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The Bournonville Archive

Bournonville in Hell
An Examination of the Bournonville Ballets and Their Stagings, 1879 to 1998, as well as Recent Events in the Company's History

Part Ia; Prologue, 1879 through 1978

by Alexandra Tomalonis
copyright © 1998 by Alexandra Tomalonis

Things have not gone well for Bournonville lately. There have been so many changes in direction and personnel at the Royal Theater since 1992 that the survival of Bournonville's ballets, as well as of the sensibilities that entitled the Danish company to a singular and honored place among the world's top institutions, is in grave doubt. I realize that dance critics are always writing something like this about somebody or other, but sometimes it's actually true, and I write, not as a hysterical alarmist, "The sky is falling," but as one who has picked through the rubble after the fall.

Things had begun to go seriously wrong around the time of the death of Hans Brenaa, the pre-eminent Bournonville stager of the post-World War II period, although few realized it back in 1988. But in the spring of 1992, just about the time the sets for the II Bournonville Festival were being struck, the announcement came that an amusement park executive and the Permanent Undersecretary of the Ministry of Defense were about to take over the administration of the Theater, and the problems accelerated at warp speed. The amusement park VP (from Tivoli Gardens) was named chairman of a new oversight board of the Royal Theater, and was on record as disliking Bournonville. It was whispered that the financial manager whom he named as his Theater Chief (the Supreme Commander, the boss, of the directors of the Royal ballet, opera, and drama companies) was—how does one say this delicately?—not a ballet person. The two hired a like-minded managerial staff, which quickly fulfilled every expectation.

The Theater's management, one is told, has come to a vague realization that something has gone awry, and is about to fix it; in itself, not especially reassuring news. A new Bournonville Festival has been announced for the year 2000, for no particular reason. What will we see there? To answer this question adequately, one must understand how the Bournonville repertory managed to survive as long as it did, and what precisely a "Bournonville" ballet is. There are so many ideas and attitudes within the company, usually linked to a particular generation, that I have tried to unravel the different strands that make up the fabric of Danish ballet in this century, and so this article will begin with a long, though certainly not exhaustive, posthumous stage history of Bournonville's ballets before getting to the immediate particulars. And besides, I thought it important to write down as much of what I knew about Danish history now, before they realize they've forgotten to burn the books.

Unless otherwise noted, the quotations in this piece are from interviews with about sixty Danish dancers, of five dancer-generations, which I've done between 1993 and 1997 for a biography of the late Danish dancer and balletmaster, Henning Kronstam. The material for the earlier periods is part Theater lore, partly culled from Robert Neiiedenham's "History of the Royal Theater," Svend Kragh-Jacobsen's "History of the Royal Danish Ballet," and the memoires of Hans Beck. An essay by the Danish critic, Henrik Lundgren, in a collection prepared at the time of the 1979 Bournonville Festival called "Perspectives on Bournononville" provided the basis for the analysis of stagings between 1915 and 1979; comments on recent productions are based on performances I saw, in America or in Copenhagen from 1979 through 1995, and repeated viewings of a collection of videotapes of Bournonville ballets televised in Denmark from the '70s through the present.

The whole concept of comparative productions is a relatively recent one. The first time one sees a ballet called Swan Lake or La Sylphide, one assumes that that is exactly what one is seeing. It isn't until one sees another production, in which Siegfried runs off with Benno, or the Sylphide whips off thirty-two fouetées to wrest the scarf from James, that questions of authenticity and identity arise. I had read so often that the Royal Danish Ballet had preserved the ballets exactly as they had been danced in the nineteenth century that I think I imagined the productions were kept in a freezer, and would be wheeled out at the beginning of each season, the dancers set in historically accurate motion upon hearing the music.

Not exactly. The more one pokes around down there in the freezer, and the more one sees, it becomes clear that, at least until quite recently, a performance of a Bournonville ballet was a consensus collaboration among the generations, the dancers, guided by a balletmaster or producer, putting in and taking out with an instinctive sense of what can be changed, what can be reinterpreted, and what is inviolate. There is something indefinable at the core of these ballets that survives even a horrendous staging or lackluster performance. But, like any theatrical work, the ballets look their best when they're cast, directed, and polished by someone who both understands them and can inspire the dancers to understand them as well. Because the Bournonville ballets have been danced so well for so long, there grew up in Copenhagen the notion that they were indestructible, that they somehow staged themselves. Would that it were so. In a Bournonville ballet, (and an Ashton or Tudor ballet), style is so integral to the fabric of the work and the ballets are so intricate that if they are not set with care, they can look negligible.

