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The Bournonville Archive

Bournonville in Hell, Part 3
The Mermaid's Head

by Alexandra Tomalonis
copyright © 1998 by Alexandra Tomalonis

On a cold, dark night of the Winter Solstice, the head of The Little Mermaid, Denmark's most-visited tourist attraction, was severed and stolen away by person or persons unknown. I should make it absolutely clear at the outset that there is not a single shred of evidence linking anyone connected with the Royal Theater to this dastardly dead. The fact that The Little Mermaid is not only the name of a Hans Christian Andersen story but also that of a lost Hans Beck ballet, or that the inspiration for the statue (NOT its model; she's naked) was the then-reigning ballerina, Ellen Price de Plane, is undoubtedly a coincidence and the desecration of said statue must not be taken as a comment on the state of ballet in Copenhagen. Nor is there any indication that the recent rise of motorcycle gangs that varoom-varoom through the streets of that otherwise lovely and tranquil capital, shooting at each other with shoulder-fired missiles smuggled in from Sweden, is related to the current depleted state of the Bournonville tradition in any way. It is instructive to note, however, that both of these very non-Danish phenomena occurred after the drastic institutional and artistic changes to Bournonville's ballets and his Theater, which I have attempted to outline in the previous parts of this article, had been made.

The Mermaid's head appeared on the doorstep of a police station a few days later, I'm told. If only the Bournonville repertory could be similarly restored. But ballets are fragile creatures, and what's been blown off with a blowtorch cannot be so easily replaced. Aside from getting the steps right again (assuming the videos caught them all), putting those steps through, not on—or before, or after—the music, and paying proper attention to style, there are those little intangibles that made the ballets theatrically viable and among the great treasures of Western art. Among them are: casting; the process of how the ballets are "put up," as the Danes call it; and the direction, in the way that "direction" would be understood by actors. The two preceding parts of this article have focused mainly on the politics and history of the Bournonville tradition, presented as background to an understanding of the present crisis in Copenhagen. This article will be mainly concerned with artistic matters, how the ballets were staged, what Danish coaching once meant. It will include a brief consideration of the state of the Bournonville repertory at the time of the II Bournonville Festival which I over ambitiously promised for Hell-2, and will end with a few observations on the current state of the company.

All of the great Danish instruktors (an indispensable Danish word meaning producer, director, and coach), from Bournonville on, were masters of casting. In a small company like the Danish ballet, which had always been made up of individuals with distinct theatrical personalities and uneven technical abilities, casting—putting the right person in the right role—was key. The Royal Danish Ballet was very much an ensemble company, and the whole was always greater than the sum of its parts. During Bournonville's time, roles were assigned by what were called "types." Bournonville laments in "My Theater Life" that this tradition was vanishing, and that his ballets, and theater generally, was diminished as a result. He wrote that while the theater was once a collection of strong individuals, the personalities were now weaker and less distinct. Dancers were assigned to type by physique and physiognomy, coloring, and character. (This is in addition to the genre classification discussed in Hell-2, which is mainly, though not exclusively, muscular and more related to dancing than acting. European theater art used to be quite complex.)

The old types were much more specific than the vague outlines of the tradition that remain today: ingenue, villain, clown. Types were as specific as The Market Woman, The Sailor, The Coachman,  The Lady from Town, and, of course, The Mother-in-Law, who once figured very prominently in ballet. In creating a ballet, one put together a constellation of types, and assembled not only a work of art, but a world. Assigning dancers to types, creating ballets out of the interactions among types, was the theatrical equivalent of painting by number. When it was done crudely, it would have looked like the hack work it was, and this is probably the main reason the tradition died out. But in Copenhagen, where deftness and subtlety were valued for well over 150 years, the system worked very well. It was a very visual theatrical method. The director would cast by eye, by how the dancer looked, and the audience would be helped in understanding the story because of the expectations the dancer brought to his role and to the ballet. A dancer or actor would know, or be told if he didn't, which types were within his range. The great actor could vary the portrayals, creating many different Sailors or Ladies; the lesser talents would be convincing if they merely executed the mimic gestures, because they looked the part and were doing on stage what they did very well naturally. This insured that the ballets would be theatrically vivid; there was an acting standard below which they could not fall, and casting by a less astute director could not ruin them--at least not completely. It was the 19th century way of dancer-proofing the ballets.

