Anne

Yesterday the Danish theatrical Award "Reumert", named after the late, famous Danish actor Poul Reumert, were given, and Alban Lendorf received once again the prestigious award "Dancer of the Year" (he also won it in 2012). He was given the award for three different performances at the RDB: Come Fly Away (Hank), Grand Pas Classique and Manon (Des Grieux).

Benita Bünger, a "home grown" talent from the RDB's own school, got one of the 10 talent prizes. She is new in the company, but had a very convincing start as Betty in Come Fly Away where she made a charming couple with Charles Andersen. Benita Bünger joined the corps in 2012 after two years apprenticeship.

Congratulations to both of them!

Thank you so much for your help, Helene!

The telecompany has also made a poster version for the papers of the commercial. I have tried to find a way to upload it to the site, but I can't find out how. Can anyone help? - maybe there is already a guide on the site, but I haven't been able to find it.

[Edited by Helene to add poster]

He doesn't say much of importance, really, but you are right, Helen, about his speaking with his girlfriend (or wife - I don't know).

She says that she's sorry she cannot attend the performance tonight, and he answers that it's okay, it doesn't matter, and that he is just about to perform. Then she asks how the interview earlier today went. He says it went okay, and then she asks what kind of questions he got. Alban tells that he was asked how it felt to be "flying". "And what did you answer?" "That it hurts like hell". After some laughing he says, that now is the time to go on stage and they say goodbye and see you later.The commercial concludes with the slogan: Many things get much easier if you can share them with somebody.

They have made a similar Commercial with a Danish boxer.

Alban Lendorf stars in a new commercial for a big Danish telecommunications company. Watch the commercial here

With Hübbe's new production of La Sylphide we'll now have three of Bournonville's greater ballets (Napoli and A Folk Tale are the other two) in his own staging, all modernized versions. In the national paper Jyllands Posten Hübbe tells, that he is going to give this new La Sylphide a homo-erotic touch: "In that way the story makes more sense to me. Some people say that James is confronted with the choice between reason and art, but if the choice were also about gender identity, it would add another layer to the story." And he continues: "Some of the prim theater goers will probably get a little chock".

I can't help getting a bit tired of stagers, who always feel an urge to read their own ideas into non-contemporary works of art, either by transferring the setting to another era or by changing the fundamental ideas of the piece. Of the greater Bournonville ballets in a staging true to the original (as far as this is possible) we now have only Ib Andersen's version of The Kermes of Bruges left, but strangely enogh this version hasn't reappeared since its premiere in 2012 and will not in the next season either, so it looks.

They don't all have to be presented in a traditional way, but I think it is a pity to eliminate the originals totally from the repertoire in Bournonville's own house.

As it is now, it is too much Hübbe and too little Bournonville.

Tuesday night The Royal Danish Theater launched their new project: live transmissions to 31 cinemas all over the country. Bournonville's "Napoli" had the honour of being the very first in a hopefully long row of transmissions. Next time will not be until the season 2014-15 and the project will include both ballet, opera and theatre.

Tuesday's premiere was a very mixed experience. On the positive side: sound and picture were of an astonishingly high quality! The pictures had a depth and sharpness which I have hardly seen before. Apart from that I really can't think of anything favourable to say about the way the transmission was made: It was deeply frustrating to watch! And here I'm only talking about the camera work, not about the performance in itself or the dancers.

The intention has clearly been to make a kind of movie out of the ballet: The camera is much more concerned about the story than about the dance. In act 3, where you finally get a lot of dance you don't see half of it because the camera is much more in love with the people watching the dance. Furthermore they switch camera angle every 5 seconds, which apart from being hard on your eye muscles often goes straight against the phrasing of the music and the flow of the dance.

Camera men these days seem to love close-ups, or at least they want to focus on only one person at a time. I'm totally aware of, that in a ballet like Napoli you have to make a choice: there are a million stories going on at the same time, especially in act 1, and neither the eye nor the camera is capable of of capturing them all. But after 20 minutes of faces and upper bodies filling out most of the screen you actually yearn for a zoom-out!

Neither the mime nor the make-up are made for a close-up, and a kiss on stage is simply better from a distance than in a long and insisting zoom-in, where you get painfully aware of the dancers' struggle not to make a smear of their make-up. The narrow framing of the dancers has the further effect that their heads are bobbing out of the picture all the time.

Act 2 is getting far better off than the two framing acts, mainly because the story is simpler and more focused. It is actually breathtakingly beautyfull to watch, no matter whether you like the idea of Hübbe's new staging or not!

If they are going to make a dvd out of this, I hope they have some more footage they can piece together to a more coherent whole and to make justice to the dance which was rather stepmotherly treated!

I found out that they have the film in Forum des Images in Paris:

Link

These are great news indeed! Thank you for posting it, Jane.