Until quite recently, Bournonville was considered a Romantic choreographer by Danish historians, and he was Romantic, within the context of nineteenth century Danish culture. In the 1960s, Erik Aschengreen, in his landmark essay, "The Beautiful Danger," widened the Danish view and compared Bournonville's "Romantic" ballets with the Romantic ballet in Paris during the same period, noting the many differences—in temperament and interpretation more than choreography. Aschengreen concluded that Bournonville's good, bourgeois Protestantism reflected a sub-Romantic movement called "Biedermeier" which was active in Denmark, and other Germanic cultures, at the time, and that this explains Bournonville's fondness for good family values and happy endings, as well as his avoidance of sensuality.

I agree with Aschengreen that, despite his sylphs, naiads, and elf maidens, Bournonville was not a Romantic, at least, in the French sense of the term. No Romantic could write, as Bournonville did in his "Choreographic Credo," that: "Beauty retains its freshness forever, while constant surprise becomes tiring," and, "Dancing is a beautiful art, as it strives for the ideal not only in movement, but in its lyrical and dramatic aspects." But I think Bournonville was more influenced by French neoclassicism than Danish Biedermeier. Bournonville's aesthetic sensibilities were shaped by his father, a pupil of the eighteenth century choreographer Noverre, and shaped in young manhood by Auguste Vestris, god of the French neoclassical period of ballet. In painting during Vestris's time, a French neoclassical school arose, which discarded the decoration and sentimentality of the pre-Revolutionary world, returning to the clean lines and heroic themes of classical painting, though often in a more human setting. It glorified Man rather than God or gods—the war hero, like David's "Napoleon," or an idealized, though unsentimental, view of ordinary life, as in the later Fragonard. A description of its tenets (from Gina Pischel's A World History of Art), seems equally appropriate to Bournonville: "The phenomenon [neoclassicism] was not an exclusively artistic one. It also concerned aesthetics—the acceptance as a model of an ideal of beauty not to be found in nature, a mental elaboration of perfection. It concerned taste, hence the importance assigned to decoration, furniture, and even the changing fashion of clothes.. . . It affected the whole of Europe, from Rome to London and Copenhagen, from Madrid to what is now Leningrad. It reacted from the exuberance and extravagance of Baroque and the ornamentation of Rococo, replacing them with the strength, purity, and balance of ideal classicism.. . .Neo-classicism had to rework [classical antiquity] on new principles of rationality, proportion, moderation, symmetry, order and clarity." The best stagings of Bournonville ballets have captured this neoclassical sense. They are not sentimental, or cute, and they are not Romantic.

Bournonville accepted Noverre's dictum that ballets were more akin to paintings than plays. I had always taken their "anything that can be painted can be danced" directive literally, that is, that any dramatic scene concrete enough to be captured in a painting could also be staged as a ballet, but the meaning was broader than that. A good Noverre-Bournonville ballet was like a painting in that it had texture and a sense of composition. Bournonville's ballets were composed as a series of pictures—Danish reviews as late as the '50s discussed ballets by "picture" rather than act or scenes—and each picture was harmoniously composed within its proscenium frame. The best stagers of Bournonville ballets have been the ones who understand this, who serve as both director and conductor, attending to the whole stage picture, the texture of a work. There are a lot of balls to juggle when staging a Bournonville ballet. Keeping the style pure, making the mime dance, binding all together with a sense of dramatic urgency, allowing individual interpretation consonant with the ballet's theme without damaging its structure (taking a second too long to make a point in mime can destroy a phrase, knock a conversation off-kilter, put a wrinkle in the canvas).