There is no reason to doubt Bournonville's observation that the great types were dying out more than a hundred years ago, but vestiges of the tradition survived until quite recently. Many of the last great types, by today's standards, were among the mass of dancers who retired in 1992 (Michael Bastian and Thomas Berentzen, both now deceased; Kjeld Noack, Gabi Dissman, Ulla Skow, Anita Soby, Aage Poulsen, to name a few). Poulsen might be the most familiar to readers of these pages. He was the last of the Sailors. Short and feisty, he had been a virtuoso principal, dancing roles such as the Napoli pas de six and the short boy in Aureole. His Bournonville character repertory included the Drummer in Napoli and the Postman in Far From Denmark. Both of these are tiny parts, and both would be unnoticeable if assigned to the shortest, youngest boy in the corps, or the injured dancer with nothing to do, as too often happens elsewhere. Danced by a star, they became roles, and Poulsen's sheepish, sad sack Drummer was one of the most memorable characters in Napoli for fifteen years. Napoli has a dozen such roles, and it is the proper casting of these tiny parts, as well as that of the principals, that kept Bournonville's ballets alive.

During the periodic flowerings in this century, casting has often approached wizardry, not only making the ballets as perfect as possible, but developing dancers and expanding their range, as well. Hans Beck is said to have been a casting genius, and I will take that on faith. Harald Lander was, too, I'm told, at least in his later years. Hans Brenaa and Henning Kronstam were the last of the casting wizards. Their approaches were very different—they were products of different eras, and had had very different careers and experiences as dancers—but how Brenaa made the type system work long after it had died out elsewhere, and how Kronstam modulated from the old, external to the newer, more internal way of acting is probably the most important reason why the ballets they directed looked contemporary.

Kronstam told me a wonderful story about Brenaa's approach to casting, which says much about the Danes' way of looking at ballet. It seems they needed a new Franz for Coppelia, as the two usual Franzes were injured. Brenaa, who was staging the ballet, asked Kronstam if he thought a young corps dancer, Torben Jeppesen, could handle the part technically. After reflection, Kronstam said yes; Brenaa nodded, and said no more for a day or two. "He went off and thought about it. He had to figure out how to fit Torben into the ballet. Alexander [Kolpin] was a funny boy, and Frank [Andersen] was a comic boy, but Torben was a very masculine boy, and Hans had to work out a way to use this." For this dancer, Brenaa keyed his idea of the role not to the comic scenes, but to the scene where Franz and his gang torments Coppelius. Brenaa did not change the ballet, but he changed its flavor a bit, and probably reworked other casting assignments to complement the new Franz. The Danes' production of Coppelia is mostly character dancing—Franz dances in boots and has several very forceful solos—and a macho teenage leader would have been quite appropriate, yet different from the usual interpretation. It is light years away from the way casting is done in the rest of the world.

There are probably dozens of stories like this, and they are all as much a part of the Bournonville tradition as the ballets themselves. This kind of incisive casting was very much a part of the Danish way of balletmastering, of the way the dancers were taught the ballets and the way the ballets were maintained. It was not always understood by dancers, audiences, or critics. There were situations in which a dancer of relatively limited gifts would be so perfectly cast and brilliantly coached that the dancer would give a star performance, and many would wonder why he or she wasn't cast in every leading role. The reason was because the dancer wasn't appropriate for every leading role, perhaps not even any other leading role. Brenaa would say they weren't the right type; Kronstam would say, "It is not in his character." What they were saying was very different, but produced similar results. When ballets were cast and staged with as much care as they once were in Copenhagen, dancers who would seem extremely ordinary left on their own often gave remarkable performances.

In Denmark, as far back as is traceable, the ballets were staged from the ground up each time they re-entered the repertory. A new ballet was usually in the repertory for two seasons only, because of the subscriber system. Then it was rested for a season or two, then brought back. When a ballet re-entered the repertory (called a "repremiere") it was treated like a new work. For the very few ballets that were so beloved by subscribers that they became repertory staples, its roles were "called back" after the end of the season (meaning that the ballet could be recast) and the ballet was staged as though new. A ballet was taught, scene by scene and role by role, by the instruktor from his head. Brenaa became custodian of the Bournonville repertory because he knew the ballets, having committed them to memory, minute by minute and role by role, as was necessary in the days before video and notation.

Stagers from the video generation may be able to copy the videos, more or less—place the dancer in the right place and mimic the steps and the gestures—but don't seem to see the small details, the nuances, and certainly can't reproduce them. In the pre-video days, works were notated (stick figures, the steps writen out word by word) and notebooks were kept and consulted, but in a very real sense, the balletmaster "owned" the ballets, and it was understood that no one "put himself forward" as a stager until he was capable of walking into the studio and teaching each part, from flower girl to ballerina, out of his own mind and imagination without reading from notes. Dancers learned the roles by watching the instruktor show them the part. With a less creative instruktor, there would be the "copy me exactly" mentality that Allan Fridericia was quoted as complaining about in Hell Part 2, but with the great ones, the dancers were encouraged to develop the parts themselves—unless the dancer were very inexperienced or very dense and could not create a part independently. Then he or she would be told, "No. Do it this way." The roles were taught holistically, meaning that the steps, gestures, musicality, and acting instructions were given simultaneously, not presented sequentially as separate elements, as is apparently the practice in many other companies.

