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The Bournonville Archive

Bournonville in Hell, Part 2
Administrative Changes, 1992-1995

by Alexandra Tomalonis
copyright © 1998 by Alexandra Tomalonis

200 years ago on 14th November 1779 Denmarks national poet par excelence, Adam Oehlenschlaeger, was born. The day was celebrated; indeed, the whole of 1979 was used by Denmark's cultural institutions as an excuse to resurrect a number of Oehlenschlaeger's works. But, to put it coldly, all in vain. In contrast with the other man whose anniversary was also celebrated in November (August Bournonville, choreographer of numerous romantic ballets), Oehlenschlaeger's works for the stage had been stored away indefinitely in some inaccessible and probably destructive place. The Bournonville ballets on the contrary have survived, and at the special Bournonville festival in November they were hailed by all the balletomanes in the western world. Perhaps the difference between play and ballet is this: to give life to a text demands a process of recreation, whereas hundred-year-old choreography need merely be reproduced year in, year out.— "A Stillborn Anniversary," by Ulla Strømberg, from Teater i Danmark, 1979-80.

Few things that I have read in Danish sources show so clearly how Bournonville is viewed among sectors of the Danish intelligentsia as the above quotation. It is a view, I would suggest, that is as responsible as anything for the destruction of the Bournonville tradition and of the Royal Danish Ballet as a world-class company that has been accomplished with such gusto in the past few seasons. The pressures of mass culture, the rise of the Me Generation to positions of artistic prominence at the Royal Theater, and historical accidents have helped, of course, but what happened in Copenhagen from 1992 on is the result of the fact that the policy makers and their cronies were bored with seeing the same ballets danced year in, year out, and they wanted something exciting and new happening on the stage of the Royal Theater, regardless of quality and at the expense of everything else. They perceived that the Danish ballet was regarded as a historical curiosity and wanted it to be respected as a great contemporary ballet company. They wanted to look, as I once wrote in these pages, like the National Ballet of Anywhere Else. In short, they wanted to attain International Standard, never realizing that what passes for International Standard these days is far below what they had. Much of what has happened in Copenhagen— a blending and blanding, loss of individuality, lack of care in rehearsing and casting, the absence of a director, producer, or choreographer of stature—has happened throughout the ballet world since the 1970s. The major distinguishing characteristic of the destruction in Denmark has been its speed. Left alone, the company would have continued along the path of slow deterioration and homogenization all too evident elsewhere; the gravitational pull is inescapable. But the Danish Ballet decided to jump off, rather than slide down, into the abyss, and accomplished in one season what it had taken the rest of the world at least twenty years to do.

The first step the progressives made, as reported in "Bournonville in Hell, Part I" which appeared in the last issue of DanceView, was to name a board of directors to oversee the operations of the Royal Theater. A chairman was appointed, one Niels Jørgen Kaiser, a vice president of the local amusement park, Tivoli Gardens. I have never met Kaiser; he is chary with interviews. The photograph that accompanied one of his rare chats with the press, published shortly after his appointment, showed a shock of white hair atop a face whose features were obscured by the smoke of his pipe. Wise, said all that whiteness and all that smoke, confident, powerful, a man in control. In the interview, the Kaiser outlined his plans to revitalize the Theater, hinting of secrets and surprises that would delight the public and astound the world. No fan of Bournonville, Kaiser was undoubtedly one of those sick of the traditional repertory, and wanted rethought productions, with exciting new sets and costumes. He is, however, a dance fan, often booking Alvin Ailey and the New York City Ballet for Tivoli during his time there, and he is said to particularly admire the dancing, and later choreography and direction, of Peter Martins. It is one of Copenhagen's most open secrets that many in Denmark (at least, many Danes outside the Royal Theater) would dearly love for Martins to come home and save Danish ballet, and the Danish tabloids amuse themselves periodically by running stories about this possibility. (If Martins is overheard to say that traffic is worse than ever in New York this year, this is taken as a coded message of emigrational intent.) So far, however, he has resisted the temptation to return to his homeland.

