On Dance

...No formal dancing came until the end, when the denouement was brought about by festivities that included a flurry of the folk pieces Bournonville so loved to incorporate into his works, and a set of divertissements as charmingly irrelevant as any that ever graced a classical ballet...

...Some families have performed with the company for generations, passing down the valued precepts of the Danish Ballet...

...Continuous processionals wove across the proscenium, breaking into groups of antique card-players, boisterous spinsters and flirting young lovers...

...Indeed, if viewers of the opulent, and expensive attractions offered by Hurok at the Metropolitan expected to be dazzled by performers as overbearing as the setting, they were disappointed...

...In addition, their soft-pedaling of the star system probably puzzled those who consider the mere presence of such international luminaries as Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov more important than the vehicles they appear in...

...In 10 vignettes, performed to a lulling rock score, avarice and brutality had their mild day...

...Flemming Ryberg's beautifully defined arms and his eagerness came into full play, and fleeting glimpses of Ib Anderson reinforced the impression that he is one of the best of the younger dancers...

...They are pupils of the company-affiliated school where Hans Christian Anderson once studied, and where they can perform onstage from their earliest training...

...Through the furor, it startles with its timeliness...

...While dance was long an art in need of proselytization, this season companies have rushed to performance like lemmings and overwhelmed dancegoers have been hard-put to keep pace...

...One pleasure of the Danish appearances, in fact, lies in watching for the youngest dancers to reemerge as full-fledged company members, and several former aspirants did so this season...

...The repertory was completed by John Neumeier's elegantly staged Romeo and Juliet, a coltish Roland Petit Carmen and a surprisingly dimly danced Etudes, Harald Lander's excursion from student exercise to bravura ballet...

...The disappointment was Triumph of Death...

...But only a few familiar and welloved faces were on hand, including Henning Kronstam and Kirsten Simone...

...The most riveting performance, though, came from Niels Kehlet...

...Both the dance audience in general and those Danish admirers who are said to urge an updating of technique and repertory would be wise to listen to a quiet warning made by Auguste Bournonville...

...First presented in 1871 and set—as are La Sylphide and Napoli—to music by Danish composers of the period, Guards was a delight of an order seldom available here...

...Because much of the repertory was familiar, the highlights of the engagement were the Bournonville dances—The Guards of Amager, La Sylphide and Napoli...

...The small but devoted cadre of younger fans promptly adopted new favorites...

...Yet it may be that the lukewarm reception accorded them was also partly a result of satiety...

...It created a genuinely Danish air of intimacy in the cavernous Metropolitan...

...Villumsen, merely one of several talented men in the corps, was not pushed forward after his enthusiastic reception...

...And I think the reasons for the guarded and somewhat perplexed reaction to one of the most interesting companies performing today tell us something about the present state of dance in New York...

...No one seemed upset at the absence of dance in Triumph...

...Of greatest interest, though, is the special piquancy of the Danish style, characterized by lightness, speed, precision, and mercurial changes of direction...

...But Martins, a leading dancer with the New York City Ballet and a product of rigorous Danish training, is cool, Apollonian near-perfection...

...Peter Martins did appear several times with the RDB as a guest star...

...The stage teemed with vivacious and brightly costumed villagers of all ages, sulky maidens and staunchly handsome home guardsmen, around whose presumed infidelity the ballet is based...

...Even the promised nudity was minimal: There were only four nudes in sight, three of them women who flung themselves about with a childish enthusiasm that robbed the work of any shock value it might have produced...

...Among the women, Linda Hind-berg and Eva Kloberg shone, but, in a tradition where male dancers are all-important, the men shone the brightest...

...True, the Danes were seen in the wrong house and New Yorkers are not accustomed to their style...

...There was also to be nudity on the Metropolitan stage, in The Triumph of Death, director Flemming Flindt's vision of the cataclysm...

...Flindt's new Four Seasons, a full-company, pure dance piece set to Vivaldi, was far more inventive, and it ably set forth the most interesting qualities of the lead dancers...

...Despite the fact that Danish Ballet was different from anything the current "ballet boom" generation of dancegoers had seen, however, the engagement proved to be a financial failure...