Congratulations to principal Mads Blangstrup, who is 40 today!

The only sad implication is that 40 is the retirement age in the RDB, and it is therefore his last season with the company. He has sadly enough refused to have a farewell performance, and so last chance to see this beautiful and elegant dancer is right now in MacMillan's "Manon", where he dances the part of Monsieur G.M. During the last couple of years he has excelled in character roles, some of them more dubious characters where he uses his beautiful, princely looks to a most distracting effect, for example as the teacher in "The Lesson", Hr. Mogens in "A Folk Tale", Tybalt in "Romeo and Juliet", and now as Monsieur G.M. in "Manon".

Hopefully the theater will find a way of using his obvious acting abilities and radiant stage presence in the future!

Thank you for posting the many videoclips, Amy. I was quite fascinated by the one with the title "Le Musicien dans la cité". It lead on to another clip from the same film, which also thrilled me terribly. He could walk in a strangely weightless way, like he was treading on air. I tried to look the title up, but couldn't find much about it, neither about the film itself nor about the filmmaker Roger Kahane.

Does any one know something about it? Can one get to see the film in it's full length somewhere?

We had no problems with neither ratio nor transmission, it only had tiny tiny stops which the eye hardly registered. It is a great idea to transmit these sessions, only should they advertise them better. I hope they will do more of this kind in future.

I think as a programme it had too much talking in it, especially in the beginning where the retelling of the story would take no end (and I wonder if a Danish audience actually understands English to that extent). But I shall not complain: they were extremely generous with the dance excertps! I was especially surprised they had called in all the men for the big scene in act two where Manon is handed round like a delicious "dish".

You are right about Lendorf. He has the right adagio qualities for Des Grieux and also the right temperament, I think. I'm rather curious to see, if Alexandra Lo Sardo will be able to create a three dimensional character out of Manon. She is not one of my favorite dancers. Though technically a really able and refined dancer, she still has to prove to me that she can express anything deeper than sweetness or temper. Her dance has until now come over to me as very unpersonal, as if she is not really there. What we saw yesterday was, however, quite promissing in that respect.

Thank you for letting us know! I hadn't noticed if it wasn't for your message here on the board, even though I'm looking almost daily at the homepage of the RDB. I came home from Copenhagen just half an hour before it started, so it was pure luck!

Do you know anything about this Karl Burnett, who is doing the staging? I can't find anything about him, neither in my books, nor in the internet.

Yes, I think you are right! That is also what popped up first in my memory, but I couldn't find documentation anywhere.

Talking about ballet stamps (sorry if i'm going a bit off topic here!): We also had a ballet stamp, or rather two in 2005. The occasion was the bicentenary of Bournonville's birth. You can find them here:

http://frimaerker.ptt-museum.dk/frimaerke/1417/dk-1434

I know for sure that male dancer in the blue one is Thomas Lund (Napoli), but I have forgotten who the couple is on the yellow one (A Folk Tale - you can see the golden cup in her hand). My best guess is that it is Gudrun Bojesen and Kenneth Greve/Mads Blangstrup. Also, who are the two dancers, posing on each side of the stamps? I think the male one is Nicolaj Hansen, also a fine Bournonville dancer, but I'm not sure about the woman. Can anyone help?

Margrethe Schanne was the motive on a postage stamp to celebrate the tenth Ballet Festival in 1959. The stamp can be seen here: http://frimaerker.ptt-museum.dk/frimaerke/437/dk-0438

By the way: I'm afraid one of the pictures in the picture slide show mentioned by Jane Simpson above is not of Schanne. I might be wrong, but I think pucture no. 5, the one in the Spanish looking costume, is of Margot Lander.

Barbara, you are right about the name of the female dancer! It was definateley Xiomara Reyes. I just checked and thereby stumbled over this clip on youtube from the applause after their performance of Sleeping Beauty:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD05yE81Utg

Sorry about that! It was naïve of me to think the internet was accessible from everywhere in the world.

Actually what Lendorf says about his future plans is all rather vague. But at a point he says that for the time being he definately wants to stay in Denmark, or at least keep Denmark as his permanent base from which he can take trips out into the world. Nikolaj Hübbe seems to be rather liberal about letting his dancers have time free to get out and get experience from other companies and other parts of the world, where they have a different kind of tradition and dance culture. Maybe that's a wise way to keep people in the house in stead of forcing them to make a choice by limiting them.

I suppose it can be a very sound experience to try out other companies, it might make you more conscious about what is specific about the style you were brought up with. And for a dancer of Lendorf's caliber it is also healthy to meet other top dancers and get challenged in a way he might not be at home - or at least in other ways than he is used to. In the documentary you follow him, among other things, when he is a guest dancer with the ABT, and it is funny to see his reaction, when he suddenly has to cope with the speediness of a female cuban dancer (I forgot her name, sorry).