The Board, determined to acquire what they considered to be a Dane of International Stature, turned to the other expatriate Peter, Peter Schaufuss, then director of the Berlin Ballet. Schaufuss was released from his contract by the accommodating Berliners in midseason and came to Copenhagen to plan for the future. The Board had every reason to be ecstatic, for Schaufuss must have one of the most dazzling press portfolios in the business. He had received a very favorable press in England, especially, and had enjoyed the steadfast support of at least two of London's most influential critics. The Danish press reported on his career, triumph by triumph. His production of La Sylphide in 1979 won prizes in London and was hailed by all of the Danish critics whose reviews I have found as brilliant, sophisticated, a harbinger of a brave new era of Bournonville stagings. There were repeated calls in the press that the director of the ballet (then Henning Kronstam) should replace the company's traditional production of La Sylphide with this new, improved version instantly. That he did not do so was seen as evidence of his inertia, or timidity, perhaps even stupidity. For those who haven't seen it, the most distinctive feature of Schaufuss's production is the addition of a pas de trois for Effy, James and the Sylph in the first act, ostensibly to show that James is torn between his bride and his dream. As one young James said to me a few years ago, "any dancer who needs this to show that James is conflicted has no business dancing James," but this was only a dancer's opinion. Europe's Bournonville experts apparently preferred the conflict to be spelled out in neon.

The obsession with Schaufuss's version of La Sylphide became a symbol of the Danish critics' opinion of how Bournonville must be updated. Allan Fridericia, writing in Bournonville; Tradition, Rekonstruction, a 1989 collection of essays, summarized the view of his colleagues that the direction of the Royal Theater had fallen behind the times. They believed that "the old repertoire was staged following more or less the same idea, meaning: please do what your predecessor did in your role." Fridericia wrote, continuing: "My younger Danish colleagues—Erik Aschengreen, Ebbe Mørk and Henrik Lundgren, to name but three—are fully aware of the problem. They have all published detailed analyses of the subject in recent years, underlining the essential difference being found between the attitude to the restagings at the Royal Theatre and those elsewhere. They are all in agreement, emphasizing that the most artistically conscious stagings these days are taking place beyond the Danish borders. This can be taken as a criticism of The Royal Theatre, but it can also reveal something deeper and more essential. The regisseurs creating new Bournonville productions outside Denmark all have a thorough knowledge of the Danish and Russian "school" and of the artistic ideals in contemporary ballet. They know that no aware dancer will accept an explanation such as 'Do it like this because we have done it like this.' They want to know why and how expression, technique and musical concept are different from that which they know from their own education and stage experience."

The clear implication was that the stagings of Hans Brenaa and Kirsten Ralov (no one outside the Theater then, it seems, had a clue that Kronstam had any interest in or, indeed, anything to do with Bournonville, except to prevent him from being revitalized) were ossified and outdated. Ralov remembers that the man who was then financial manager of the Theater approached her at an intermission when Schaufuss's production (for the London Festival Ballet, as it was then called) was being danced at Tivoli one summer and asked, not very nicely, why this excellent production was not being seen on the stage at the Royal Theater? I asked Kronstam if he had ever considered acquiring the production and he replied, "No, I wanted to keep Bournonville's production." When I asked how he had withstood such intense pressure from both the press and some in the Theater administration to throw out the old and replace it with the new, he said simply, "But you can't let something like that influence you. You have to do what you think is right." (Doing what you think is right, of course, has no place in the world of International Standard, though it once had a great deal to do with ballet in Denmark.) But many in Copenhagen, at least many outside the Theater, felt it was long past time for a change. In the minds of the Wise Ones, the best thing about Peter Schaufuss's appointment as director was that he would, at long last, bring his new La Sylphide to Kongens Nytorv.

