The third Bournonville Festival ended on Saturday at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. Over the proscenium arch is the moral injunction "Ei Blot Til Lyst" - "Not for Pleasure Alone" - but for 10 days, ballet-lovers thronged the theatre in quest of those special pleasures that come with watching the Royal Danish Ballet do what it does best: honouring its founding father with joyous performance.
In the treasury of the Bournonville repertory (less than a dozen works survive from his tremendous output) we have the best and most compelling view of 19th-century ballet. The French and Russian repertory of this same period, from Giselle to Raymonda, is mostly corrupt, bruised and amputated by revisionism and producers' mania. What survived of Bournonville was loved and kept intact in Copenhagen but for the past half-century, as the Danes ventured into the larger ballet world with these precious relics, there has been a continuing process of cleaning, rethinking, revising, and (sometimes) remaking.
Bournonville has proved a great inheritance, but also a great burden for the Danes in seeking to know how to use that inheritance. To edit or not? To rethink and redesign or not? How to adapt a very beautiful and difficult dance manner to late 20th-century physiques (taller bodies) and temperaments (more questioning of the style's validity)? How to continue the crucial mimetic traditions of these old ballets? This has been solved by casting great dancers after their retirement from dance - it is a privilege to watch such luminaries as Kirsten Simone and Flemming Ryberg making characters real with grandest authority.
This festival showed yet again that the Bournonville legacy is no easy thing to use. Kermesse in Bruges, a delightful comedy-drama of 17th-century prejudices cast as an adventure story about three brothers seeking their fortunes, has been disastrously redesigned, with its Bruges setting lost and its costuming abominable. Dancers draw some of their interpretations from their stage clothes and the decor. This new version denies them anything of this support and inspiration, and the piece foundered.
A new La Sylphide was less radical but cursed with unsuitable settings - a cavernous baronial interior, when the action demands intimacy; a cramped view of the Scottish Highlands, when space and air are vital for the sylph's domain - and an overwrought manner.
The redeeming feature in both works was the dancing of Thomas Lund, ardent in step and feeling, a performer in the greatest traditions of Danish male artistry. Others of the old ballets - the enchanting Charles X Paris of Le Conservatoire; the naval shenanigans of Far from Denmark - were shown with all the felicity in acting and dance the Royal Danes so happily command. Thomas Lund was also the hero in Napoli, that perfect masterpiece of danced joys and dramatic subtleties. The staging is traditional and, on the second night of the festival, the final act exploded from the stage like the world's most wonderful firework. This was why we love Bournonville and the Royal Danes so much. Choreography and dancers affirm ballet as an ennobling and illuminating art. The inheritance was safe.