Bournonville's ballets are quite complex, and difficult to stage, and there have been very few great stagers.As he left them Bournonville, wise in all things, realized this, of course, and was torn between wanting his art to live forever and a pragmatic acceptance that this was improbable. When he retired in 1877, he prepared sixteen of his ballets for posterity: Valdemar, Napoli, Kermesse, The Valkyries, A Folk Tale, The Lay of Thrym, and Arcona, which he considered major ballets; and The Toreador, Flower Festival in Genzano (the whole thing, not just the pas de deux), Pontemolle, The Wedding Festival at Hardanger, Far From Denmark, Konservatoriet (both acts), The Kings Volunteers on Amager, The Mountain Hut, and From Siberia to Moscow. La Sylphide was not among these, but was revived after Bournonville's death. Also missing and restored later from the memories of dancers. were Bellman, the Scandinavian Quadrille, La Ventana, and the Festival in Albano, as were several dances in operas and assorted character dances, like Polka Militaire.

While he could gather scores, costume sketches and his notes, and ensure that his pupils understood them, he could not pass on his special gifts as a director and balletmaster, which Svend Kragh-Jacobsen described: "Undoubtedly the quality of the Bournonville productions to a great extent rested on his personal inspiration, and his wonderful ability to place the right dancers in the parts best suited to them and get the best out of each individual, elements which cannot easily be imitated."

Bournonville was succeeded by one of his favorite, and most loyal, pupils, Ludvig Gade, who the Danish historians seem to agree, not only failed to keep the repertory fresh, but also managed to reduce the ballet's stature within the Royal Theater's hierarchy (this probably means he didn't get any money). His successor, Emil Hansen, fared no better, although it was during this period that the Danes acquired Coppelia, remade it to their liking (no ballerina hero, little pointe dancing) and invented one of the very few post-Bournonvillean works of genius in the repertory.

In 1894, Hans Beck, the first Bournonville savior, took over as balletmaster. Today, he is most famous for writing down the Bournonville Schools, those combinations that Beck turned into lessons named for the six days of the dancing week, which preserved the Bournonville style, as well as several dances, for the next fifty-five years. (They were danced by the company through the '30s, and by school pupils every day until 1949, when Karl Merrild, a Beck pupil, retired.) In his time, Beck was known as the man who restored respect for the ballet as an important art form in Denmark, and made the Bournonville ballets live again. In the state of the company when Beck took it over lies one of the few glimmers of hope history holds for the current situation; things have been worse. Ballet had been reduced to a very adjunct status at the Royal Theater, mostly dancing in operas and plays. The Danish ballet has always danced at the Royal Theater; there is no Opera House in Copenhagen, and, although both the ballet and the opera are supposed to be coequal with it, the drama has long been the dominant art. The audience is mostly a theater audience. Until the 1960s, ballets shared an evening with a one-act play or an opera; dancers often appeared in plays and operas, and actors and singers filled out the crowd scenes in ballets. Ballet had become so negligible in the decade following Bournonville's death, that during the 1887 season, for example, there were only four evenings devoted to ballet, and the repertory contained a mere six ballets spread over ten performances. Beck's productions insured Bournonville's survival for several generations.

Beck's success as a Bournonville stager resulted from his genius for casting and his acute sense of Bournonville's musicality. Most of the Bournonville dancers I've talked to say that Bournonville should not be danced squarely on the beat, but through the beat, each step melding into the next, and that this sense of musicality, this way of phrasing, is crucial to the ballet's texture. It's what makes the ballets sing. ("You're not supposed to see the steps; you're supposed to see the music," one ballerina stated emphatically.) All of the performances of Bournonville's ballets that I've loved have been danced like this, so I'm tempted to say that this is the "correct" way to dance Bournonville, but not everyone would agree with that. A large part of the history of Bournonville stagings is that a great director (Hans Beck, Hans Brenaa) restages the ballets with this sense of textural musicality, and then someone else will come along and put the music Bang! back on the beat, where he thinks it belongs. To my eye, it is this oom-pah-pah musicality that makes some productions of the ballets look old-fashioned and corny. Beck, I read, was a dance-through-the-music man.