The Coming of Peter Schaufuss and the Flight of the Sylph

Many people blame Peter Schaufuss for what has happened to the Royal Danish Ballet, but I am not one of them. On the contrary, I think that Schaufuss is the one person in this whole sorry story who performed to spec, and if what happened wasn't what his procurers had expected, that is their fault and not his. Schaufuss's directorship in London and Berlin was a matter of public record. He left both companies before his contract expired, and, despite the press raves, there had been dissatisfaction with his handling of both dancers and budgets. His productions of La Sylphide, Giselle, Napoli, and A Folk Tale were all in repertory somewhere and could be seen; the Theater was not buying promises or a pig in a poke. Even the dancers were excited about Schaufuss's appointment. Most have probably forgotten this now, but when I went to Copenhagen in August of 1993, just as Schaufuss was beginning his term, the dancers were glad to be rid of Frank Andersen and looked forward to working with Schaufuss. The balletmaster in the Danish ballet is often referred to as "the leader," and the dancers were ready and willing to be led by someone whom they respected, whom they viewed as a world-class dancer. There were some worries about the repertory and about some aspects of Schaufuss's reputation, but, on balance, the dancers were more than open to him.

Things started to go wrong almost immediately, and although many of the dancers' problems with Schaufuss were because his directorial style was quite different from what they were used to, the first problems came with that La Sylphide. Unlike the learned ones who called for reform and progress, the dancers actually knew and understood the ballet, its structure, its drama, its musicality, and its style. Not to mention its steps. And they knew, right away, that they weren't getting a new, brilliantly rethought production, but a bad copy of a bad staging from the 1960s with a pas de trois nobody needed stuck in the middle of it, all done with a very old-fashioned acting style, off-the-music, and with innumerable textual and stylistic inaccuracies. They were, in short, appalled. I think that if Schaufuss had begun his directorship with his acclaimed "Tchaikovsky Trilogy" (Rethinks of Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and Nutcracker as comments on Tchaikovsky's sex life; Europe, which suffers from some ghastly need to commune with Freud nightly, just loves them), he might have lasted longer. Had there been someone at the Theater who realized the implications of this, who could tell the difference between the productions—who, indeed, could tell that there was a difference between the productions—and could have advised Schaufuss, perhaps suggesting that he first bring in the unfamiliar works, then slip in the ones that would upset the dancers but please the critics later, Schaufuss might still be zooming around Copenhagen in his little red sportscar with its crown and the words "The Royal Theater" emblazoned on its side.

Under New Management

But by the spring of 1993, there was no one in the Theater's management who knew enough about ballet to realize there might be a problem. Kaiser had appointed a man called Michael Christiansen, formerly the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Defense, as theaterchief. ("Permanent Secretary" in parliamentary governments is the top nonpolitical job in a ministry. It's roughly analogous to the job William Perry had before he was named Secretary of Defense.) Christiansen's two most endearing qualities to those who put him in charge of one of the great theatrical institutions in Western Europe were that he was an efficient manager, and he had no experience with any theatrical institution, great or near-great. There were many rumors swirling around Christiansen's appointment, none of which DanceView would dream of repeating. It surely was impossible that Christiansen had never seen a ballet and that he had never been inside a theater, and I give such stories no credence except as evidence of the Danes' wonderfully wry wit. I have, however, been unable to find anyone who can confirm that such an appointment is part of the normal career path for an ambitious civil servant. It was certainly unique in the Theater's history, as the theaterchief has been the one who set the artistic policy of the house. He was supposed to run the place, of course, make sure the electric bills were paid and that there were enough tubas and toe shoes in the store room, but, at root, he was the guardian of the Theater as an institution. Since the dawn of civilization, theatechiefs in Denmark have been cultured individuals who actually enjoy the productions they oversee and can tell one art from the other without checking the cue cards (opera is where they sing; drama is where they talk; ballet is where they jump up and down).

But this was the 1990s and art was no more a primary concern in Copenhagen than anywhere else in the world. The Board would be quite happy with the public perception that great art was being made and a healthy bottom line. The Board would set the artistic policy, appoint artists to head the Theater's three branches, and a bureaucrat would make sure everything ran smoothly. There seemed to be the perception that the Theater needed a good dose of budgets and discipline. It was losing money, unions were proliferating like amoebas on a binge, and citizens complained that their tax dollars were supporting a Theater that wasn't even in their own home town. It seemed obvious that something must be done, and so the Man from the Ministry of Defense was named theaterchief, and proceeded to do some things and undo more.

