What’s Dance Without the Details? : The splendor of late designer Jens-Jacob Worsaae’s sets and costumes lives on as San Francisco Ballet’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ ventures south to the Music Center

Nobody planned it that way, but the new $900,000 San Francisco Ballet “Romeo and Juliet” that opens Wednesday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion can be considered a monument to the late Danish designer Jens-Jacob Worsaae.

Both celebrated and controversial for his daring reconceptualization of familiar works and his insistence on minutely detailed workmanship, Worsaae influenced ballet production throughout North America and Europe before his death from cancer in August--five months after the San Francisco “Romeo and Juliet” premiere. He was 48.

In contrast to the lusty/dusty verismo versions of the Shakespeare/Prokofiev ballet familiar to local audiences, Worsaae envisioned a painterly, aristocratic High Renaissance Verona partly inspired by the works of Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio. From marbled floors to paneled ceilings, his sets leave plenty of space for dancing yet are meticulously finished for their own sake, with ornately carved and gilded columns, rich tapestries and frescoes, even a super-balcony: a bridge unit suspended 12 feet above the stage.

Too ill to travel far from his native Copenhagen, Worsaae never saw a rehearsal or performance of this “Romeo and Juliet” except on videotape. However, throughout the production period, he helped supervise the workmanship of widely separated teams of specialized artisans.

Fabric for his costumes, for instance, was bought white and dyed in England--sometimes four times--then silk-screened. Bodice pieces went to Denmark for embroidery and back to England for beading (seed-pearls being a Worsaae trademark), with the designer periodically joining San Francisco Ballet artistic director (and “Romeo” choreographer) Helgi Tomasson in London to judge the results. The process often took three months.

“Jens-Jacob would hardly ever compromise,” Tomasson recalls. “He didn’t like shortcuts. People in the costume shop would say, ‘Jens-Jacob, nobody’s going to see that (detail) from the back row.’ And he would answer, ‘The dancers are going to see it. And when they put on costumes like that, they feel very special and it carries through into their dancing.’ He felt very strongly about that.”

Boston Ballet artistic director Bruce Marks remembers that Worsaae’s demands “drove my staff a little crazy. He would have them move a line of gold braid on a costume maybe an eighth of an inch--when the closest seat to any dancer in my theater is 60 feet away. But his reason was always ‘It must be right.’ And right to him meant right from four inches away or 400 feet away.”

*

Local dance audiences first saw Worsaae’s designs in 1979, when a touring group called Soloists of the Royal Danish Ballet visited Pasadena with a program honoring the centenary of the great Romantic choreographer August Bournonville. The iridescent pastels and gleaming accents of his costumes suggested period richness without any hint of the grandiose, just as his choice of fabrics achieved ideal lightness and flow.

“Jens-Jacob was always concerned with how the dancers moved in his costumes,” Marks emphasizes. “He always talked about the 19th Century in terms of lightness: ‘We’ve got to get it light.’ And, of course, the actual costumes of Bournonville’s time were never light. They were heavy and cumbersome--on big bodies.

“When you look at his work, it isn’t a reproduction of 19th-Century costuming,” Marks continues. “It’s quite modern--the fabric, the color range, the fact that the costumes were always dyed and painted rather than a single, solid color. They didn’t look old-fashioned and yet they were classical: a reinterpretation of Romantic costumes in contemporary terms.”

Marks had met Worsaae in Copenhagen in the early ‘70s and first worked with him on a piece called “Innerspace” for Nederlands Dans Theater before becoming artistic co-director of Ballet West in Salt Lake City midway through that decade.

They later collaborated on a number of productions--none more acclaimed than the 1985 recon struction of Bournonville’s long-lost Arabian Nights ballet “Abdallah” for Ballet West. Soon after, that production entered the repertories of the Boston Ballet (when Marks became director) and the Royal Danish Ballet itself.

*

By the time “Abdallah” premiered, the new artistic director of the Royal Danish Ballet was Frank Andersen, co-founder of the touring Soloists group and a longtime friend of Worsaae’s. “Jens-Jacob designed my wife’s wedding gown in 1983,” he recalls, “and that summer the three of us went around Europe together in a car.”