Yes, he is indeed a very eyecatching and brilliant dancer. I happened to see him a couple of days ago when he starred as the Cavalier of the Sugar Plum Fairy in Balanchine's Nutcracker on the RDB's tour in Aarhus. He is a very welcome addition to the rank of soloists and fits in well stylistically with the company. And it looks like he is good at partnering as well.

The Danish television channel DR k broadcasts a short documentary about Alban Lendorf tonight at 0.25-0.55 (Danish time!). It is possible to Watch it directly, e.g. live, if you click on to the channels homepage, as they stream all their programs:

http://www.dr.dk/tv/live/dr-k

The name of the programme is "Ballettens Laudrup: Et portræt af Alban Lendorf". (Laudrup is a very famous Danish footballplayer!)

I'm afraid it is all in Danish, but maybe it can be worthwhile seeing anyway because of the dance-clips.

One of the main topics in the documnetary is whether Alban will go for an internatinal career or whether he will stay with the Royal Danish Ballet, where he was "brought up". Ballet master Nikolaj Hübbe is also interviewed about this.

The Danish paper "Weekendavisen" brought an interview with Thomas Lund last Friday under the headline" Triumph For a Masterpiece". Lund has been in Vienna to stage Harald Lander's "Etudes" with the Vienna Opera Ballet". He has done it twice before, once with the RDB in 2010 together with Nikolaj Hübbe and Lander's widow Lise Lander, and again in 2012 with the Boston Ballet. The ambition for their version was to scrape off the many layers of use and tighten it up musically and stylistically.

Lund tells (in my translation): "We stayed a week with Lise Lander in her wonderful place in the south of France. Harald Lander in his time entrusted her with the management of his artistic heritage, and he taught her to understand the dance from inside. Lise has taken part in most of the productions all over the world. She knows everything even though she has never been a dancer herself. She has the final say. When we visited her in 2010, we viewed 12-15 versions: from the 1969 television-version, which was produced by Lander himself, till newer versions from Paris, Boston, The Royal Danish Theatre [e.g. the RDB], the St Petersburg-version from 2010 etc. Even though the work is laid down to some extent, a ballet remains a living organism. There are always small details, which can be discussed. We dug into things like style, technique, timing, pauses, lighting, scenography, costumes, headpieces – and we listened to tempi. Completely down to the nerdy level."

About the the collaboration with Manuel Legris, former star dancer of the POB (a company who has its own history with "Etudes" because Lander mounted it there, when he was maitre de ballet at this company from 1956-63), now head of the Vienna State Ballet, Lund says following: "Manuel Legris, who has his French eyes on the work, has also been both an inspiration and a help. This meeting of the French and the Danish gives some special finer points. […] It is as if one here in Vienna see a melting together of Danish and French traditions, and with a company of brilliant dancers, of whom many come from Russia. […] This mixture is somewhat different from what we had in Boston, where the more physical – american – approach dominated."

"Etudes" was premiered on the 15th of December and will run again in February.

Congratulations to all three of them! I am especially pleased by the promotion of Gregory Dean. He really deserves this. He is a dancer who has developed enormously during the last 2-3 years, and it has been great to be able to follow his growth, seeing how he has risen to every challenge he has been given. In his case it looks like Hübbe has understood to give him exactly the right challenges at exactly the right time.

Jane Simpson has now reviewed Come Fly Away in dancetabs.Click here for the review.

She also reviews the new show for children by the Royal Danish Ballet School, The Fable Maker, which sounds like a true hit!

Oh yes, Ib Andersen, Arne Villumsen and Lindberg were marvelous dancers too, and Villumsen and Hindberg made a wonderful couple on stage: They suited each other very well, both of them dancers of a certain stature and both of them rather powerful without being heavy. And they were both extremely good looking, in a very natural way!

Yes it’s funny how the boundaries are constantly pushed: what was difficult ten or twenty years ago might not be difficult today.

You mention the Pacific Northwest Ballet. I saw them in 2002 in London, where they had brought their Jerome Kern programme "Silver Lining" to the Saddler's Wells. From your description it sounds like the company has quite a tradition of doing this kind of semi-modern chorerography? I wasn't so impressed by the choreography of Silver Lining (I think it was by the company's director Kent Stowell). It was charming but to mine eyes not very inventive. I think Tharp is much more genuine in her choreographic language, but my view might be influenced by my disliking of show dance in point shoes. I quite fell in love though with the dancers of the PNB back then, I especially remember dancers like Stanko Milov, Olivier Wevers and Paul Gibson, the latter I liked for his Gene Kelly-like way of dancing, but in general I liked the marked individuality of the dancers, especially among the male dancers.