© Henrik Stenberg 'Colour of Love' reviews 'Polacca' reviews 'La Stravaganza' reviews Haugland in reviews recent Royal Danish reviews more Gunild Pak Symes reviews

Wang’s Colour of Love found its premier this season with an ambitious goal to portray the various manifestations and phases of love in a woman’s life according to the choreographer’s personal vision. While the soloists, Tina Hoejlund performing in socks with tremendous fluidity and long lines partnered sensitively by a weighted and mature Jean-Lucien Massot, came closest to the qualitative needs of the choreography, Wang’s subtle use of modern dance vocabulary within a ballet framework lost its gravity on classically trained bodies. Breath was missing in the corps, as well as a sense of weight and transition using the momentum of a movement as well as its suspension in space and time. Choreographically, there were sublime moments with strong visual imagery enhanced by a bright red couch, a sequence of natural forms and textures projected onto the backdrop and a floor to ceiling bedroom drape that appeared and disappeared in a bewildering manner. Some entrances and exits of both dancers and visual elements did not make sense. The stage was often cluttered and movement too busy in a vain attempt to match the powerful textural score by Wei Du. In this case, less is more, where Wang’s sensitive and highly poetic movement vocabulary and subtle choreographic concepts would perhaps be better served with a smaller well-organized group making better use of a more defined stage, giving more attention and meaning to transitions and visual elements as well as breathing space for the eye.
 

Second on the program was Polacca, a now very dated work by Laerkesen choreographed to music by Chopin, created in 1992, dusted off and entered into the program when a choreographer withdrew from the production. This work, which was originally created at the time to show off the talents of three Royal Danish Ballet principles, did not find freshness the second time around and probably should have been kept in the attic of ballets with a short shelf life. Laerkesen’s choreography cannot match the majesty and finesse of Chopin’s music, which was beautifully performed live by the acclaimed piano duo, Ingryd Thorson and Julian Thurber. While the dancers made a valiant effort to give life and harmony to this disjointed, incoherent and contrived work of choreography, making sense of the strange insertions of arbitrary and incompatible movements from other genres and recognizable phrases usurped from the major ballets produced regularly over the past decade, proved to be as difficult as saving a sinking ship. It is not a good sign when a significant number of the audience leaves after seeing this long-winded and pretentious piece of choreography. However, credit must be given to the strong and effortless performances of Caroline Cavallo and Andrew Bowman.
 

Indeed, the whole evening would have been lost, if not for the exceptional performance of the Royal Danish Ballet dancers in the final work brilliantly crafted by Preljocaj, La Stravaganza, originally created for the New York City Ballet in 1997 and remains more than worthy of critical acclaim today. Inspired by the historical immigration of Europeans to America, the choreography juxtaposes two groups of dancers, one in period costumes by Hervé Pierre reminiscent of the Dutch master Johannes Vermeer’s portraits of 17th century Holland, the other in current day garb. While the group representing modern times danced with classical verve and gusto to the Baroque master works of Vivaldi, the Vermeer-clad ensemble performed haunting abstracted and surreal movements to organic electronic scores by Evelyn Ficarra, Robert Normandeau and Serge Morand, which were full of strange insect-like sounds, haunting drones and unpredictable percussive sequences set against a dramatically raw-painted backdrop of blood red anchored by a black square and a white diamond by set designer, Maya Schweizer. The tribal conflict and clashes between past and present, Old World and New World, entrenched social classes and free individuals was portrayed with intelligence, theatrical ingenuity, organic and musically sensitive use of choreographic devices and seamless transitions that could only be crafted by a master. Even though sharpness was confused with military-like precision and anonymity by some dancers, it was still a strong execution of a vast amount of difficult movement vocabulary with a lot of intricate arm work, levels and directional changes. Stunning performances and technical acuity came from every single dancer in the work, but a woman of the Vermeer group, Sascha Haugland, and two men stood out, Sebastian Kloborg and Christopher Rickert, who performed a kinetically compelling and challenging duet with a combustible intensity.
 

With such a talented group of highly skilled dancers as the Royal Danish Ballet, it should be paramount to the administration that the artists are given the most gifted and skilled choreographers and contemporary dance mentors available. Audiences must be given the opportunity to see the dancers presented in the most current and well-crafted works that show off and challenge their creative, artistic and technical prowess while providing new perspectives on dance as an art form. While it is often ballet companies that have the means to produce contemporary works, setting modern dance on classically trained dancers continues to be awkward due to lack of proper contemporary dance training. And while the effort to present new work of emerging choreographers should be applauded, the education, development and presentation of such artists in Denmark needs to be brought up to date, have standards raised and given much more institutional and artistic support than it currently receives. It is the foresight and vision of the artistic leaders of the Royal Danish Ballet that will aim the company and the region towards further growth or artistic stagnation. Let us hope that they promote the former and prevent the latter next year.