I never had the opportunity to watch Hans Brenaa work in rehearsal, and I know of him only through stories, but I did get to watch Kronstam work quite a lot, and I know he was greatly influenced by Brenaa, as well, perhaps, by his memories of Lander. Kronstam would say the action of the particular segment he was teaching as he showed the steps so they would be welded together in the dancer's mind. If he considered a dancer musical, Kronstam did not give counts, unless the score was unusually complex. If the dancer was not naturally musical, he would sing the counts to the melody of the score, as though trying to force the dancer's body to inhabit the music. Kronstam would begin rehearsals at a much slower tempo than he would want to see on stage, so that the dancers would learn the parts thoroughly and perform them cleanly. As rehearsals progressed, he would tighten the ballet by tightening the musicality, speeding up the tempo. Sometimes the ballet would not be "a tempo" by opening night, but at least it would look clear; tightening and polishing came later. (Once upon a time in Copenhagen, ballets actually got better the longer they remained in repertory.)

In Bournonville mime sequences, the musicality is especially key. A dancer who was part of a conversation among five people in the first act of Napoli gave an example of how Kronstam could sometimes be implacable and not allow a dancer any leeway in his interpretation because of the musicality. In this instance, the dancer had been instructed to turn and deliver his mime gesture on one count, but he wanted to take three counts to do the gesture, and he had what sounded like a perfectly reasonable dramatic explanation for it. This was not allowed, and no explanation was offered, but the reason was clear in performance, for when the five characters' gestures were put together they were so tightly interwoven with the music that the small scene became the climax of that segment, exploding with the force of a firecracker, pulling taut the texture of the whole scene.

The one overriding rule for both Brenaa and Kronstam (I am omitting Kirsten Ralov, the other stager of the Brenaa era, perhaps unfairly, because I neither saw, nor heard about, much of her work) was that the ballets must be cast as perfectly as possible for benefit of the ballets, and this approach to casting is one of the most obvious differences between the first and second Bournonville festivals. The first Bournonville festival (1979, when Kronstam was director) was cast for the sake of the ballets, meaning that each ballet got the best dancers available for each part. The point of the festival (the point of every performance in regular repertory, for that matter) was to show the ballets at their best, not to allocate roles equally to keep the dancers happy, or to make the company look as though it was awash in principals. Several excellent dancers, notably Annemarie Dybdal, Linda Hindberg and Mette Honningen, had very little to do during the 1979 festival, simply because they weren't the ones best suited to the ballets' leading roles. Several dancers had multiple roles, several had none, or few, or only minor ones. This was commented upon by nearly everyone in the foreign press (and caused much disgruntlement backstage), which is curious, because it's exactly the kind of approach critics at the time were urging other companies to follow.

The 1970s were a time of great change in the ballet world. The concept of employ, of dancers dancing roles appropriate to their type, already eroded, began to disappear, a casualty of the star system. The star danced the Prince, because that's what the audience, and eventually, the critics, expected. There were exceptions. The French held, and still hold, the line reasonably well. At the New York City Ballet, George Balanchine, that revolutionary modernist, continued to create demicaractere and classical roles and continued to differentiate their casting. Elsewhere, it was the age of the All Purpose Principal. In the absence of stars, casting quickly degenerated to an "if you can do the steps, you get the role" approach. This was something that many critics railed against at the time—jokes were made about this or that company putting on Swan Lake with a dozen different swan queens—yet by 1979, the new way was already so established that it had become the norm, and there were many comments that the Danish ballet didn't have much dancing depth because every ballet didn't have four casts.

At the second festival, in 1992, the situation was quite different. Almost each ballet had a different sets of principals, a perfect literal example of the shift towards quantity at the expense of quality that became prevalent in Copenhagen in the 1990s. Because the performing standard in Copenhagen for dramatic ballets was still higher than in other companies, even the second or third-best dancer looked fine to foreign eyes and, never having seen the better cast nor, in some instances, having the chance to see an old-style imaginatively cast ballet, this seemed normal to the foreigners. By Danish standards, it was a sea change, though neither foreign nor local critics seemed to notice. In fact, there were many favorable remarks in reviews about the number and vareity of leading dancers compared to 1979. (Perhaps this is the place to note that, when I make nasty cracks at critics, I am writing as a critic, and have made at least as many gaffes in print as anyone.)

As for the ballets themselves, most of those who had seen the Brenaa or Ralov productions either at the first festival or on the company's tours were saddened at the diminution in quality, although very few wrote about it so bluntly. The festival was, after all, supposed to be a celebration of Bournonville as a choreographer. But I'd like to offer a few comments now that I did not make in 1992.