No one could accuse the Man from MOD of being lazy. He erased the Theater's long-standing deficit in the flick of a cat's tail. He took on the unions, renegotiating dozens of overlapping and conflicting contracts and making them more compact and efficient, a task that had defeated his predecessors for as long as there had been either unions or predecessors, and he accomplished this in about eleven seconds. The next afternoon, having spruced up the costs side of the equation, he boosted the Theater's income by doubling the ticket prices (without a thought, it seems, for what long-term effect this might have on the theater's audience or its repertory.) A marketing whiz was hired to repackage the Theater's various subscription series in a surefire, suresell way, and the season sold out in a flash—well, the first season, anyway. The books looked terrific, or would have, had one been able to examine them. Curiously, one of the very first things done by the Man from Tivoli (or perhaps it was the Man from MOD) was to change the Theater's accounting system so that it is no longer possible to determine what each production costs.

Modernization and Its Roots

It is often forgotten in the hailstorm of changes that have happened to the Danish Ballet that the new management team started its work in the 1992-93 season, when Frank Andersen was still balletmaster. Several of the minor modernizations (like replacing the traditional titles of "solodancer" and "dancer" with the more internationally correct terms of "principal," "soloist," and "corps") and a very major one (the forced retirement of more than twenty dancers over forty, radically altering the company's profile and ability to perform the Bournonville repertory with its trademark maturity and depth) occurred during Andersen's last two years, as did the ballet's first experiment with block programming, the practice of dancing a single program for weeks on end, then going on to dance another program to death the following month. The disposal of Kronstam occurred during this period, too, and it should be stressed that Kronstam's loss was not only crucial because he was a great artist, but because he was the last of the great artists. Brenaa's death was a terrible loss, as well, but Kronstam was still there in 1988 and could have taken over Brenaa's productions, and the Bournonville repertory would have still been recognizable. After his "disappearance," as it was usually referred to in the Danish press, there was no one working remotely at Kronstam's level, and the quality of the productions diminished instantly and obviously. There were a few oblique mentions of the effect of Kronstam's absence in reviews, and several pointed comments in interviews with the dancers of how Kronstam was missed and should return to the Theater, but since his "disappearance" was shrouded in mystery and rumor, no one did anything, because no one knew what to do.

At the end of the New Regime's first season, Andersen's contract, as noted last issue, was not renewed, and there was a call for candidates, although there are strong indications that the decision to replace him with Schaufuss had already been made. There were several applicants for the job (including Frank Andersen), but Schaufuss was named director at the end of the summer of 1993. Andersen had to continue as a lame duck for a full season, a difficult situation for both him and the dancers. Schaufuss began his term in August 1994; Lise La Cour remained, for a few months, as vice balletmaster. Schaufuss brought with him a considerable number of people, including Johnny Eliason, his trusted assistant; a choreographer (to do opera ballets); several dancers who had followed him from London and Berlin; and a Benesh notator to set his productions.

There is only one person in the world who would be capable of sorting through everything that happened after Schaufuss assumed the directorship, but I don't think Geraldo is interested in ballet. Tobi Tobias made the fairest, most succinct, and probably most accurate statement when she wrote in a review of his ill-fated revival of Ashton's Romeo and Juliet that Schaufuss's tenure "had been unfortunate for all concerned." So much has happened that it's hard to remember the changes and their order, or even, in some cases, why they were once considered so shocking. Among the more important changes were cutting the school's enrollment in half; replacing with foreigners nearly all of the Danish dancers who were still on probationary status and could be replaced; and radically changing the direction of the repertory. Flemming Flindt was called home, probably not by Schaufuss. Peter Martins was invited to stage an evening of his works, and Schaufuss himself would not only contribute his productions of Giselle and La Sylphide, but choreograph a full-evening version of Hamlet to a punk rock score.

The theaterchief seemed extremely proud of his acquisitions and proclaimed that the Danish ballet would be Danish again, which seemed odd, under the circumstances. It was said that the Flindt-Martins- Schaufuss repertory meant that the company would dance works by the three greatest living Danish choreographers, and who could argue with that? What I do remember vividly from the autumn of 1994 is coming home at least three times a week to hear the increasingly defeated voice of a friend on my answering machine saying, "I'm calling with more terrible news from Copenhagen." Changes to the school and company classes, the composition of the company, the repertory, rehearsal practices, the emphasis of attention to technique rather than attention to drama—virtually the entire institutional culture was turned upside down overnight.

