Stockholm wonder: the Royal Swedish Ballet celebrates 225 years - includes related article on the men of Swedish ballet - Cover Story

Dance Magazine, June, 1998 by Lynn Garafola

They call Stockholm the Venice of the North. Almost everywhere you walk--and what a city for strolling--you encounter water and bridges. And boats. Ferries, skiffs, fishing boats, pleasure yachts--you see them anchored along the elegant strandvagen or sailing past former royal hunting lodges to the Baltic Sea, yesterday's gateway to the fur, timber, and iron markets of a Northern Europe once ruled from Norway to Ukraine by conquering Swedes. I had imagined Stockholm to be a modern city, gleaming and clean. It is clean, and when it's sunny, the water looks like sky-blue glass. But it's also a very old city, with remains of Viking settlements, a medieval quarter, and eighteenth-century center built at the height of Swedish political power. It's also a city that takes the arts seriously. A new Museum of Modern Art opened in February, and from June 5 to 13 the Royal Swedish Ballet celebrates its 225th birthday with a festival that is sure to make Stockholm, the Cultural Capital of Europe 1998, this year's European dance capital as well.

Founded in 1773 by King Gustav III, the Royal Swedish Ballet is the third-oldest company in Europe--and one of its least known. After an initial of glory, it suffered an extended era of neglect and, despite periodic visits from August Bournonville from the late 1930s to the 1860s, it languished in the shadow of his Royal Danish Ballet. A turning point was the arrival in 1913 of Michel Fokine, whose productions of Les Sylphides and other ballets hurtled the troupe into the twentieth century.

Among those inspired by the Russian choreographer was Jean Borlin, a talented dancer who created his earliest solos under Fokine's tutelage. In 1920, when Rolf de Mare, a wealthy Swedish collector, formed the Paris-based Ballets Suedois ("Swedish Ballet"), Borlin became the star and resident choreographer of this lively avant-garde company. Like Borlin, most of the dancers, including Carina Ari and Jenny Hasselquist, came from the Royal Swedish Ballet. It took decades for the troupe to recover from the massive hemorrhage of talent.

At the helm from 1953 to 1962, British-born Mary Skeaping worked like a dynamo to restore the company to health. With Sadler's Wells as her model, she stocked the repertory with nineteenth-century classics and important modem works, including George Balanchine's Symphony in C and The Four Temperaments, Leonide Massine's Le Sacre du Printemps, and Antony Tudor's Dark Elegies. (Tudor later created Echoing of Trumpets for the company.) She commissioned works from Birgit Cullberg and other Swedish choreographers, produced The Stone Flower by the Kirov's Yuri Grigorovich, and, inspired by the history that surrounded her, re-created many court ballets and eighteenth-century works.

Erik Bruhn's appointment as artistic director brought American choreographers to the fore. Jerome Robbins staged Les Noces in 1969; the following year Jose Limon set There Is a Time, The Exiles, and Missa Brevis; Glen Tetley, Ricercare; and Dennis Nahat, Brahms Quintet and Process (Ontogeny). During this period, Bruhn added Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet to the company's repertory of full-lengths, produced Balanchine's Serenade, and himself staged Bournonville's Pas de Six from Napoli.

When Swedish choreographer Ivo Cramer became director (1975-80), interest shifted to the continent. He gave Jiri Kylian his first assignment outside of the Netherlands Dance Theater and brought John Cranko's Onegin into the repertory. Under his successors, "classics" (Rudolf Nureyev's Don Quixote, Natalia Makarova's La Bayadere, Frederick Ashton's Cinderella, MacMillan's Manon,) shared the boards with "contemporary" works (John Neumeier's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Peer Gynt; Choo-San Goh's Configurations; William Forsythe's In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated; Ulysses Dove's Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven) and ballets by various Swedish choreographers. It was a fantastic repertory--on paper--but since few works outlived the tenure of the artistic director who commissioned them, there was little continuity on which to build a tradition or forge the distinctive identity of a major company.

Frank Andersen, its director since 1995, is determined to put the Royal Swedish Ballet on the map. Although born and trained in nearby Denmark, he knew "surprisingly little" about the company before he took the job. Why this should be so is what intrigued him. Since the dancers were good, why had the company been overlooked? We are sitting in his tiny office at the Swedish Royal Opera. An engaging man with an impish grin and the energy of a twenty-five-year-old, Anderson speaks fluent if slightly idiosyncratic English. "We have some talent here, which not many people know about. And that I intend to do something about." During a ten-year stint as head of the Royal Danish Ballet, he had organized a Bournonville festival that brought critics to Copenhagen from all over Europe and North America. Perhaps he could perform a similar feat in Stockholm. So the idea of the RSB 225th Jubilee Festival was born.