A step in time: Bournonville class at the school of the Royal Danish Ballet

Dance Magazine, March, 1997 by Tobi Tobias

The Royal Danish Ballet's status as a company that can be mentioned in the same breath as, say, the Kirov and New York City Ballet depends largely on August Bournonville--his ballets and his technique. In other words, the heart of what's wonderful about this company today is not in the least modern or forward-looking, but quite old. Bournonville lived from 1805 to 1879; he was an exact contemporary land the friend) of Hans Christian Andersen.

A handful of Bournonville's choreographic gems--among them, La Sylphide, Napoli, and A Folk Tale--have been preserved for a century and a half now, handed down from one generation of dancers to the next. The technique has had a quirkier fate: It was based on the French schooling of the Romantic era. Bournonville completed his own training at the Paris Opera, then gradually domesticated what he'd learned, once he settled down again in Denmark as the very young leader--and regular teacher--of his company. Apparently, he was a gifted and imaginative instructor, so much so that his appreciative students made and kept notes of the exercises and enchainements he devised. In the first decade of this century, his successors, afraid of forgetting their rich inheritance, made a survey of these notes, added to them passages from Bournonville's ballets 1such as excerpts from the dancing-school section of Konservatoriet, the choreographer's homage to his student years in Paris), and codified the material into six set classes, one for each day of the working week.

Like the Bournonville ballets that have survived by means of what the Danes call "the living tradition," the classes, too, were transmitted personally, from teacher [always a senior or retired RDB dancer) to pupil. These pupils included the children and teenagers in the academy attached to the company and the professionals as well. IA published version of the classes, masterminded by the Danish ballerina and Bournonville expert, Kirsten Ralov, appeared in 1979.) Incredibly, and perhaps absurdly, the six set classes--with their accompanying music, which was dancey but often trivial--became almost the sole teaching instrument of the Royal Danish Ballet. Senior artists claimed they could do the steps in their sleep or their dotage, moving like circus horses the moment they heard the familiar tunes, and the more daring male dancers composed risque lyrics which they song sotto voce as they went through their paces, to relieve the tedium of if-it's-pirouette-lifting-off-from-grand-plie-it-must-be-Monday.

In the 1930s other ideas from abroad about dancing gradually began to filter through to the company that had been so snugly isolated in Copenhagen. Finally, in the 1950s, with the arrival of Vera Volkova, a Russian teacher of genius who became a mainstay of the RDB for a quarter-century, the teaching was modernized considerably. Unfortunately, the company, having developed a frantic desire to be contemporary, threw out the baby with the bathwater. The set Bournonville classes were allowed to disappear from the school curriculum, and an entire generation of Danish dancers experienced their first significant immersion in Bournonville only when they were cast in the ballets. Needless to say, the style was foreign to them and, despite some superb coaching, this showed.

The Danes had the grace to realize their mistake. In the late 1 980s, during his tenure as leader of the company, Frank Andersen worked to reinstate the teaching of the set Bournonville classes in the school. His goal was to have every student graduating into the company able to perform them not only with panache, but from memory. Today, if you have the good fortune to visit the Royal Danish Ballet's school, you may see, as I did, a group of young women, aged thirteen to sixteen, committing to muscle memory the intricate and beautiful patterns of the Saturday class. These students are still young enough--just--in mind and body to absorb the Bournonville vocabulary and style without resistance. To them, the complex petite batterie, the subtle epaulement, the odd but keenly musical phrasing, the emphasis on buoyancy and old-fashioned grace are not so much a foreign language, contradictory to the "international style" that forms the core of their training, but a local dialect to be absorbed, even cherished, as their own.

Appropriately, their astute teacher, Eva Kloborg, is passing on to them the spirit--the focus on a joyous elan in dancing--as well as the substance of Bournonville. Her final instructions before a particularly mind-boggling passage are, "Remember, make every move clean, precise--and delicious." One nymphet repeats the killer combination without the piano accompaniment. Her phrasing is so apt, so suffused with vitality, that you imagine you hear the music in the silence broken only by her panting breath and firm footfalls. "Yes," Kloborg comments, in a reminiscent tone, as if repeating a guideline essential to her own formation as a dancer. "Make the whole thing like a song in the body."