He lists the cities fondly, the way other Worsaae collaborators name productions: “Stuttgart, Venice, Nice, Cannes, St. Tropez, Paris. It was a wonderful summer. Jens-Jacob was a very dear, very honest person and it was always a great honor for me to hear him say I was one of his friends.”

The late ‘80s proved extraordinarily productive for Worsaae, with even the Bolshoi Ballet (not exactly a haven for Western designers) adding to his laurels.

In 1986, Helgi Tomasson was passing through Copenhagen and a former teacher advised him to take a look at costumes and scenery that Worsaae created for the famed Tivoli Pantomime Theater. “I liked what I saw,” Tomasson says, “and got ahold of (Worsaae’s) telephone number through a friend and called him up the next morning.”

Their meeting led to a series of San Francisco Ballet commissions beginning with Tomasson’s “Intimate Voices” in 1987 and continuing into the future with a projected production of Flemming Flindt’s “The Lesson” (the last designs Worsaae completed) in 1996. However, it was three distinctive versions of full-length classics that generated the greatest attention: “Swan Lake” (1988), “Sleeping Beauty” (1990) and the new “Romeo and Juliet.”

Each of these projects, Tomasson reveals, proved to be largely designer-driven in concept. The Watteau-style “Swan Lake,” for instance, evolved from Worsaae’s desire to enhance the fluidity of Tomasson’s new choreography: “He saw a rehearsal and asked me, ‘Would you want the ballet to be (traditionally) Gothic?’ I said, ‘No, it doesn’t have to be that.’ And he said, ‘Why not move it up a bit, make it 18th Century? I can use different materials (for that period) that have more of a flow.”

For “Sleeping Beauty,” Tomasson and Worsaae discussed how to dramatize the passage of 100 years that takes place midway through the action. While in Moscow for his Bolshoi commission, Worsaae thought of the contrast between the ancient, Asiatic Russia of boyars and icons versus the Frenchified Westernization imposed under Peter the Great. He called Tomasson to ask, “Why can’t ‘Sleeping Beauty’ take place here ?”

*

Last December, the Royal Dan ish Ballet staged its own Tomasson/Worsaae “Sleeping Beauty,” one modeled on their San Francisco version but even more scenically elaborate (three-dimensional onion-domes instead of a painted backdrop, for instance).

It was the most expensive production in the company’s history, Frank Andersen says, and it took shape at a time when Worsaae was coming to the theater directly from exhausting chemotherapy sessions.

“He was very, very sick,” Andersen remembers. “We even felt sometimes that he was close to the end but his willpower denied accepting the fact and brought him through.”

The production is scheduled to be videotaped next April for television and possible video distribution, and Andersen considers it “one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. I think he knew that it was most likely his last chance to show what a genius he was, and I think that (genius) came out loud and clear on opening night.” Worsaae was subsequently knighted, the first designer so honored in Denmark.

To Tomasson, “Romeo and Juliet” represents Worsaae’s “most personal production in many ways. When I asked him to do it (in 1991), he said, ‘Helgi, I have wanted to do that ballet more than any other work, ever.’ And I said, ‘Well, it was one ballet I always wanted to dance but never did--so maybe it will be a good time for us to get together.’ ”

“There is something in the production that I identify with him. Maybe it has to do with the colors, maybe just the way he talked about it.”

Certainly, Worsaae drafted plans for his own funeral that included his body being carried out of the church to a lament from Prokofiev’s score. As usual, his wishes were obeyed.

“The last time I spoke with him was the evening he died,” Tomasson says. “From just his tone of voice, I knew that he had only a short time left. He suffered so much. It was incredible how much he suffered and how little he let on. He was a very private person and did not talk much about himself or his family. But he loved to talk about dance--about costumes, scenery, productions.

“I remember him telling me that maybe some day people will look back on what we accomplished together and say, ‘They really took the time to do it right. They didn’t have to, but they did.’ I will miss him very much.”

* San Francisco Ballet, “Romeo and Juliet,” Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave. Wednesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturday-next Sunday, 2 p.m. $15-$60. (213) 972-7211, (213) 365-3500 or (714) 740-2000.