Beck resigned as balletmaster in 1915, supposedly felled by a bad case of Ballet Russe Fever. He was succeeded by a succession of his pupils, none distinguished as a director. (One example of the kind of aesthetic that was leading the company was the restaging, by Kaj Smith, of Fokine's Spectre de la Rose, in which the Rose was danced by a woman, the dreaming youth by a man.) No choreographer emerged from within the company who equaled, or even challenged, Bournonville's supremacy. Both Fokine and Balanchine staged ballets for the Royal Theater (Chopiniana, Petrushka, and Prince Igor by Fokine in 1925; and Apollon Musagetes and Barabou by Balanchine in 1929-30, as well as his stagings of Fokine's Scheherezade and Legend of Joseph, and Massine's The Three-Cornered Hat and Boutique Fantasque; one rumor is that this repertory was chosen because the Theater's conductor wanted to get his baton on the scores). The dancers were excited by the new works. Several studied privately with Fokine, and some left for a few years to dance in America, but the Theater's administration was resistant to foreigners, and the visits resulted in no changes in policy.

In 1931, a young dancer and choreographer named Harald Lander was appointed balletmaster. The twenty years for which he reigned was either the third "great flowering,"(after Galeotti and Bournonville) according to Svend Kragh-Jacobsen and many others, especially those of Lander's own generation, or a time of "crisis,"according to the late Henrik Lundgren, the contrarian of those who wrote in the '70s and '80s, and whose opinions seem very much in concert with the critics who were contemporaries of Beck. Lander had studied abroad, and created his own versions of Ballet Russe ballets, heavy with character dancing and set in exotic climes. His works became the standard for an audience with little chance to see ballet outside of Denmark.

Like most choreographers who direct ballet companies, Lander wanted to run his own show, and was at first uninterested in Bournonville. He staged revised versions of some of the ballets, although at least half of the Bournonville repertory disappeared during his tenure. He was assisted in this task by Valborg Borchsenius, who had been Hans Beck's partner. Some say he sought out Borchsenius because he wanted to be sure he revived the ballets accurately. Others (I like this one better) maintain that Borchsenius stalked in, uninvited, to take her place at the choreographer's side, bearing notes from the old days scribbled on scraps of paper that she kept in a sewing basket by her side, to serve as watchdog. Whether Borchsenius was the best of her generation to help in the project seems to be an open question. Some critics wondered why Lander worked with her, rather than Beck himself, or several other dancers from previous generations. What is not debated is Borchsenius's contribution to the Bournonville archive. She made notebooks out of the scraps of paper (reportedly at Lander's urging), writing down the ballets, mime scenes and steps, in words and little stick figures. It is these notebooks that have formed the basis of subsequent stagings at the Royal Theater until 1994.

The Landerites loved the new stagings, writing that Lander brought the ballets up to date in the best possible way, cutting scenes that no longer made sense, adding or rechoreographing dances, speeding up the pace to better to compete with the movies. The old guard was less ecstatic, and felt quite strongly that Lander's stagings had ruined the Old Master. "His dances are not Nordic; they come from the world," wrote George Wiinblad of Lander's 1932 staging of The Valkyries. The costumes and decor (which are not negligible components, if you think of ballets as paintings) were acceptable, but "The style, the style! It comes from the world, and has nothing to do with Bournonville or Hartmann [the composer]." The Valkyries was one of Bournonville's serious works, connecting Norse and Greek mythology, and Wiinblad wrote that, "In the Greek-pictures, the style is straight out of Trudi Schoop," which is to say it was cartoonlike.

Lander eviscerated the second act of Napoli, reducing it to Teresina's two costume changes and enough mime to make the story make sense. I have not yet discovered what other changes he made, apart from a suspicion that the incongruous Polaka in Kermesse comes from this period, and that it was Lander, not Bournonville, who put Birthe, the troll maiden, on pointe in the mirror dance in A Folk Tale. Wiinblad's crack at Trudi Schoop, though, is a clue to Lander's preferred performing style, and hints at one of the enduring conflicts within the Danish company. At its founding in 1748, the company was made up of a group of dancers from the court theater and another from the musical theater. Although all were classically trained, and the Royal Danish Ballet has always been a classical company, the musical comedy dancers seem to outnumber the court dancers (and their spiritual descendants), and there's been a tension between the two styles and attitudes ever since. Trudi Schoop directed a popular company that put on mime plays, mostly comic in nature, and rather broadly delivered comedy at that.