The one thing one would think a pack of bureaucrats to understand is the importance of evolutionary rather than revolutionary change to an institution, but no such understanding was evident. What apparently had not occurred to anybody was that Schaufuss was not an institutional balletmaster. He was a freelancer, a soldier of fortune, in a way, traveling the world with his productions and a small cadre of loyal dancers and assistants.. A company like the Royal Danish, or the Kirov or the Bolshoi, requires a Governor General, someone who wants to serve an institution, to conserve and to build. Andersen had some sense of this, I think, and, although he had been proceeding along the same path as Schaufuss in many respects, he had done it more slowly. Andersen's mistake, in addition to wildly overestimating his own abilities, was that he thought he could make the company look like every other company while still preserving the Bournonville heritage and the things that made the company uniquely Danish.

Schaufuss was such an international product as a dancer that I doubt the idea of building even occurred to him, and he would have rejected it if it had. He knew what other companies looked like and how they were run, and I would guess he thought that that was how ballet companies should be run; it was certainly what the management wanted. Schaufuss had spent his school days in Copenhagen, but very little time actually dancing with the company, and his tenure there was during the Flindt era, another time of modernization. Many who knew Schaufuss when he was a young dancer say he was heavily influenced by Nureyev, and he seems to have modeled his career on Nureyev's; they even shared a manager. As Nureyev had staged "updated" versions of Petipa all over the world and made a name for himself as a choreographer (and a fortune, by licensing the productions to several companies simultaneously), so Schaufuss would do for Bournonville. Like several Danish dancers of his generation, he seemed to regard Denmark as a place where one is from, a starting point, but also a background that must be overcome.

Several dancers have put forth the opinion that Volkova, and later Kronstam, did not progress, did not incorporate changes in technique that were going on in the outside world. This view ignores the fact that their "lack of progress" was a conscious decision. Volkova had been considered shockingly old-fashioned by both Balanchine and Nureyev when they encountered her in the 1950s and 1960s, respectively. Both were, however, drawn to her purity, and Nureyev studied with her for years. Later, foreign dancers working in Copenhagen would feel the same about Kronstam. "Oh, he is so classical," Nina Ananiashvili, who danced the Sylph in Copenhagen in 1990, said after working with him, with the gratitude of one who has finally found her way home. (The matter of the importance of technique is one of great debate; a word is in order here. Volkova and Kronstam were extremely conscious of, and knowledgeable about, technique, but they believed it should never be obvious. The first thing you should notice about a dancer was not how high he could jump, but how beautifully he moved.)

Schaufuss and Eliason believed that the company needed to progress, however, and Schaufuss proceeded to modernize with a great deal of energy and, I think, after a great deal of thought. The central Danish conundrum is that the company has been considered one of the world's finest since it was first seen by outsiders in 1950, yet the Danes themselves have never seemed to realize that the reason the RDB is so ranked is because of its Bournonville heritage and the special qualities that result from the maintenance of that heritage. Without this, Denmark is Norway, balletically speaking, or one of the nether cantons of Switzerland.

The solution to this problem, for Flemming Flindt and Frank Andersen, as well as Schaufuss and those who have followed him, has been to import foreign dancers. The problem with this solution, of course, is how to keep the company Danish after infesting it with foreigners. Andersen invited about a dozen foreign dancers into the company, but he had them take repertory and Bournonville classes, and he made a great effort to find dancers who could pass for Danes. One of Andersen's acquisitions, the American Lloyd Riggins, not only became a star, but more Danish in his approach to dance than some of his Danish colleagues.

