"The Lesson," "La Sylphide"
Royal Danish Ballet
David H. Koch Theater
New York, N.Y.
June 17, 2011
By Carol Pardo
Copyright ©2011 by Carol Pardo
The Royal Danish Ballet ended its American tour with Nikolaj Hübbe’s reassuring staging of "La Sylphide." No tussles with religion. No Vespa. Just Bournonville’s genius shining through unencumbered. What a relief. What a pleasure.
Like Bojeson, Ulrik Birkkjær revealed his James immediately, playing out his fate consistently, inexorably leading to tragedy. This James was forceful and head-strong, running from his home with the sylph as if shot from a cannon, no looking back, and arriving in her domain intoxicated with wonder. The broad outlines of the part are in place. Birkkjær, young and new to the part, needs to add detail and texture, to color between the lines.
The role of Madge, the witch and puppeteer who orchestrates the destruction of the Sylph and James, was entrusted to Sorella Englund. Englund is a dance actor who can raise her hand and spread her fingers to reveal that they are knife blades. One gesture can suggest many different sources and meanings. In her instructions to James on the handling of the fatal scarf, Madge indicates that he will be able to take his elusive beloved in his arms and, demonstrating, wraps her arms around herself. The force and grandeur of that embrace resonate with self-regard which, when underestimated or wounded, retaliates with vengeance. But woven into it too are passion, memory and regret for a lost love, possibly James himself. All that from one gesture. The development of dancers from neophyte, to consummate dance actress, to senior actress dancer of genius, personified by this cast, reminds us of another reason we love the Danes.
My only quibble is with the sets by Mikael Melbye. The front cloth, a view of the sky looking up through a grove of lilacs, telegraphs the distance between the earthbound and aerial realms and the desire to transcend it, perfectly in tune with the ballet. The curtain rises to reveal that James lives in the apse of a Gothic church, all ogival windows and high ceilings. The sylph’s glade is out of 1930’s Americana with each striation of tree bark accounted for. James’ home is full of air. He leaves it for a world weighed down by realism and detail. The magic has to come solely from Bournonville and the dancers. Happily, it does.
Flemming Flindt’s "The Lesson" has its origins in Ionesco’s eponymous play, its setting neatly and convincingly shifted from a mathematician’s study to a ballet studio plot intact. This performance was led by Mads Blangstrup as the ballet master, Mette Bøtcher as the pianist (in place of Ionesco’s maid) and Alexandra Lo Sardo as the ballet student who meets her end at his hands at the barre. This pianist, her hair parted dead center and pulled into a bun at her nape, looks like a dancer. Her fascination with pointe shoes stems from a repressed or unrealized passion for dance or her own failure at becoming a dancer. Playing the piano in a ballet studio, even one run by a psychopath, is, for her, the next best thing. This is not, perhaps, the standard interpretation, but it works. Mads Blangstrup, tall, blond usually the noble prince, is all but unrecognizable as a baby-faced killer. Both dancers have created valid convincing characters. But those characters don’t travel through Ionesco’s or Flindt’s dramatic arc. Both are unglued from the beginning; they’ve no place to go. Alexandra Lo Sordo’s student is similarly monochromatic, so enamored of dancing that she’s oblivious to all else. "The Lesson" may be a national treasure in Denmark, but elsewhere it has to earn its stripes, its story developed in full.
Photograph: Gudrun Boejesen in "La Sylphide"; photograph by Martin Mydskov Ronne