It's difficult to sort out exactly what Borchsenius had to do with the Lander-era productions. The few dancers still around who remember this period sometimes talk about Lander and Borchsenius as though they worked on different ballets. The "Lander stagings" coarsened and speeded up Bournonville, according to some. The "Borchsenius stagings" were accurate, if a bit dull, according to others. There is disagreement, too, over Borchsenius's teaching methods and miming style, and tracing the development of this controversy sheds light on another company disagreement. Some of her pupils, like Kirsten Ralov and Stanley Williams, adored her and cite her as being of crucial influence in their development as dancers and mimes, stressing how Borchsenius taught them that mime was not just a series of empty gestures, but had to come from within. Others, like Erik Bruhn (according to the biography by John Gruen) and Henning Kronstam, who also took her mime classes, found her teaching rigid and external, completely based on mastering facial expressions and gestures. After Borchsenius died in 1949, the great character dancer, Gerda Karstens, succeeded her as teacher of the company's two-year mime course for aspirants, in which the company's sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds learned the mime scenes from the entire Bournonville repertory. Kronstam, who was with Borchsenius for a few months the year before he became an aspirant and then studied with Karstens, said that Karstens brought an entirely new style to the mime, replacing the former, old-fashioned, declamatory style with a newer, more modern one she had acquired in Theater's acting classes, which followed the Stanislavsky method. Karstens' terrifying, preternaturally evil Madge, and her spontaneous, almost improvisational acting, opened the eyes of many of the dancers to something new that they could introduce into their mime work, an updating consonant with the spirit of the ballets. Kronstam, Hans Brenaa, and Fredbjørn Bjørnsson were exponents of this "new style,"and incorporated it into their teaching when they came to conduct the mime classes. The older style did not disappear, however. Karstens retired in 1955, shortly before the company's first American tour, and was replaced as Madge by Niels Bjørn Larsen, who returned to the older style. There has been a tiny fissure in company mime style since, although none of the dancers would phrase it the way I have. Sorella Englund, who succeeded Larsen in the role in 1979, had taken Kronstam's mime class, and created a new Madge, twisted by bitterness and longing and very much "danced from the inside". It is this kind of divergence of opinion that makes it difficult to determine what is "authentic" in a Bournonville performance, and helps explain why two stagers can produce work which looks so different.

During Lander's directorship, the RDB's repertory was largely made up of either Lander's ballets, or his stagings of the Bournonville ballets. He also taught company class, and was a balletmaster in every sense of the term, assisted only by a regisseur (Poul Vessel), who did the scheduling. During World War II, the company was obviously segregated from the international dance scene. In the years immediately after the war, the young men of the company (Bruhn, Williams, Bjørnsson, and Poul Gnatt) went to London and Paris to study and brought back tales of choreographic wonders. There was intense pressure by the dancers for Lander to modernize, to bring in new ballets. Lander did invite some foreign choreographers (Massine, for one), and his 1949 ballet, Etudes, is not only a result of this pressure for something in a new style, but of Lander's attempt to emulate the new "pure dance" ballets by Balanchine and Lifar that were being created at that time. He did not move fast enough for the dancers, however. Lander was forced out of the company by a coup known ever since as the Lander Scandal. The short version of what happened is that Lander was accused of what today would be called sexual harassment, and had to leave the company. Lander has gone down in history as a philanderer, although the causes for his ouster had much more to do with company politics, squelched ambitions, and bruised egos than outraged morality. Niels Bjørn Larsen (who, as far as I know, had nothing to do with getting rid of Lander) was named artistic leader of the ballet, and from all accounts went through absolute hell, especially during his first few seasons. Although most of the dancers were anti-Lander, there was a small, vigorous pro-Lander faction, and the critics were passionate Landerites, criticizing Larsen's every casting decision and repertory choice, and openly urging Lander's return.