In contrast, Schaufuss wanted to achieve a specific look as soon as possible, and so brought in several dancers with whom he had previously worked, and he brought them in as principals. Critical mass did its work. The look of the company, the national identity of the company, was instantly changed, and the change was all the more noticeable for the absence of those twenty senior dancers, character dancers, and mimes (a change which Schaufuss might well have made himself had Andersen not already done it). Schaufuss favored men who were like himself—short and muscular, with powerful thighs. For the women, he seemed to like the small, wilting, lyric types. There were many dancers he couldn't fire because they had airtight, old-fashioned institutional contracts, so he simply benched the ones he didn't like or made them appear as supers, undoubtedly to goad them into leaving. Lloyd Riggins, Silja Schandorff, and Kenneth Greve were the most prominent of the dancers who seemed to disappear. Riggins left after a year to go to the Hamburg Ballet. Schandorff and Greve languished at home.

The Importance of Genre and the War Between the Demis

In a way, although no one intended it, Schaufuss's regime saw the resumption of an ancient war within the company, one to which I alluded to in Part I of this article: that between the court dancers and the music hall dancers who had formed the Danish Ballet several generations before Bournonville. To understand the change and its implications for the company and the Bournonville repertory, I must be permitted one last long historical diversion. In its court days, when ballet's rules were formed, dancers were divided into three genres: the danseurs nobles, the danseurs demicaractéres, and the danseurs grotesque. These categories were as immutable as those of tenor, baritone and bass in opera, and were determined by physique and temperament.

In the early opera ballets, roles, as well as specific dances and musical rhythms, were assigned by genre and dancers were specialists in a particular genre. The danseurs nobles took the roles of gods and heroes, were tall and elegant, and specialized in the slower dances. These were considered the most difficult, because they displayed the body, and placement and épaulement were crucial; it was not only the genre of nobility, but the genre of beauty. The demicaractére dancers were the common folk, shepherds and peasants, and were allegro dancers, though still elegant and lyrical. (These were courtiers-as-peasants, like Marie Antoinette at her game of milkmaid; they were not yokels.) The grotesques were the demons, the virtuosi. They were not elegant, and performed anything from folk dances to technical tricks—all, of course, in the service of the role.

This system worked only as long as ballet was confined to the court, where everyone knew the rules and beauty was considered a virtue. When ballet moved into the public theaters, it had to change, as audiences in any era are initially attracted to the superficial and applaud the special effects and virtuoso tricks while not seeing the refinements, because they have no idea where or how to look for them. The nobles were undoubtedly miffed that their beauty went unappreciated, the demis wanted the starring roles, and then there was the French Revolution, and the danseur noble lost his head. By the early 1800s, when Romantic ballet was just a whisper on the Boulevards and Bournonville went to Paris to study with Auguste Vestris, the genres had shifted a bit. Joan Lawson describes four (which she attributes to Noverre, although my copy of his Letters lists only the three delineated above).

They were: danseurs nobles, danseurs classiques, demicaractére dancers, and character dancers. The danseurs nobles were still the gods and heroes, and must be "well-proportioned, elegant and behave as rulers of a kingdom...The tempi of their dances were usually slow and grandiloquent, and gestures generous yet precise and performed with conviction." The new category, the danseurs classiques, "excelled in pirouettes, elevation, and batterie, because of their natural gift of ballon. They had livelier personalities and danced roles such as Diana, goddess of the hunt, or Mercury, messenger of the gods." The demicaractére dancers "were not always so well-proportioned and usually possessed a natural sense of comedy." The character dancers "whose physique and movements were not necessarily of the finest, but whose abilities when playing some comic or dramatic role such as a Cyclops or Fury were most valuable."

If this all seems horribly old-fashioned and irrelevant, there are analogs in Shakespeare which are still followed by contemporary actors and may serve as a useful comparison. The noble is Macbeth, Hamlet, any of the kings in the history plays; the danseur classique is Romeo, or any princeling or lyric lover; the demicaractére would be Puck; and the character dancers are the groundlings. (There are feminine versions of the genres, of course, but I have stuck to discussing the men for the sake of simplicity.)