At II Bournonville, only La Sylphide, Konservatoriet, and the first and third acts of Napoli were at Danish standard. Keeping the analogy of painting in mind, some of the minor ballets (which had been out of repertory for nearly ten years, and thus out of the dancers' performing lives) were like wrinkled canvases hastily grabbed out of storage and dimly lit. A Folk Tale, which was a serious attempt to examine original sources and come up with a rethought version along traditional lines, was too complex a task for the talents and experience level of its stagers. It was disappointing, especially to those who had seen and loved Kirsten Ralov's haunting, poetic and oddly contemporary version, which I discussed briefly in Hell-1. In what was possibly his most brilliant political move, Frank Andersen had persuaded Denmark's popular monarch, Margrethe II—Queen, balletomane, author and illustrator—to design the sets and costumes. The production was immensely popular and brought a new audience to the Theater, curious to see their Queen's work. ("She's the only monarch in the world who could earn her own living if she had to," a tour guide proudly explained on my first trip to Denmark.) The Queen's participation also provided the production with a bulletproof vest, for no Danish critic could easily criticize it, especially when there were whispers that many of the ideas of the production "came from the palace," as several mentioned at the time, though no one ever specified which ideas might have been royal ones. The production will be nearly impossible to dislodge from the repertory for the same reasons, and the saddest result of all of this is that Folk Tale has become thought of as a kiddie ballet, because of the Disneyesque approach and the costumes.

I had liked the new Folk Tale when I saw the premiere a few months before the Festival, admiring its energy and thinking it lively compared to some rather perfunctory performances of Ralov's production I had seen in the 1980s. I liked the fact that the producers (Andersen and Anne Marie Vessel) had restored a lost mime scene that showed the troll family leaving Denmark; the music for that segment is especially lovely. I also liked the idea that they brought back the angels, even though I never saw them clearly. It wasn't until I saw a 1977 video of Brenaa's production (directed by Ralov) that I sawthe new staging's problems. Now, having watched videos of both productions several times, I have a very different view. Aside from the fact that Folk Tale shouldn't be especially energetic and lively, in comparison to the old production, the first act of the Festival production was a frenetic mess. There was movement, movement everywhere, but running around isn't dancing; in the older, gentler, version, the dancers seem to be dancing constantly, even though they're actually moving less. The story, especially the relationship between Junker Ove and Birthe, was unclear, and, as Knud Arne Jurgensen had the courage to point out at the time, Lis Jeppesen's hoydenish Birthe, the troll maiden, was in exactly the wrong key. (I admire Jeppesen, and am sure she was doing exactly as she was directed, and she did it brilliantly. But if Birthe is so obviously dominant and crazy from her first entrance, Junker Ove is a colorless and unappealing hero.) The action of the opening scene, which establishes the human characters, had been so muddied that the relationship between Junker Ove and his fiancee seemed an afterthought.

A Folk Tale is the most mystical work in the extant Bournonville repertory. Theatre legend has it that both Fokine and Balanchine loved it. It's the one Bournonville classical ballet (aside from La Sylphide) to survive Lander, though I think it only survived because it has been understood, or misunderstood, as a demicaractere ballet, a story about trolls, while the young lovers are really the central characters. Arlene Croce pointed out after the 1979 Festival that the first scene of Folk Tale was like the hunt scene of Sleeping Beauty (interesting that when the Danes tried to do Sleeping Beauty in 1993, the only scene they really got was the hunt scene). It also resembles the first act of Swan Lake, with its measured pace (in the old version) and contrast between noble and folk dancing. The weight, the gravitas, of A Folk Tale was absent from the 1992 production, which was simply a rather pleasant story with a chase scene and a happy ending. As a Washington critic said after the first performances here a few months after the Festival, "The magic has gone."

There were several visual aspects of the staging that I hadn't noticed at the premiere, and which not only seem unnecessary, but indicate a lack of the painter's eye on the part of the stagers. Props were put on the opposite side of the stage from their usual position, changing the composition of scenes. In the first act, Birthe's swing, which was once in the back, swinging from left to right, was moved to the front, and Birthe seemed to fly out over the orchestra the better to show off her knickers. I'm sure the producers thought this would look more dangerous, more daring, but that's exactly the kind of lack of subtlety that strikes a wrong note in a Bournonville ballet. Another small detail: in the pas de sept, there's a trio of three women that ends with one woman in the center, the other two, one on each side, each tilted towards the center woman. Invariably, when Silja Schandorff, one of the tallest dancers in the company, danced in this piece, she was a side girl, and the pose looked ridiculously out of balance. How could the stagers not see this? As for the dancing of that pas de sept, compared to the plush, powerful, yet light and smooth dancing of 1977 (especially by Arne Villumsen, Anna Laerkesen and Eva Kloborg), the dancing in 1992 sometimes seemed forced and frantic. A far more significant concern with this Folk Tale, according to the dancers, was that coaching had been subpar. Dancers cast as Junker Ove or Hilda said they had to go to Kronstam, or Sorella Englund or Anna Laerkesen, in order to get coherent help in understanding the roles—in fact, in understanding the idea of the whole ballet, as one put it.

