DANCE : An August Body : The Royal Danish Ballet keeps alive the Bournonville tradition, resisting the idea of modernizing his Romantic works

COPENHAGEN —  “Not For Pleasure Alone .” Emblazoned in block letters above the proscenium of the antique, intimate, red-plush, gold and cream Royal Theater, these words seem excessively stern for the home of the Royal Danish Ballet, a company renowned throughout the dance world for effervescence and charm.

Nevertheless, the motto underscores the moral vision shaping the company’s most beloved repertory. It also suggests the serious (though not solemn) approach of an event that drew 150 international ballet critics--plus company directors and other dance VIPs--to Copenhagen this spring: the second Bournonville Festival.

Prized chiefly for their combination of choreographic intricacy and nostalgic sweetness, the ballets of August Bournonville (1805-79) form the largest body of 19th-Century classicism existing in any condition the original choreographers might recognize. However, unlike the much-revised Russian classics, they remain rooted in pantomime and social portraiture, resisting attempts to modernize their world view or turn them into choreographic abstractions.

“Bournonville today is four things: a school, a repertory, a style and a problem,” wrote young critic Alexander Meinertz recently in a Danish newspaper. Earlier, he had isolated that problem in a review of the flawed 1991 Royal Danish production of Bournonville’s “A Folk Tale,” which featured sets and costumes by none other than Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II:

“It’s Danish, cute and lovely,” Meinertz said, “but, as with most Bournonville, there’s a problem presenting that to contemporary audiences.” Picture a ballerina in a long, white tutu with wings on her back, holding a bird’s nest--or a danseur whacking a tambourine before he takes a soaring jump straight at the audience, arms spread wide. That’s Bournonville, right?

Not entirely. By presenting nearly all of the choreographer’s surviving works in an eight-day marathon, Bournonville Festival II augmented these images with a host of others: Viking gods, troll vixens, flirtatious Latinas, Arabian knights and even a couple of philandering Danes in military uniform.

Moreover, it supplemented the performances with citywide festival activities designed to take audiences deeper into Bournonville’s world--to prove he created his ballets not for pleasure alone. More than once, these sideshows eclipsed the main event, revealing a Bournonville committed to ideas that can’t be found in many current productions of his ballets.

At the museum named for sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen and housing his works, an exhibition linked Bournonville to the other major Danish artists of his day, including his friend Hans Christian Andersen. Panels and lectures at the University of Copenhagen, along with two newly published books, discussed Bournonville’s thematic and technical priorities, occasionally unveiling intense controversies about his creative intentions.

The Museum of Decorative Art (in the building where Bournonville was born) focused its Bournonville exhibit on “Napoli,” his most popular ballet, and, in particular, on Northern Europe’s obsession with the fabled eroticism and danger of Italy. In turn, these issues were reflected onstage in the ambitious 150th-anniversary staging of “Napoli,” which premiered the day before the festival opened.

This “Napoli” is part revival, part reconstruction, an attempt to strengthen the ballet’s central conflict by restoring passages deleted and sometimes forgotten over the years. It is scheduled for its American premiere on Tuesday as the opening ballet in a seven-performance, all-Bournonville engagement at the Orange County Performing Arts Center (the company’s first Southern California appearance in 27 years).

With their depiction of lusty Neapolitan fisherfolk, the first and third acts of “Napoli” have suffered only a little from the attrition that has left the second act something of an empty shell. Set in Capri’s Blue Grotto, Act 2 shows the lovers Gennaro and Teresina facing supernatural dangers and affirming the faith that should be the ballet’s central theme.

Beyond merely restaging this act, Dinna Bjoern has choreographed its lost dances in Bournonville style to reclaim its function as the equivalent of the pivotal “white acts” in “Giselle,” “Swan Lake” and Bournonville’s own “La Sylphide.”

In a lecture-demonstration at the tiny court theater in Christiansborg Castle, Bjoern explained that Bournonville’s writings led her to make the Grotto a place of dreamlike sensuality where Teresina is seduced (rather than trapped) into becoming a Nai ad. This watery realm of sensation and forgetfulness should form a potent contrast with the social and religious conventions of bright, workaday Naples.