...One wonders, too, if dance's new, marketable popularity may in the end exclude exquisite oddities like the Royal Danish Ballet...

...Feet are particularly well-articulated and pointwork is unassertive...

...nevertheless, it consisted of one long unwinding of such tired personages as worldly priests, rich hypochondriacs, rag-pickers, storm troopers, and a tall, sleek, blond death dressed in a flowing black plastic Dracula cape?with little dance to be found...

...On Dance something fresh from denmark BY JENNIFER DUNNING The Royal Danish Ballet's three-week appearance promised to be one of the highlights of the Hurok Organization's dance marathon at the Metropolitan Opera House...

...A dancer since 1957, in energy and attack he remains superior to any of his juniors...

...It was to offer a repertory that included three carefully preserved works by Auguste Bournonville, the 19th-century choreographer and teacher who developed the Danes' unique idiomatic style...

...New York wanted blood-and-thunder, not the best champagne...

...It received a particularly well-danced performance from Peter Martins—although he was a shade too elegant to be a believable Scottish farmer—and from Sorella Englund as the touching, feather-light sylph who enchants him...

...Children dashed through the crowds, leaving their games to join the elders in sporadic social dancing...

...As performed by Vivi Flindt—who danced the wife with poignant dignity—and Kronstam—her ironic, philandering husband—Guards was like a mute opera, spilling over with such life as to push beyond the limits of the stage space...

...But it was Napoli that emerged as the signature work of the engagement, no matter how shaded by time the Bournonvillian nuances may have become...

...While one would have also liked to see a 1786 work by Vincenzo Galeotti that the Danes perform—the oldest ballet still offered in its original production—as well as other, less familiar Bournonville works, they doubtless would have been mere historical curiosities to a dance public weaned from the ballet's original mime tradition...

...The production of La Sylphide was faster-paced than the American Ballet Theater version New York is familiar with...

...It is the mission of art," he wrote, "and especially the theater to stimulate the mind, elevate the soul and refresh the senses...

...For audiences used to the exhilaratingly pure, technically brilliant neo-classical choreography of George Balanchine, the Danes' program of thematic or story ballets must have seemed to contain a frivolously insufficient amount of dancing...

...The jaunty Johnny Eliasen, and the exuberant Arne Bech and Frank Anderson were a joy to watch...

...Dancing above all should therefore be careful not to flatter a sophisticated public's love of sensation which is foreign to true art...

...Dancers tend to look alike these days...

...The ballet owes something in conception to Kurt Jooss, a German choreographer of the 1940s noted for his dance dramas, but it does not owe enough...

...Performers are either soloists or members of the corps de ballet, with the second category embracing both rising young stars and fine, older dance-mimes...

...Whether tearing across the stage with stylish abandon, looking at times like a scruffy terrier chasing a prize catch, or sinking into madness as the homicidal ballet teacher in The Lesson, he was the star of the starless Danish season...

...The present troupe ranges from veteran dancers, who fill the smallest of mime roles with detail and conviction, to the "ballet children," a dozen of whom performed here...

...Emphasis is placed on the line of the arms and shoulders and on an open upper torso...

...the Danes, by contrast, reveal a vitality and humanity that makes them individuals...

...The Guards of Amager is a complicated tale based to some extent on real characters and situations in Copenhagen in the opening decade of the 19th century...

...Dancers darted about a stage crowded with more festive villagers (this time of early 19th-century Naples) and performed variations that etched the choreographer's clear designs in space...

...The city struggled to make a celebrity of young Arne Villumsen, who startled the opening night audience with his dark good looks and bounding, beautifully finished solo in La Sylphide...

...There are small, buoyant jumps, but the dancing moves close to the ground, covering the whole stage space...

...Significantly, for all the RDB's eschewing the star system, those who remembered its first tour found themselves searching for the more commanding presences of 1956...

...But the Danes were endearingly noncommital, a reflection of their notable lack of enthusiasm for the usual custom of billing dancers hierarchically...

...Eleven years had passed since New York last saw the RDB, and the state-supported group is one of the world's oldest major ballet companies...