Two of the other productions were also problematic. (Far From Denmark was staged by Niels Bjorn Larsen, then nearly 80, and was, I think, quite accurate, though it seemed rather small.). Kermesse in Bruges and The Kings Volunteers on Amager were both directed by Anne Marie Vessel, who had worked extensively with Brenaa, especially on the latter ballet. Vessel was a wonderful Bournonville dancer and loves Bournonville, but these stagings were disappointing. All the steps were there, but the action was unfocused, the dancers uninspired. One of the very unintended consequences of II Bournonville was that many dancers, and some critics, seemed convinced that these "minor" ballets had expired shelf-lives and should be permanently retired. Kermesse (the most popular ballet of the first festival and the most-performed work of Kronstam's tenure as director, according to statistics compiled for me by Eva Kistrup) was once the company showpiece, but in 1992, it lacked the lyricism and poetry one remembered, and, as in Folk Tale, the philosophical underpinnings (in this case, the danger of the misuse of magic and unchecked power, among other things) were gone. What survives of the Bournonville repertory is slight enough; without depth in casting, direction, and interpretation, there's not all that much left, and although I am saddened by it, I can understand the younger dancers not seeing much here but slapstick and boots.

As for Kings Volunteers, a ballet I adore, it, too, suffered from miscasting in the leading roles and a loose and sloppy staging. Two details, one tiny, the other cosmic, show how the ballet had deteriorated. In the first scene, a coach arrives from Copenhagen, and several people disembark and enter the inn. I remember a striking older woman in a red cloak, undoubtedly a holdover from the old Types (perhaps a Judge's Wife), who had a thirty-second scene in which she simply said hello, and took off her cloak. It had nothing to do with the plot of the ballet, simply gave you something to look at until the heroine's entrance——and, of course, provided the build up for that entrance, as well as atmosphere. I later learned that the woman I remembered had been one of the company's supers, a category which had been cut to save money. The part was now taken by dancer. When I saw the ballet at its first performance the spring before the festival, an older, quite lovely, corps dancer took the part, and looked completely confused about who she was and why she took off her cloak and especially what she was supposed to do next; she seemed more fashion model out of time than a Lady from Town. At the Festival, one of the young English corps dancers took the role. She walked in and took off her cloak, and that was that; the role had disappeared. King's Volunteers is constructed of dozens of such thirty-second scenes and strong characters. Without those details, it loses much of its visual and dramatic impact.

The second detail was also small, though far more important: the excision of a gesture. It's a gesture that no one who saw the ballet in the 1970s can forget. When Edouard, the philandering hero, asks his wife to forgive him, he assures her he loves her and, holding up his index finger in a gentle gesture of supplication and reassurance, tells her that she is the only one. The raised finger was nearly cut in 1992 because the dancer cast as Edouard did not feel comfortable with performing it. This was quite an issue with older dancers when I was there the spring the ballet re-entered the repertory. Four of them mentioned it to me, and some said they'd spoken to Vessel about it. So did I, and Vessel explained that Brenaa always said that if you stick to the spirit of a work, you can make changes. If the dancer didn't feel comfortable with something, forcing him to do it would look awkward on stage. However, Edouard's curious constancy was the spirit of the work, and if the dancer didn't understand that, then it was the instruktor's job to figure out a way to make him understand it. Otherwise, there was the old standby, "Just do it, dear." Ultimately, Kronstam, who had been the great Edouard of the '70s, went to the dancer and explained why the gesture was important and advised him to perform it, and the Missing Moment was saved. In 1992, there was still an Old Guard to stop some of the more egregious mistakes and tamperings.

For a few brief months, since Konservatoriet, La Sylphide and the first and third acts of Napoli (all Kronstam's productions) had been immeasurably better than the others, and since Kronstam, heretofore considered the company's international classicist, was beginning to become interested in staging Bournonville, as Brenaa had before him, it seemed to some of the dancers, at least, that Bournonville had found his new guardian. Kronstam not only understood the ballets completely, he was so respected by the dancers that he could make them believe in the ballets. (Actually, Kronstam had always been interested in Bournonville, but had never "put himself forward" until asked, for fear of stepping on toes. After the [1979] Festival," he told me once, "suddenly there were all these people coming forward, saying they were Bournonville experts, and so I said, Well, let them have it." Kronstam had always respected the roles, though agreed with others of his generation that the works themselves were old-fashioned. "I never had that much respect for Napoli, other than the third act, of course, until I had to stage it myself," he said. "But that first act is a masterpiece.")