But does it? Reviewing this “Napoli” in the newspaper Politiken, veteran Danish critic Ebbe Moerch praised it as “the best Bournonville production in many years” but admitted that “one cringes over the costumes of the Nai ads and Tritons (in Act 2). The girls are decked out in heavy, wet (?) wigs, and the men have glued-on beards and fish-scales in their hair. . . . It is clumsy and ugly.” So much for seaside eroticism.

Even ignoring Soeren Frandsen’s designs, festival audiences found the intended playoff between volatile Catholic peasants and carnal sea sprites sometimes countermanded by casting. At the premiere, for instance, Nikolaj Hubbe brought so much sexual intensity to the role of Gennaro that Naples, not Capri, became Ground Zero for sensuality--but who’d complain?

Two days later, however, the boyish-unto-virginal Gennaro of American principal Lloyd Riggins helped make a compelling case for Bjoern’s dichotomy. Innocence or experience: Take your pick.

The performances by Hubbe and Riggins not only demonstrated the wide interpretive latitude of major Bournonville roles, but also embodied the tension between preserving Bournonville tradition and extending it that preoccupies the members of this company from Artistic Director Frank Andersen on down.

“Tradition. You never know if it’s your enemy or your friend,” says Hubbe with a Gioconda smile. He can afford to be philosophical: After the company returns to Copenhagen from the two-city American tour, he joins New York City Ballet.

To company principal Alexander Koelpin, however, “it’s very hard to conserve the (Bournonville) tradition. It’s not just a matter of doing the steps right--we have to give it some of ourselves. We have to say, ‘This is my contribution to--let’s say--James (in “La Sylphide”).’ It’s a matter of flair, of feeling, of having the heart for it. Then it becomes Bournonville.”

Koelpin and Hubbe were the young lions of the 1988 Royal Danish visit to North America, but right now Koelpin remains sidelined with the latest in a series of major injuries: a split kneecap. With no immediate need to promote either himself or the company, he’s willing to talk about the dark side of the Bournonville heritage:

“Sometimes we can suffer from all this tradition,” he says. “It becomes so historically correct, it has nothing to do with impulse and expression and love. To be kept alive as an artist, you need the creative part of the brain, not just the part that keeps the steps in order.”

Koelpin says company officials have sometimes ordered him to eliminate ideas and feelings from an interpretation when they weren’t accepted as part of the tradition of dancing that role.

“I’m so sick and tired of hearing ‘It’s always been done like this,’ ” he declares. “There’ll always be 10 Bournonville experts in the house, and they’ll always have 10 different opinions.”

Caught in the middle of the debate: Lloyd Riggins, who grew up in Orlando, Fla., training with his mother and uncle at Southern Ballet Theater, the company they founded. In 1986, he went to a Bournonville workshop in Michigan and, at 16, was given an invitation to study in Copenhagen.

He went for three weeks the following year and was offered a contract, rising quickly through the ranks to become the youngest principal dancer in Royal Danish history. Eventually the company offered his childhood sweetheart a contract too, and they will soon celebrate their first anniversary.

Sounds perfect, but even those Danes who consider Bournonville hopelessly old-fashioned guard his heritage jealously. Riggins remembers participating in lecture-demonstrations after he joined the company and being asked why he took a job that should have gone to a Dane. “My first review said that even though I came from Florida, I danced well,” he recalls.

Riggins is slender, fair and blessed with a free-floating jump that seems to come from nowhere. He says he didn’t try to judge Danish ballet traditions right away: “All I did was try to find out about them.” Now, however, he believes that “foreigners may have provided a new kind of light on a tradition in danger of getting stale.”

In Bournonville’s “Far From Denmark,” 132 years of tradition mandates nappy wigs and blackface for the dancers cast as comic servants--and that’s exactly what you see onstage at the Royal Theater in 1992. But Riggins, who wants to direct a company after his dancing career ends, believes the ballet can easily lose its minstrel-show trappings. “Maybe it’s time to redo them (the black servants) and make them (non-black) little old men,” he says dryly.

