Bournoville Festival
Royal Theatre, Copenhagen
Two of Denmark's best-loved creators, Hans Christian Andersen and August Bournonville, were born in 1805, and Copenhagen is busy celebrating their joint bicentennial. Andersen longed to be a ballet dancer - a hopeless ambition, given his gawky physique - so he had to content himself with watching the Royal Danish Ballet and befriending their great choreographer and ballet master, Bournonville.
August's French father, Antoine, was ballet master before him, so the old French style of dancing has been a long-established tradition in Copenhagen's Royal Theatre. Because the Danes have kept their favourite ballets in continuous performance (nearly 10 complete Bournonville works survive, along with excerpts from others), we're looking at the way the ballet girls in Degas's paintings and sculptures used to dance.
Not exactly, of course. The past is another country and they moved differently then. But the Danes preserved the steps and style Bournonville taught, while French and Russian dancers changed with the times. What we see now on most international stages is an athletic form of ballet in which dancers display their strength and flexibility, with lifts as daring as ice-skaters'.
The reason why balletomanes from around the world have flocked to the third Bournonville festival is to keep the faith with a more courteous culture, in which virtuosity is downplayed and grace taken for granted. Such qualities have to be instilled into today's dancers by careful teaching, until the modest style seems natural instead of assumed. Although Bournonville's two most popular ballets, La Sylphide and Napoli, have been performed by many companies, only the Royal Danish Ballet looks completely at home with them.
And some of the folksier period pieces - Far From Denmark, A Folk Tale, The King's Volunteers on Amager - would make little sense in a foreign repertoire. So, once every 13 years, pilgrims travel to Copenhagen to experience Bournonville in context, complete with exhibitions and demonstrations of the specialist classes by company members and children from the Royal Ballet School.
The dancers take pride in showing how conversant they are with Bournonville's bubbling ballet vocabulary. The cast in Le Conservatoire, for example, accomplished all the academic feats in the dancing lesson that starts the ballet and then relaxed to have fun in the pantomime second half.
The sweetly silly last act comes from the Victorian vaudeville tradition, like the shipboard shenanigans in Far From Denmark. Performed, as they have been, with charm, the quaint conventions are well worth preserving.
Under Frank Andersen's leadership as artistic director, a balance is being attempted between faithful reproductions and a fresh approach to old favourites, including new designs. Opinion is sharply divided over what has been gained and lost. He has opened up the company to non-Danish dancers, though the expectation is still that young recruits will imbibe the Bournonville style by appearing in the ballets as small children, making their way through the ranks to soloist status.
During the festival, youngsters cheered on their elders from the bridge in the last scene of Napoli, while ex-pupils took centre stage: Thomas Lund and Tina Højlund, for example, whose performances became all the more joyful as they realised how much the audience was rooting for them.
Lund, a contemporary of Johan Kobborg's, grew up through the school with Gudrun Bojesen too: their affinity was evident in the latest production of La Sylphide, by another alumnus, Nikolaj Hübbe.
Hübbe left after the 1992 festival to join New York City Ballet, just as Kobborg departed for our Royal Ballet, in search of fresh challenges. Lund has remained, deepening his interpretation of a role such as James in La Sylphide, and coaching his fellows as well. He and Bojeson as the Sylph danced the choreography with the fluency and musicality of experience, though Hübbe's dramatically inept staging did them few favours. Let's hope that Kobborg's upcoming production for the (British) Royal Ballet retains more of the humour and magic of this quintessentially Romantic work and that our dancers can do it justice.
Evil triumphs in La Sylphide, as it never does elsewhere in Bournonville's morally optimistic world. His is not light entertainment, for all the airy bounce of the steps he strings together so felicitously. To watch the Royal Danes, foreigners as well as native-born dancers, is to understand how he expected a generous spirit to be allied with a disciplined body. A typical position, of the arms held out to the audience, is called an embracement.
For the past week, the dancers have been embracing festival-goers and their patron, Queen Margrethe of Denmark, attentive in the royal box, at ease backstage. She designed A Folk Tale, so she's truly part of this company, which has surpassed itself. This was a great festival and, once again, a happy one.
· The Royal Danish Ballet is at Sadler's Wells, London EC1, 21-25 June.