One of the great Bournonville style controversies begins with Vera Volkova's coming to Copenhagen in 1951. There are those who say that she changed the way the company danced so completely that she ruined the style, others who insist that she refreshed and renewed the style, updating it by introducing elements of technique that postdated 1879 while keeping what was essential, bringing the company to international standard. Volkova was a pupil of Vaganova, who had been a pupil of Christian Johannsson, who had studied and danced with Bournonville and was a great believer in his style, sensibilities, and musicality. Volkova was crucial to the development of the next two generations of Danish dancers, teaching, coaching, guiding their careers. As a teacher, she was an influence on Stanley Williams and Henning Kronstam; through Kronstam, Volkova's way of dancing was a gentle presence in the company until 1993. She also shaped the company's repertory through her connections in the ballet world, and brought in Ashton, Balanchine, Robbins, and others to create or stage their ballets.

Did she change Bournonville? Undoubtedly. After Volkova, the rounded arms became more linear, yet remained soft. At the first class she taught, she went around, dancer by dancer, and gently turned out each dancer's elbows. With the turned-in elbows, she explained, they would never be able to do fouettées. Volkova did not try to introduce Russian-style virtuosity, but developed the Danish, and changed her classes to suit the repertory. She was also responsible for putting many of the dances in Bournonville on pointe; they had been on demi-pointe until the late '40s, when the company began to tour and foreign critics sneered that the Danish women were backwards and "couldn't" dance on pointe.

Larsen was the chief stager of the Bournonville repertory during this period. He was artistic leader from 1950 to 1958, when Frank Schaufuss took over for a brief and stormy year-and-a-half, and then again, in a strange triumverate with Volkova and Henning Røhde, a long-time Theater administrative employee who was the "administrative leader of the ballet" from 1960 to 1965. Larsen guided the company during its first forays abroad—to London in 1953, then America in 1956, and several tours thereafter—so it was he who introduced the world outside Copenhagen to Bournonville, whose very existence was unknown to all but ballet professionals as late as 1950. Larsen's stagings in the '50s and early '60s were continuations of the Lander stagings. He made no major revisions, as far as I know, and is very much a purist, believing that Gurn, in La Sylphide, for example, should be a comic figure, a middle-aged man with a red beard, because that was how the role was danced in the Lander stagings. Larsen was a celebrated mimic and a human Xerox machine, who can copy anything he saw, and his stagings were accurate ones, although he was not considered an inspiring director. "If something isn't right, he can see it, but he can only show you how he thinks it should be. He can't tell you how you should do it. So he'll just say 'Please do it again,'" is how Kronstam put it.

Flemming Flindt became balletmaster in 1965, and directed the company for the next twelve years. His tenure was a time of expansion and change in direction, for Flindt wanted to modernize the company, moving it away from classical ballet, which he, and many Danes of that generation, seem to think of as an outmoded style. Rather than seeing the classical vocabulary as an infinitely renewable language, Flindt turned to modern dance for inspiration, and his works are more theater pieces than ballets. But he kept classical ballets in the repertory, and he did not desert Bournonville. Flindt cares about history, I'm told, and his first staging of a Bournonville ballet (La Sylphide) looked to the past and tales he had heard from Lander (with whom he had worked at the Paris Opera, where Lander went after leaving Copenhagen and where Flindt spent much of his dancing career). He worked with Brenaa, and the staging was conservative; he did not change the choregraphy nor add any "contemporary"psychological touches. As late as the '60s, James did not dance a solo in the first act, but walked around the room, greeting guests and thanking them for their gifts, as the two solos now danced by James and Gurn were danced by two "Young Scots."

There was a television broadcast of this production, Margrethe Schanne's farewell performance of the Sylph from 1965. It's the earliest Bournonville staging I've seen, and it is disappointingly ordinary. It lacks many of the things we think of as typically Danish or Bournonvillean, most notably textural tightness, the way dancing and mime are seamlessly sewn together. Instead, the ballet is a collection of stop and start "numbers," much as it is when danced by non-Danes; the acting is uneven; the whole thing looks like a production that's been in repertory so long that it's become rote, and seems badly in need of polishing.