During the neoclassical period, that brief time between the Revolution and Romanticism, there was a genre-reclassification driven as much by the dancers themselves as by audience taste and changing times. The nobles wanted to dance; they were tired of standing there, looking beautiful and performing difficult adagio steps perfectly while the shepherds got all the applause. Vestris pére, the great danseur noble, was dead; long live Vestris, fils, the great danseur de demicaractére. The demis, on the other hand, wanted to dance the heroes. After all, they were the ones who could spin and jump and beat, and so it was only fair that they should be the stars. And so a hybrid, the allegro noble, or the lyrical demi, called the danseur classique, emerged. (To further confuse things, some sources say the demicaractére genre split into the danseurs classiques et serieuse and the danseurs comique, and I think this is how Bournonville would have understood the terms. It is what Gautier was getting at when he distinguished between the Christian and the pagan in Romantic ballet. The danseur/se classique is the chaste perfectionist; the comique, the demi, is the flirt, the sexual genre. It's the difference, to switch genders, between the soprano and the mezzo.)

Albert and Paul, stars of the lyrical and neoclassical ballets of the early nineteenth century, were exemplars of the new danseurs classiques. So was August Bournonville. This type became dominant during the Romantic period, usurping the role of the danseur noble almost entirely. James, Albrecht, and all those lost lyrical hero-poets, are danseurs classiques. The danseur nobles (for after all, tall, beautiful men still do appear occasionally) survived in Russia as Florimund and Jean de Brienne, and in Denmark as Junker Ove. Today, if you called a dancer "demicaractére" in print, he'd probably sue you for defamation of character. Especially in America, where "classical" is thrown around at every conceivable opportunity, "demicaractére" has acquired the connotation of "second-rate." Not so to Bournonville. He understood the genres, and he used them properly, according to the rules of his time. (As did Balanchine, but that's another story.)

Bournonville wrote about genre in Theater Life; it was obviously important to him. He insisted that the Sylph be cast with a classical dancer, and imported Maria Westberg from Sweden when he didn't have a classical danseuse in Copenhagen, and he goes to some lengths to explain why a particular dancer, while absolutely charming as Teresina, was not suitable to the role of the Sylph or Valdemar's Astrid (with Hilda and the Sylph, the other great "classical" role in his repertory) because she was demicaractére. I can't prove it, but I'd bet that this was a controversy during his day, or he wouldn't have felt the need to explain his casting rationale in a book intended for a popular audience, and which contains very few references to technical matters. In Denmark, the conflict was between the danseurs classiques of the court, and the danseurs de demicaractére of the music hall. The latter always outnumber the former, and audiences, especially general audiences, nearly always prefer the latter. I think Bournonville was always dancing in a foreign language in Copenhagen, that no matter how hard he tried to instill the French neoclassical school and its principles into his countrymen, the Danes would Biedermierize it, make it cute and comfy, and I think this is a result of the music hall strain, which asserts itself whenever there is no resident classicist to contain it.

There's an elegance in Bournonville's demicaractére roles (and in Petipa's; look at how the Kirov casts the Songbird Fairy, compared to Western companies). Effy, for example, in La Sylphide is not a cute little farm girl, but a beautiful young woman who is absolutely acceptable as a wife to James, if only he did not have a deep, inexplicable yearning for someone else. In America, and now, alas, in Denmark, James seems to desert the corps girl for the ballerina, but in Denmark, once, it was not so. Brenaa understood this, and Kronstam understood this, although they understood it through instinct, through knowing what they'd seen and what seemed right and what did not. Hans Beck must have understood it when he breathed new life in Bournonville 100 years ago, for else what was it that Brenaa saw?

But Lander, I think, at least at the beginning, before 1948-50 and his emerging interesting in classicism through Toni Lander and Etudes, which Alexander Meinertz discussed in these pages some years ago, was a demi's demi, and demied down the repertory that Beck had returned to classicism with such care. The long-limbed, elegant, lyrical dancers were replaced by the short, quick, cute ones (the Danes all use this term; "he liked the cute little ones," is how they put it). Mona Vangsaae (Peter Schaufuss's mother) was the great lyrical dancer of the late '40s and early '50s, but she was considered the company's "modern" dancer, and did very little in the traditional Danish repertory; it was Margot Lander—quick, devilish, and adorable—who was the ballerina; one of her great roles was the Broom in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Kirsten Ralov, a danseuse classique and classical enough to dance Aurora and Myrthe, never danced the Sylph in repertory. Many of the foreign choreographers, from Massine, to Ashton, to Birgit Cullberg, were enchanted with Vangsaae, with her slim, long body and lyrical line, and she had her best years at the end of her career. The great male star of the Lander period, the only dancer besides Bournonville and Kronstam to publicly hold the title of First Solodanser in the company's history, was Børge Ralov, a dramatic demi (as was Margot Lander). Niels Bjørn Larsen, who succeeded Lander, was very much a Lander man as far as taste in casting and repertory goes, and a look at the repertory of the 1950s—considered a High Water Mark by many Danophiles—shows a clear bifurcation between ballets by Lander's Danish successors and the ballets that were brought into the repertory by Vera Volkova, whose arrival in 1951 returned the company once again to classicism. The line became longer, though never hyperextended, the musicality became lyrical again, the favored dancers slender and elegant.

