘La Sylphide,’ ” he says. “A lot of our friends and critics and historians have seen these pieces. But we’re also dancing for a general audience, as well as telling stories about ordinary people.

“I would have liked to play two weeks here because I would have liked to bring a contemporary program also. But when you’re only here one week, I think it’s important to show what we do best.”