Riggins is happy that the Royal Danish Ballet normally dances a wide range of contemporary choreography--with a special emphasis on the work of expatriate American John Neumeier. (A Neumeier festival is planned for 1996.) But he credits the Bournonville repertory and style with developing him as an artist. “Doing the choreography produces its own dancers,” he explains.

“The style makes you look pleasant and relaxed. It conveys ease, not flash. You can try to dance bigger, mime bigger, but it wouldn’t be true to the style. A lot of people try too hard in getting the style. It’s a matter of simplifying.”

Riggins has now danced in all the surviving or reconstructed Bournonville ballets and divertissements with male roles. He’s even earned approval in Bournonville parts dominated by mime, though he acknowledges that “the naturalness of the mime was difficult at first.”

Nevertheless, as a non-Dane, Riggins labels himself “the freak of the festival,” which might be just another way of saying that he defies the rule that only Danes look comfortable in Bournonville.

That rule received double validation during the closing gala of the festival when Georgian ballerina Nina Ananiashvili of the Bolshoi and Argentine virtuoso Julio Bocca of American Ballet Theatre appeared with Danish partners in showpiece Bournonville pas de deux.

Both these international stars had previously danced with the company, and Ananiashvili, in particular, looked well coached and in perfect technical command for the “Flower Festival” duet opposite Hubbe.

However, such stylistic trademarks as “Russian arms” called attention to her for all the wrong reasons in a version of the “Napoli” finale that enlisted the full company, plus stellar guests, and ended with a dress parade of Bournonville characters.

As for Bocca, the brilliantly sharp footwork he brought to the “William Tell” pas de deux upheld his reputation, but his interplay with the sunny Heidi Ryom looked forced and his approach to Bournonville style painfully stiff. In the “Napoli” euphoria, he sank without a trace.

Since the first Bournonville Festival in 1979, Copenhagen audiences have seen a number of important new productions of his ballets, including reconstructions of works assumed lost. However, the unexpected hit of the 1992 event turned out to be a revival of the late Hans Brenaa’s 1979 staging of “Kermesse in Bruges,” an uproarious genre piece about family loyalties, magic and the power of dancing.

Many of the festival’s happiest discoveries turned up in this picaresque 1851 romp, starting with 19-year-old Johan Kobborg, claiming a role Ib Andersen used to own; Hubbe, again, in a majestic partnership with the statuesque Silja Schandorff; Lis Jeppesen, the company’s exquisite lyric ballerina of the 1980s, now exulting in a spitfire role. And, finally, Kirsten Simone, great international star of the 1960s, gloriously lovesick as a rich, high-class widow held spellbound by a yokel.

Simone entered the Royal Danish Ballet school in 1945 and joined the company itself seven years later. At 57, she plays a wide range of mime roles, including Madge in “La Sylphide.” And she discusses changes in the company’s approach to Bournonville with no false reverence for the past.

“It always changes as times change,” she says. “People see Bournonville with new eyes and look at it from different angles instead of doing an old thing the old way. It freshens it and keeps it alive.

“Harald Lander (director, 1932-51) tried to shorten the ballets. Now they try to find what was cut and put it back. I think it’s a good idea. Henning Kronstam (director, 1979-85) and Frank Andersen do more Bournonville than Lander or Flemming Flindt (director, 1966-78).”

Although she left an indelible stamp on steamy modern roles (among them Carmen and Miss Julie), Simone approves of the renewed Royal Danish emphasis on Bournonville.

“I love all his Romantic ballets, and I think we are the company in the world that does him best,” she says.

“All the dancers nowadays have more technique than they had before, but you cannot change the steps. We try very much to keep the tradition. It goes on from generation to generation.”

And how does she explain the continuing fascination with a choreographer born at the beginning of the 19th Century and very much of his time?

“Because the world as it is now can sometimes be very cruel,” she answers. “Because it’s wonderful to see something that you can believe in, that shows you the world is good.” And maybe because art that endures always exists not for pleasure alone.

* ROYAL DANISH GUARD

The Royal Danish’s artistic director, Frank Andersen, sees himself as a guardian of tradition who must steer the company back to its roots. An interview, Page 74.