DANCE: Royal Danish Ballet Preserves the Legacy of Bournonville : GREAT DANES : The Royal Danish Ballet Has Long Been Ruled by the Traditions of Bournonville

Prized chiefly for their combination of choreographic intricacy and nostalgic sweetness, the ballets of August Bournonville (1805-79) form the largest body of 19th-Century classicism existing in any condition the original choreographers might recognize.

Preserved from generation to generation by the Royal Danish Ballet, they remain rooted in pantomime and social portraiture, resisting attempts at modernization.

“Bournonville today is four things: a school, a repertory, a style and a problem,” wrote young Danish critic Alexander Meinertz recently. Earlier, he had isolated that “problem” in a review of the latest Royal Danish Ballet staging of Bournonville’s “A Folk Tale”:

“It’s Danish, cute and lovely,” Meinertz said, “but, as with most Bournonville, there’s a problem presenting that to contemporary audiences.” Picture a ballerina in a long tutu with wings on her back, holding a bird’s nest--or a danseur whacking a tambourine before he takes a jump straight at the audience, arms spread wide. That’s Bournonville, right?

Not entirely. By presenting nearly all the choreographer’s surviving works in an eight-day marathon, the recent Bournonville Festival II in Copenhagen augmented these images with a host of others. Moreover, it supplemented the performances with citywide activities that took audiences deeper into Bournonville’s world.

For example, the Museum of Decorative Art focused an exhibit on “Napoli,” Bournonville’s most popular ballet, and, in particular, on Northern Europe’s obsession with the fabled eroticism and danger of Italy. In turn, these issues were reflected onstage in the ambitious 150th-anniversary Royal Danish staging of “Napoli.”

Part revival, part reconstruction, this “Napoli” is among the works being danced in an all-Bournonville engagement continuing through Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. The performances mark the company’s first Southern California appearance in 27 years. (A review of opening night appears on Page F1 of today’s Calendar section.)

With their depiction of lusty Neapolitan fisherfolk, the first and third acts of “Napoli” have suffered only a little from the attrition that has left the second act (set on Capri) largely an empty shell.

Beyond merely restaging Act 2, Dinna Bjoern has choreographed its long-lost dances in Bournonville style to reclaim its function as the equivalent of the pivotal “white acts” in “Giselle,” “Swan Lake” and “La Sylphide.”

In a festival lecture-demonstration, Bjoern explained that Bournonville’s writings led her to make Act 2 an interlude of dreamlike sensuality. This world of sensation and forgetfulness should form a potent contrast with the social and religious conventions of workaday Naples in Acts 1 and 3.

But does it? Reviewing this “Napoli,” veteran Danish critic Ebbe Moerch praised it as “the best Bournonville production in many years” but admitted that “one cringes over the costumes. . . “ in Act 2. Far from sensual, they struck him as “clumsy and ugly.”

Even ignoring the second act costumes, festival audiences found the intended contrast between the acts sometimes upset by casting.

At the premiere, for instance, Nikolaj Hubbe brought so much sexual intensity to the leading male role that Naples became Ground Zero for sensuality instead of Capri. Two days later, however, the boyish-unto-virginal interpretation of American principal Lloyd Riggins helped make a compelling case for Bjoern’s dichotomy.

The performances by Hubbe and Riggins not only demonstrated the interpretive latitude of major Bournonville roles, but also embodied the tension between preserving Bournonville tradition and extending it that preoccupies so many members of this company.

“Tradition. You never know if it’s your enemy or your friend,” says Hubbe with a Gioconda smile. He can afford to be philosophical: After the company returns to Copenhagen from the two-city American tour, he joins the New York City Ballet.

To company principal Alexander Koelpin, however, “it’s very hard to conserve the tradition. It’s not just a matter of doing the steps right--we have to give it some of ourselves. . . . It’s a matter of flair, of feeling, of having the heart for it. Then it becomes Bournonville.”

Koelpin and Hubbe were the young lions of the 1988 Royal Danish visit to the United States, but Koelpin currently remains sidelined with a split kneecap. With no need to promote himself or the company, he’s willing to talk about the dark side of Bournonville’s legacy:

“Sometimes we can suffer from all this tradition,” he says. “It becomes so historically correct, it has nothing to do with impulse and expression and love.”

Koelpin says company officials have sometimes ordered him to eliminate ideas and feelings from an interpretation when they weren’t accepted as part of the tradition of dancing that role.

“I’m so sick and tired of hearing ‘It’s always been done like this,’ ” he declares. “There’ll always be 10 Bournonville experts in the house, and they’ll always have 10 different opinions.”

Caught in the middle of the debate: Lloyd Riggins, who grew up in Orlando, Fla., training with his mother and uncle at the company they founded. In 1986, he went to a Bournonville workshop in Michigan and, at 16, was given an invitation to study in Copenhagen.

He went the following year and was offered a contract, rising quickly through the ranks to become the youngest principal dancer in company history.

Riggins says he didn’t judge Danish ballet traditions right away: “All I did was try to find out about them.” He’s happy that the Royal Danish Ballet normally dances a wide range of contemporary choreography. But he credits the Bournonville repertory and style with developing him as an artist.

“Doing the choreography produces its own dancers,” he explains. “The style makes you look pleasant and relaxed. It conveys ease, not flash. You can try to dance bigger, mime bigger, but it wouldn’t be true to the style. A lot of people try too hard in getting the style. It’s a matter of simplifying.”

Riggins has now danced in all the surviving or reconstructed Bournonville ballets and divertissements with male roles. He’s even earned approval in Bournonville parts dominated by mime.

Nevertheless, as a non-Dane, he labels himself “the freak of the festival,” which might be just another way of saying that he defies the rule that only Danes look comfortable in Bournonville.

Since the first Bournonville Festival in 1979, Copenhagen audiences have seen a number of important new productions of his ballets. However, the unexpected hit of this year’s event turned out to be a revival of the late Hans Brenaa’s 1979 staging of “Kermesse in Bruges.”

Many of the festival’s happiest discoveries turned up in this picaresque 1851 romp, starting with 19-year-old Johan Kobborg, claiming a role Ib Andersen used to own; Lis Jeppesen, the company’s exquisite lyric ballerina of the 1980s, now exulting in a spitfire role. And, finally, Kirsten Simone, great international star of the 1960s, glorious as a high-class widow held spellbound by a yokel.

Simone entered the Royal Danish Ballet school in 1945 and joined the company seven years later. At 57, she plays a wide range of mime roles, including Madge in “La Sylphide.” And she discusses changes in the company’s approach to Bournonville with no false reverence for the past.

“It always changes as times change,” she says. “People see Bournonville with new eyes and look at it from different angles instead of doing an old thing the old way.”

Although she left an indelible stamp on steamy modern roles, Simone approves of the renewed emphasis on Bournonville. “I love all his Romantic ballets, and I think we are the company in the world that does him best,” she says.

And how does she explain the continuing fascination with a choreographer born at the very beginning of the 19th Century?

“Because the world as it is now can sometimes be very cruel,” she answers. “Because it’s wonderful to see something that you can believe in, that shows you the world is good.”

What: The Royal Danish Ballet.

When: “La Sylphide” Thursday and Friday, June 11 and 12, at 8 p.m.; “Napoli” Saturday, June 13, at 2 and 8 p.m. and Sunday, June 14, at 1 p.m.

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.

Whereabouts: San Diego (I-405) Freeway to Bristol Street exit. North to Town Center Drive. (Center is one block east of South Coast Plaza.)

Wherewithal: $14 to $55.

Where to call: (714) 556-2787.