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Earlier this year the Danish Ministry of Culture published the results of a year's work to produce a list they call the Kultur Kanon - 'a collection and presentation of the greatest, most important works of Denmark's cultural heritage', designed, among other things to provide an introduction to 'the directions and milestones in Denmark's long and complex cultural history'. Among the twelve theatre works selected were three ballets: Bournonville's La Sylphide, Harald Lander's Etudes and Flemming Flindt's The Lesson, and all three are featured in this year's Royal Danish Ballet programmes - a double bill of the Lesson and La Sylphide runs through the season, and Etudes was on show recently in tandem with the company's first performances of Uwe Scholz's Schumann's 2nd Symphony.
Harald Lander made Etudes for the RDB in 1948, towards the end of his reign as director, both to show off the standard his company had reached and to show the audience for the first time how the elements of a dancer's technique come together on stage to make theatre. It's generally considered his masterpiece, and has become a staple of repertories all over the world; but there's still something special about seeing it on the stage where it was created, danced by the company which owns it. And quite apart from its history, and in this case without the dancers of extreme virtuosity who have inhabited it in the past, it's still an exciting, exhilarating ballet.
Mads Blangstrup and Izabela Sokolowska in Schumann's 2nd Symphony
© Henrik Stenberg
The true star of any good performance of Etudes is its corps de ballet: it must be a terrifying piece to do, with the technique of each dancer so completely exposed and any tiny mistake showing so obviously. To field 24 women and 12 men the RDB has to use almost everyone, and it's good to see senior soloists like Morton Eggert and Nicolai Hansen working alongside the most junior aspirants: it's a real 'company' ballet. Amongst the male soloists, the honours went to Tim Matiakis, who did the 'turning' solos - he's not a showy dancer but that seems to fit well with the Danish way of doing things, and he knocked off his 30 or so fouettés very stylishly. The young Ulrik Birkkjaer, still very new to leading roles, did the rest of the men's solos - he shows a lot of promise but needs much more confidence to be convincing in a purely technical role like this. Normally the dancers in these two roles would also appear with the ballerina in the pas de trois in the earlier part of the work, but for some reason we saw Kristoffer Sakurai instead of Matiakis - it seemed an unecessary substitution, and odd that Sakurai then disappeared for the rest of the evening, not even returning for the curtain calls - did we just dream that we saw him? The ballerina was Gudrun Bøjesen, a generous, open dancer with a golden glow rather than a diamond sparkle, particularly charming in the Sylphide section.
Tim Matiakis in Etudes
© David Amzallag
The Schumann piece was a disappointment. Although Scholz declared himself to be more interested in expressiveness than technique, there was not enough of the one and too much of the other to hold the interest for the forty-minute duration of 2nd Symphony. It must have taken a huge amount of time and work to produce, and the dancers gave it more than it deserved - but they couldn't disguise the awkwardness of its construction or the unattractive lines of some of the choreography. One of the keynotes was duplication: Caroline Cavallo's solo, for instance, was repeated a few minutes later by Izabela Sokolowska, and with their partners (Jean-Lucien Massot and Mads Blangstrup) they danced a long double pas de deux, a pointless device which halves the emotional effect rather than multiplying it. That typified the whole piece for me, and left me with the feeling - which I remember from some of the works we saw from the Royal Ballet in Ross Stretton's time - that it just wasn't a good enough ballet for this company to be doing.
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