© Martin Mydtskov Ronne Lund in reviews RDB reviews Jane Simpson reviews Danseglæde og springkraft is published in Denmark by Gyldendal www.gyldendal.dk

For the last few months of the Royal Danish Ballet's season in 2006, principal dancer Thomas Lund was out of action, going through a course of intensive treatment for an injured knee. With time to spare for once, he gladly fell in with ballet- and art-historian Ole Nørlyng's suggestion that they should collaborate on a book, using Lund's own story as a basis for a wide-ranging look at the world of ballet or, as he puts it, 'a good excuse to talk about dance in general'. Nørlyng contributes facts, history, and background information, whilst Lund talks about his life in dance and what he's learnt from it. In his introduction he describes his part of the book as 'a sort of stocktaking', and it seems to me that - not entirely by coincidence - it was written at an important moment in his career.

The book itself, published at the beginning of November, is handsomely produced and very well illustrated, though I do wish it had an index. (It's in Danish, so maybe it's one for the pile of dance books bought for the pictures, waiting for the day when you finally get round to learning Russian or Japanese or whatever. I'd been buying Danish books for 40 years before I learnt to read them.) The title is Danseglæde og springkraft,which doesn't translate easily into English: literally, though, it combines 'delight in dancing' with 'power in jumping', twin elements of most people's image of Danish ballet and also of Thomas Lund's own performances. Sixteen chapters deal with the stages of a dancer's progression, or with different themes - how dance can tell stories or what's involved in a partnership. Lund talks, Nørlyng spins off into related subjects, sidenotes direct you to a collection of 'dictionary' entries at the back of the book. I think the ideal reader in the authors' minds would be someone who is already going to the ballet, and has just got to the stage of realising that a little knowledge of history and technique, some insight into the backstage life of the dancers, would add hugely to their pleasure and understanding. Someone a bit further down the road may choose to focus more on what Lund has to say - the layout of the book allows you to plot your own course through it.

The tone throughout is conversational rather than formal, but Lund's contributions seem particularly spontaneous, probably because they're based on a series of long interviews, with Nørlyng asking the questions whilst Lund, as he puts it, 'lay on the sofa and slowly lost my physical form'. He comes over, as he does on stage, as very open and honest, and speaks about self-doubt and difficulties as candidly as he does about success. When he talked to me one morning in the Royal Theatre, I asked him if he was happy that we should all know so much about what makes him tick. Evidently it's not a problem: 'I have always been quite open: you are who you are. To create roles on stage I am always reflecting on my life - what have I experienced, and what have I learnt? I think you have to be honest about how you develop as a person, and you can't run away from the experiences you have had. That's what has made me what I am, as an artist. Some people really don't like to show the private side at all - I have colleagues who don't want to do any interviews and who don't want to talk to anybody about anything, so that it will be a secret for the audience how they come across with the wonderful results that they get: but I am probably the opposite of that.'
 

The injury which kept Lund offstage for so many weeks was 'jumper's knee', a progressive injury, common in athletes as well as dancers, in which scar tissue builds up in the knee and then rips if the dancer goes on working. Although the 2005-6 season had been, deliberately, rather quiet for him, the season before had been incredibly busy in the build-up to the 3rd Bournonville Festival. As well as rehearsing his own roles and both dancing in and supervising the recording of the Bournonville School on DVD, he was also lecturing, teaching and 'over his ears' in the planning for the group he brought to Sadler's Wells immediately after the Festival. The Festival was a personal triumph for him as well as a success for the company as a whole, but the stress taught him that he must learn to say 'no' occasionally, and the heavy dance load damaged his already painful knee still further. The climax of it all was the night of June 15th, when he danced James in La Sylphide, perhaps the peak of his career up till then: but as he says 'I did that Sylphide so fully, full out, that I probably ripped [my knee] a little more there, and then I kept dancing... I went to London, and had some pain when I was dancing there, and then I went on and did even more. As a dancer you are used to cope with pain, and it wasn't as if I couldn't dance - but then in the new season I planned with Frank Andersen that I could be out for some months after February, and gets some proper treatment.' So the Festival, although it brought him international recognition and a hatful of prizes and awards, could also be seen in retrospect as a turning point: after his enforced time-out, he's perhaps returned to a new phase of his dancing life.

It seems common for male dancers at a certain point, often in their early thirties (Lund is 33) to reassess who they are and what they hope to achieve in the rest of their career. Carlos Acosta, for instance, at about that age was telling us that he was tired of boys' roles; with Lund, it comes out as a need for something beyond the cheerful character with the amazing jump, which is certainly how he's mostly thought of outside Denmark. I liked the phrase he uses in the book: 'I've served my time as a jack-in-the-box', and he elaborated on that in conversation. 'Since I was at school, being the Joker who comes out of the box in The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep - believe me, I have done that for ever. It's not that you don't want to do it, it's just that at some point in your life you want to show that you have a darker side, more nuances: I don't always want to be looked at as someone who is always doing the happy funny guy.'