In August of 1994, Peter Schaufuss became balletmaster, bringing with him a very different way of working. If there is a precedent for Schaufuss's style of directorship it is probably that of Flemming Flindt, in that he was primarily interested in his own productions, allocating the lion's share of rehearsal time to them, and working very hard with the dancers that especially interested him, delegating the rest to his assistants. Flindt, however, had had Vera Volkova in the school and Brenaa and Kronstam in the studio, and so the company's core repertory continued to be well cared for. Schaufuss had no one on that level, and relied mostly on his long-time assistant, Johnny Eliason, as principal rehearsal master. Eliason was considered a good teacher, despite a tendency to ignore the arms (some of his pupils never ovecome this, and are said to have "johnnyarms"). Both Schaufuss and Eliason's approach to rehearsals was very different from the Old Ways. The two brought International Standards with them to the Royal Theater, as requested, and ballets that had once received three or four weeks of rehearsal were now performed after only three or four days.

A note about International Standard. Once upon a time, about thirty years ago, the term was synonymous with the highest standard and was the standard to which everyone aspired. A provincial dancer was sent to Paris or London to be "polished" and dance at international standard, for example. Today, International Standard refers to a bland and undistinctive mediocrity that's easily portable and instantly accessible to a mass audience. The move from Chanel to Wal-Mart, in ballet as in fashion, is complete. Vivi Flindt, talking about Nureyev's appearances with the company in the mid-'70s, told me, "Rudi never changed things here. He knew he couldn't get away with it." This attitude was lost by the '90s (witness Julio Bocca's performance of what was listed as the William Tell pas de deux at the 1992 Festival, but could most charitably be described as ad libbed). By 1994, the changes Nureyev had made to La Sylphide in places that he could get away with it (Toronto, London) had become part of the Danish text.

One of the most significant changes brought by Schaufuss-Eliason was the lack of dramatic coaching from either man. Dancers were told to "work out the role for yourself." If there are any dancers anywhere in the world who could do this, it's Danes, so I was puzzled why this would be so disconcerting until I realized they meant that they weren't given even a vague outline of what the directors wanted, of the idea for the production. The dancers certainly knew the story of La Sylphide, during whose rehearsals this issue first arose, but expected some specific guidance, even if it was just, "You're jealous of James, and a little bit stupid." Given that instruction, ten Danes will give you ten very different Gurns, but without an outline within which to act, they'll either flounder or work out something so imaginative that it clashes with the others in the cast.

If the sudden lack of dramatic coaching and switch to an emphasis on technique, as in which muscle moves during that step, as one dancer put it, was a disappointment, the introduction—for the first time in the history of the Bournonville repertory—of a notator to actually stage the production was a shock. At the risk of offending our notator readers, I would propose that notation arose as a need only in the absence of artists. Hans Brenaa did not need a notator. The dancers weren't used to taking instructions from someone who could only say, "No, no. It says here to start on the left foot," especially when they had been dancing La Sylphide for years and knew it was the right foot. There were dozens of conflicts like this, many of them revolving around musical phrasing. The mime was put back square on the music again, the dancing, according to some, had no discernible relation to the music. Dramatic nuance had also been notated in, which may have been necessary when setting the ballet on a non-Danish company, but seemed odd in Copenhagen. "They said, 'Raise your left eyebrow on the count of five,'" one angry James related.

As an artist, Schaufuss remains a conundrum. He certainly can talk most knowledgeably about Bournonville, and Ashton as well, and seems genuinely to admire them as choreographers, yet, as both dancer and choreographer, he is the least lyrical of men, and one wonders what it is that he admires, or even what he actually sees when he looks at the ballets. His stagings use big, massed effects, there's little subtlety either in staging or dancing, and his own dancing is forceful rather than filigree. He not only admired Ashton, however, but gave several of Ashton's ballets a home when the Royal didn't seem to want them. One of Schaufuss's dreams had been to restore the Ashton Romeo and Juliet to the company of its birth, yet that, too, went awry, partly because the current generation of Danes considers the Neumeier production of that ballet "their" production, partly because Schaufuss was unable to make the dancers see the work's beauty.

Schaufuss and the Theater Chief reportedly were in perpetual conflict over administrative matters, and he was released from his contract after a year, though he continued to be a presence for a second season, as he had four productions in repertory. Eliason served as acting director for that second year and half of another, until Maina Gielgud, who had directed the Australian Ballet for sixteen years, was appointed. Gielgud professed a respect for the company's traditions that I am sure was most sincere, but it seems obvious that the last person who could restore those traditions was someone who'd spent her entire career elsewhere. (Why the selection committee chose Gielgud, who had been told that her contract in Australia would not be renewed because of problems there, over Ib Andersen, the other finalist, a Dane and a choreographer, is one of the many unfathomable decisions made in the past decade.) Gielgud, very much a hands-on director (a plus) is in the process of transplanting the Australian repertory to Copenhagen, a predictable minus. It's a perfectly respectable repertory, as International Standards go, for a second or third rate national company, but why inflict it on the Danes?

