BALLET REVIEW : Danish Troupe Triumphs at Kennedy Center

A kinder and gentler politics may still be eluding us, but that there is such a thing as kinder and gentler ballet is attested to with exquisite enchantment by August Bournonville’s “A Folk Tale,” the opening offering in the Royal Danish Ballet’s current week-long visit to the Kennedy Center Opera House, launched Tuesday night.

This 1854 masterpiece of a fairy-tale ballet hasn’t the flash, fire or high tragedy of the Franco-Russian historical repertory American audiences are more used to, but it has a bewitching perfection all its own.

The Danish troupe, honoring Washington as one of only two national stops (the other was at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa), appeared at first sight to be in splendid fettle, sporting a multitude of new, young, gifted dancers, among them Silja Schandorff and Peter Bo Bendixen--the excellent principals for this first cast of “A Folk Tale.”

You’ll be wondering about one of the highly publicized features of the new staging--the sets and costumes designed by Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II, clearly an artist of fine skill and imagination.

As befits the nature of the work, the decor has an engaging storybook quality, and the costumes--appropriately suggesting the rich variety of social strata and clearly reflecting the sharp divisions between mortals and supernaturals--are no less winning.

Such reservations as one might have about the designs arise as much from the overall dramatic conception of the new production, directed by Frank Andersen, the company’s artistic director, and Anne Marie Vessel. In any case, the drawbacks, if such they are, are not of sufficient gravity to detract from the superbly humane charms of the ballet as a whole.

The plot of “A Folk Tale” is too convoluted to lend itself to easy summary, but the essentials of the story are simple enough. At birth, the human Hilda was snatched by mischievous trolls, and a troll baby--her troll counterpart, Birthe--was left in her place.

The ballet is essentially the tale of the righting of this wrong, the restoration of Hilda to the natural world and her predestined sweetheart, the knight Ove. It is also, in a typically Bournonvillean vein, a magnification of the virtues of Christian love and harmony over the greedy and capricious irrationality of trolldom--a sermon on “family values,” if you will.

For contemporary American audiences, the preponderance of gesture in “A Folk Tale”--as opposed to the showy virtuosity we tend to identify with “dance”--can be something of a hurdle, and that probably accounts for the somewhat subdued reaction of Tuesday’s audience, which received the work and the company warmly but not explosively.

Schandorff’s grandly scaled Hilda was assuredly one of the chief joys of the performance--the 23-year-old is not only tallish for a ballerina, she also has a sense of daring and an amplitude in phrasing that remind one of Suzanne Farrell. Bendixen, her Ove, showed us a nobility of purpose and romantic ardor that his matinee-idol looks did nothing to diminish.

Nothing in the performance, though, outshone Lis Jeppesen’s peppery account of Birthe--this past master of Bournonville style, herself a bewitching Hilda in previous seasons, gave a model demonstration of comic characterization at its pungent best, seasoned with a kind of Imogene Coca nutsiness that goes to the heart of the tempestuous troll maiden.

Jette Buchwald’s Valkyrie-like Muri, as the leader of the trolls, was an additional enhancement, as were the contributions of virtually every other cast member, including the fleet soloists of the finale’s sprightly Pas de Sept, the corps dancers of the peasant ensembles, and the multitude of children.

Michael Bastian and Sorella Englund, in key mime roles as a contrasted pair of troll siblings, were likable but on the pallid side. They mirrored the primary flaw in the production as a whole--a softening of the troll universe, depriving it of the edge of menace and grotesquerie that were among the strong points of the earlier staging seen here in 1982.

Be that as it may, “A Folk Tale”--and the uniquely scintillating troupe that dances it--are precious gems for any ballet lover.