There was quite a bit of Bournonville in repertory during Flindt's tenure, but, dancers say, it was not the focus of the repertory. Flindt delegated Bournonville stagings to Brenaa, for the most part, while Kronstam directed the classical and contemporary repertory and Flindt choreographed, favoring a small group of dancers whom he used and reused—something that often happens when a choreographer directs a company. He very much had an agenda: to make the company big enough to compete against the other big players (at that time, mostly England's Royal Ballet), while at the same time being considered avant-garde. Flindt was, I think, the first of the big classical company directors who thought it possible to do a credible Swan Lake as well as modern dance, and invited several modern dance choreographers (Paul Taylor, José Limn and Murray Louis, among others) to stage their works.

Economics during this period affected the Bournonville repertory as well. Good fortune was responsible for chipping away some of the traditions. The 1960s were a prosperous time in Denmark, and the Theater's coffers were full. Flindt expanded the company, allowed foreigners and Danes trained "outside the walls" to join for the first time (Sorella Englund and Anna Laerkesen came into the company as teenagers during this period). There was less interaction among the three arts now. A small sub-company was formed to dance in operas; the opera chorus reportedly let it be known that they were tired of being the crowd for a ballet. As a result of all of this, for the first time in its history, the Danish Royal Theatre companies were less of a family, less a tightly-knit ensemble, more a collection of individuals with specialties. The Bournonville repertory must have felt the effects of a new generation of dancers that had not danced the Bournonville Schools since the age of six. The whole notion of "putting on a show," where everybody had a part in each program, began to erode during the Flindt Age.

Two Bournonville ballets were brought back to life during this period, when Brenaa pulled The Kermesse in Bruges and The King's Volunteers on Amager out of his memory; both had been out of repertory for years, and some think he literally saved these ballets from extinction. Brenaa became an immensely respected stager of Bournonville ballets, and several dancers thought he didn't completely mature as a stager until after he started mounting the ballets on foreign companies, and had to learn how to teach them to dancers not trained in the style and unfamiliar with mime. "He had to rethink them, and understand the reason for everything," Kronstam said, "and when he came back, that's when the really beautiful productions happened."

Dancers say that Brenaa could create the atmosphere of a Bournonville ballet magnificently and make them believe in its world. Hearing the stories, sometimes it seems as if Brenaa thought he was Bournonville, so certain was he of how the ballets should look. Brenaa had been a classical dancer, though not a great one. His repertory included such disparate parts as one of the solo men in Etudes and Mr. Mogens in A Folk Tale. He was the company's cavalier and, just as had happened during Petipa's time in St. Petersburg, he would be partner the ballerina while the company's star, who wasn't a good partner, would dance the solo. He said he had taught himself the Bournonville repertory as a child when, bored at seeing the same ballets night after night, he would pick a dancer and watch him or her until he knew the part by heart. He was a huge part of the company's institutional memory, and kept several generations of dancers alive through his stories. Kronstam, who assisted Brenaa on several ballets and taught himself how to stage them by watching the older man remembered, "He'd say, 'Yes, but I saw Christian Christiansen dance and you didn't,' or 'She'll be wonderful! She'll do the role just like Ragnhild Rasmussen," referring to two long dead dancers. "And who could argue with that?

During the '60s and '70s, Brenaa made several additions to Bournonville ballets we now take to be the standard choreography. Sometimes he reached back into his memory to restore something that Lander had thrown out; sometimes he just made them up (after consultation with Bournonville, of course). In his article, "Bournonville in Denmark and Abroad," Henrik Lundgren lists the following as Brenaa additions: The restoration of a pas de deux in the second act of Napoli for Teresina and Golfo that was not in the Lander version (1961); "the addition of a pas de deux for Teresina and Gennaro in the Russian style with high overhead lifts to music from The Crystal Palace (1967)" and since discarded; Adrian's solo in Kermesse in Bruges (1966); the solo for Prince Karneval in the pas de trois in Kings Volunteers on Amager (1970); a pas de deux for Junker Ove and Hilda in A Folk Tale at the start of the third act (Ove dances, with Hilda, the same steps that Hilda had been given to dance 1969). Aside from the "Russian-style pas de deux" for Napoli, Brenaa's major sin was a weakness for low humor. The balloons-for-breasts stuffed in the Indian women's shirts in Far From Denmark were his invention, as well as some of the lower comic touches in Kermesse.

[Return to Bournonville in Hell] [Go to Part Ib]

first published in DanceView
© 2003 by Alexandra Tomalonis