This dominance of the danseurs classiques was considered Russian, foreign, and of course, in a way, it was. But I think it was also very much back to Bournonville, who cared so much that his Sylphide be a classical dancer. Brenaa, who had been a cavalier with classical sensibilities, if a rather inelegant body, cast this way, as did Kronstam, strongly influenced by both Volkova and Brenaa. (Their approach to casting, which has been completely obliterated by the new regimes, will be discussed in detail in Part III of this article.)

Nearly all of the dancers in the company while Kronstam was still working there, except the ones running it, had absorbed his taste and his aesthetic. The current turn away from classicism started at the end of Andersen's time, when he and Anne Marie Vessel, Lise La Cour and Eva Kloborg began to coach and produce. All demicaractére dancers, they professed great admiration for Kronstam, and in some ways this was probably quite sincere. But what they were telling people to do in rehearsals was very different from what Kronstam had told them to do. The dancers were now encouraged to play to the audience, to dance more forcefully, and Andersen imposed his own energetic, rather abrupt and unmusical, style, replacing Kronstam's beautifully smooth and musical legato (another move to International Standard). And always, the admonition was to "Smile, smile, smile"—so much so that one of Kronstam's stories, that Ashton had told him to "Always smile with your eyes, because when you do that, your whole face brightens, but don't give me any grin," has become a watchword among certain Danish dancers.

Schaufuss, too, was a demicaractére dancer who, by virtue of his powerful technique, danced the big classical roles. I offer all this as background to help clarify what happened under Schaufuss's direction, for Schaufuss, in his effort to modernize the company, instead really went back to the Landertime, although with the souped up technique of the 1990s. The elegant, lyrical classicist was out, and the short, forceful virtuoso was in. This is probably the most significant change in the company's direction, and it is still in place, although Schaufuss is long gone. Johnny Eliason, who was appointed interim director after Schaufuss's resignation, is very big on the short, forceful, technique-is-all approach. Unlike Andersen and Schaufuss, who were really torn, I think, between the dance of their childhood learned from Volkova, and their natural instincts and the desire to be internationally recognized, Eliason has a single vision. He can recognize diamond from paste at fifty paces, and seems to prefer the paste. Eliason is an engaging fellow who was a popular teacher and can throw a ballet onto the stage in three rehearsals. He's still [1998] the principal rehearsal master at the company, and has probably been as much responsible for the company's style as anyone in the past three years.

Between them, Schaufuss and Eliason imported non-Danish, even anti-Danish, approaches to casting, directing, and rehearsing the repertory. All that they have done is very definitely in the spirit, at least, of International Standard, although on a rather provincial level. Schaufuss might say that he was not allowed to finish his work, and that is undoubtedly true. He might also say that his aesthetic conflicts with the dancers resulted from their conservative, civil servant, institutional approach to things, that they were resistant to vibrant new ideas, and that would certainly be one way of looking at it. One of the most poignant comments any dancer made of the new, improved Royal Danish Ballet was this: "When Henning was here, we had our own way of dancing that was special, but now all we do are bad copies of what everybody else does better," and few could argue with that. How that happened, and what the dancers and the Bournonville repertory look like now, is as much a result of a collision between "modern" and "old-fashioned" ways of casting and rehearsing ballets as of the stylistic changes that have crept into the company, but that must wait until Part III (and part last, honest) of this saga.

first published in DanceView
© 1998 by Alexandra Tomalonis