And Bournonville? He is now firmly in the clutches of Frank Andersen and Dinna Bjorn, a dancer who's devoted most of her life to him, teaching his classes and reconstructing small lost dances, many of which were in the repertory of the last Soloists group, which Bjorn and Frank Andersen had put together back in the late 1970s. Bjorn also choreographed the second act of Napoli for II Bournonville. Bjorn is known as a scholar and a stylist, and while neither attribute would necessarily preclude one from being a good stage director, in Bjorn's case, her work has always struck me as pedantic and dull. She's not a stickler for accuracy, but likes to experiment, both with style and drama, and so her stagings don't even have the virtue of being good, clean copies from which a later, more imaginative director, could work; her work is Bournonville Lite. The dances she mounted for the Soloists looked so small and old-fashioned, they sparked debate, at least among American critics, as to how much the more familiar Bournonville works. The restored dances were so thin and simple, it seemed unlikely that the richer choreography we knew could be by the same hand. This is one notion I was glad to have corrected by Danish Brenaaists, who assured me that Bjorn's stagings simply lack the accents and stylistic embellishments another stager would know to include. As for Napoli Act II, Bjorn's choreography for the naiads was harmless, if undistinctive, but her interpolation of a solo for Gennaro struck me as an unacceptable anachronism (Bournonville sayeth: the hero may not dance unless his soul is in a harmonious state), as does the sexual longing (for Golfo, a sea monster) she forces onto Teresina.

This brings us back to the Types. I saw a video of the second act of Napoli from the mid-'60s, in which Golfo (Frank Schaufuss), tall and terrifying, picked Gennaro up, raised him over his head, held him aloft for three counts, and dashed him to the ground. I was told that Schaufuss pere was not nearly as terrifying as his predecessor, Poul Vessel, had been. If Teresina, or any other 19th century small-town girl, could fall in love with such a monster instead of fainting on the spot, she would have spent the first act fighting for Italian unification instead of trying to get a husband, and Napoli would be a very different ballet. Golfo has gotten weaker generation to generation since the mid-'60s; he was almost a sympathetic Romantic hero in Kirsten Ralov's production. The weaker he gets, the more possible it is to have silly notions about him. The idea that Teresina is in love—or in lust—with Golfo may come from another performance tradition. I have read tributes to Margot Lander, the great ballerina of the '30s and '40s (demicaractere, and proud of it), that mention her "unforgettable look" at Golfo as she leaves the Grotto. The Look may have always been there, or may have entered the repertory with Lander. Kirsten Simone, the Teresina of the 1960s video, also gives a look, though it's a look of wonder—wonder, as in wondering what had happened to her; wonder, as in marveling at the nature of this place. The Look now has become the spark for an "enhanced" libretto, another example of what I wrote in Hell-2 as the need of many Bournonville stagers and commentators to have everything spelled out in neon. Bjorn and Frank Andersen are working on a new production of Napoli as I write this. [Note 12/98: The production was not a success. Although one Danish critic wrote, "Ah, Bournovnille lives," most of the others disagreed. My favorite headline was "Is Napoli Bournonville's grave beer?"]

Bjorn has already staged the traditional version of La Sylphide, more or less, which returned to the repertory this past autumn. I have not seen the full production, only the second act, which was staged for a tribute to Kronstam the dancers put on last June. It was the old production, but it didn't look like the old production; all its intangible beauties were gone. Bjorn had a corps that was mostly new to the ballet (have I mentioned that the company is nearly half foreigners now?), which is certainly not her fault. The casting, however, made my heart sink, and, although I suppose I should be grateful to management for providing me with a seemingly infinite supply of material, the casting of La Sylphide indicated that yet another corner has been turned.

The new Sylph (and Juliet, Sugarplum Fairy, Swan Queen and Aurora) of the company is an American dancer named Caroline Cavallo. She's sweet, hardworking, and the very model of the new International Standard principal dancer: she can do the steps, you can put her in any role and any ballet and she'll look just the same. Cavallo came into the company during the Andersen years, and was charming in the corps and in the few solo parts I saw her do. For an American, she's an excellent Bournonville dancer, and if the Atlanta Ballet, where Cavallo danced before coming to Copenhagen, were putting on La Sylphide, she'd be a perfectly acceptable Sylph. But she's not a Danish Sylph. I asked a few people why they think she got the part, and the answer was consistently, "she's our strongest technician," in itself not a very encouraging thought. But, although the Sylph is a difficult role, the part has never gone to the strongest technician. If it had, Linda Hindberg, the company's "Russian" virtuoso of the '70s and '80s, would have been the Sylph of her generation.

When the full production reentered the repertory, Bjorn's other Sylph was Henriette Muus, cast, I'm told, because she's said to be the best Bournonville stylist, a matter of some dispute among other Bournonville stylists. More problematic—back to types again—Muus is a perfect example of what was once called the Girl (Inge Sand and Anne Marie Vessel are her predecessors). She was a wonderful Swanilda, but she is not a Sylph. The rest of the casting was what you'd expect in any small, young company without a tradition, but not in Copenhagen. I asked some of the retired dancers who seem to me to really understand what Brenaa and Kronstam were doing, and they had no trouble coming up with three or four possibilities for each role (the rest of the casting was similarly foreign to the Bournonville tradition). This is how Danish dancers were once developed: Find the girl most like the Sylph and, unless she has an insurmountable technical impediment, work with her until she becomes a Sylph. This, alas, takes time and genius, and why go to all that trouble if only a few people notice?

Is there any good news from Copenhagen? Yes. Sorella Englund is coaching there now. I don't know how much of a free hand she has, but her mere presence is cause for hope. There are still some wonderful dancers there, although the careers of several have been derailed by the past few years, when there seems to have been a kind of ethnic cleansing of artists. Many of the people who could help restore the company to its pre-International Standard days are gone. Arne Villumsen, whose coaching the last time the company danced Onegin was, several dancers told me, the closest they'd had to Kronstam, is no longer there. Neither is Niels Kehlet, who is reportedly a fine teacher and who has staged Bournonville pieces in Paris, among other places. Arlette Weinrich, who certainly knows the ballets and can see what is wrong with them, and who worked with Brenaa longer than anyone else, has not been brought back to the ballet. There are a few dancers left who worked with Brenaa, slightly more who worked with Kronstam, and almost all of them speak of both men, not only with the profoundest respect, but with an understanding of what they were about. So it is theoretically possible that the Bournonville tradition could be at least partially restored.

The real question is, how many people, both in and outside the Royal Theatre, really want the Bournonville tradition to be restored. In the past few years, I have heard many heartfelt laments for the state of the company, but, except for a deep and genuine concern for La Sylphide, I have seen no tears shed for Bournonville. My sense is that the dancers are where their older brothers and sisters were in the mid-1970s, with respect for only La Sylphide and the third act of Napoli. I don't think they'd dare eliminate the ballets completely, but if they packed up and walked away by themselves, few would shed a tear.

So now you know the short version of what happened to Bournonville after the 1992 Festival. Can his ballets and, more importantly, the Bournonville tradition, be restored? Not completely. The line has been broken and there are too many things that can't be undone: the composition of the company, who was not taken, or not kept, in the school, and the gap in performances, and thus in the performance tradition, among them. This does not mean that there aren't people who could revive the company and produce versions of Bournonville's ballets that Hans Brenaa would recognize; I think there are. But the likelihood of their being allowed to try is slim at best. Does that mean that Bournonville will no longer be danced in Copenhagen? Alas, no. I think there will be a succession of unfortunate productions before he is declared hopelessly old-fashioned and given a decent burial. The next decade will see a slew of Bournonville pretenders, some old friends, some new. What they produce is likely to be acclaimed in the press; the standards of criticism are as low as in all other fields these days. Someone could give the dancers tambourines and put on Billboards under the title of Napoli and there are those who would believe it. Two or three might even write that the new production was an improvement (no mime). But eventually, if the ballets are on the level that the new generation of Bournonville stagers has produced in the past six years, even the most optimistic will notice, blame the passage of time and El Nino, and drift away.

Who is responsible for the current Theater Crisis? If there is a villain in this story, it is Politics. When Americans think of politicians meddling in the arts, we think of Jesse Helms ripping up pornographic photos, but this is benign compared to the greater danger. In an age where high culture is attacked in the name of democracy and those who control the arts claim to act on behalf of of the People, there is far more at stake than the right to bare flesh. Taking away the responsibility to govern arts institutions from those who have been trained to appreciate art and understand what is necessary to protect it, and giving that power to people acceptable to those who do not understand it, results in the death of art. The People already control art; that's what folk art is. Arts populism gives control of the arts to a few people who don't know much about art, and this is the least democratic situation imaginable. Such so-called democracy too often rewards those who are, to use a quaint Texas phrase, "all hat and no cattle." The Know Nothings have no defense against the charlatans and wannabes whom the real Elites would know to avoid. Nor do these "democrats" understand the workaday realities of backstage life, of what is necessary for the production of art and the maintenance of a tradition. That is a job for professional artists, not politicians.

This is a worldwide problem, not just a Danish one, and America is as responsible for this New Thinking as anyone. But Bournonville is in Danish custody, and so I write of the Danes. Until they have a Minister of Culture who understands and appreciates the Danish cultural tradition, and a Theater Chief who understands how a theater, an opera company, and a ballet company work, they are playing Russian roulette with that heritage and future generations will not thank them. At the press conference called to introduce Maina Gielgud, the Theater announced a Bournonville Festival for the year 2000; there will probably be some celebration to honor his 200th birthday in 2005. There may well be a Festival then, but, unless the gods decide to dance with dance again, Bournonville will not attend.

first published in DanceView
copyright © 1998 by Alexandra Tomalonis