It's actually a bit surprising that it's this side of him that has become best known. The photographs in the book let you trace his development from the amazingly self-possessed 11-year old ballroom-dancing champion who turned up for his audition for the ballet school with blond streaks in his hair and a salon tan, through his years as an aspirant and in the corps de ballet; his first big chance came when he was still very young - only 20 - when Flemming Flindt picked him to dance the long and difficult role of the mad King Christian VII in his Caroline Mathilde. It must have looked like the beginning of a career as a strongly dramatic dancer, but it was a long time before there was any follow-up. His Mercutio in Peter Schaufuss's revival of Ashton's Romeo and Juliet was not a success - he felt he had neither the authority nor the maturity for the role - and soon after that that the company was plunged into its troubled years, with one director following another in quick succession, each with his or her own ideas about repertoire, company style and casting. Lund found himself underused and eventually gave serious thought to leaving to continue his career somewhere else; he did actually spend half a season with Twyla Tharp, but in the end decided to stick it out in Denmark.
 

Stability returned with Frank Andersen, but although Lund was given some satisfying roles - he was reportedly a very fine Lensky in Cranko's Onegin - he was till quite recently, and long after his promotion to principal dancer, cast as such things as the leading beggar in Manon. He describes himself as a demi-caractère dancer - a phrase once in very common use, now rapidly going out of circulation. He's a 'dark' demi, though, one with a much wider range than the peasants, jesters and gypsies usually associated with the type today. The book gives more than a hint that he wishes he'd had the opportunity to dance some of the danseur noble roles: when I asked him about it he agreed, but added 'I think it's something to do with wanting what you can't get: you're always more interested in that'. And he points out that he has done at least one Prince - in Nutcracker - and he also, very early on in his career, learnt from Henning Kronstam a solo Frederick Ashton made for the Prince in Act 3 of Sleeping Beauty. It was originally made for Michael Somes, and only he and Kronstam ever performed it; Lund danced it once in public, at a memorial evening after Kronstam's death. In today's world, someone of his height is unlikely to find himself cast as that prince or as Siegfried; but with the right cast I'd love to see him as Albrecht.

Of course, Bournonville's ballets are hugely important to someone brought up in the tradition of this house, and Thomas Lund's international reputation rests almost entirely on his dancing in those beautiful classics. But it's not hard to understand that one of the purposes of his book is to show that he can do other things as well, and though Bournonville's name inevitably and rightly crops up throughout, only one chapter is entirely devoted to him. The company's next director, Nikolai Hübbe, talks about Bournonville as 'the well to which we all return' for instpiration; Lund sees it the other way round too. 'When you work with a modern choreographer you learn more about your own style, you learn other things - like about gravity and how you can actually use it - and the experience can make you a better Bournonville dancer, if you still know how to dance within the frame of the style'. I wondered if being seen around the world as 'Mr Bournonville' put a heavy weight of responsibility on him, and he agreed - but not, as I'd expected, when he's actually dancing. 'I feel a little scared sometimes when you feel that people see you as one of those who are going to pass it on to the next generation. It's something that you have to take very seriously, and it's a big task to do - luckily I'm not the only one who's going to do it, there will be other people.' I'd seen a little of this handing-down process in action earlier in the day, when I watched Lund teaching the boys from the top classes of the ballet school: one of the exercises he gave them is one he demonstrates himself on the Bournonville DVDs.

Since the Festival Lund seems to be being used rather differently. His first role after his knee healed was the Teacher in Flindt's The Lesson, about as far away from the 'happy, funny guy' as it's possible to get, and frighteningly well done - his eyes after the murder haunt me still. In the same season he returned to King Christian in Caroline Mathilde, relying more on art and less on intuition this time round. He's known as a method actor, a description he agrees to somewhat reluctantly. At first he seems more interested in talking about how 'I see things in other people, if I'm sitting in a cafe maybe ... you can take something, maybe a certain look or the way somebody behaves, and you can use that in your acting'. But there's a nice story in the book, about how when he first danced Gennaro in Napoli he had trouble with his entrance in the second act. He arrives in the Blue Grotto and has to register a whole mix of emotions, and he didn't find the key to that until he visited Capri on holiday and actually swam into the Grotto alone. When I reminded him of that, he admitted that in his performance the night before he'd been reliving that experience. 'It's very very hard - because nothing is happening - you just walk, and you have to do it all by what you think, and somehow give that to the audience at that moment. And you have to have different feelings - you have to be exhausted, you have to be overwhelmed by the magic of where you are, you are searching for your love - so you have a handful of different feelings without having any steps - and you have to do it your way.' He's fortunate in having an actor's expressive face, so that we in the audience imagine we can read his mind as his thoughts visibly succeed each other.
 

'You don't know how you look on stage, but if what you're doing reads clearly it means you have to try to be quite honest, because otherwise it shows. You have to be very aware of how you work with yourself - it all comes from what you feel at that moment. When I do James, for instance, I actually say the lines to myself as I'm doing the mime. Not always, but... you have to have the overall feeling at that moment, in that scene; and then one scene leads into the next, and sometimes, if for instance in Sylphide or Napoli something doesn't go how I want during the first act, then when I'm up in my dressing room in the intermission I try to work out what I felt, and what do I need to do now, to get it in a way so it still works. That way you don't always do it the same way - what I'm doing on Friday might be a little different from last night because suddenly things fall out a little differently in the first act. So I need the intermission to reflect. And this is what I think is so wonderful about the Royal Danish Ballet, that we work so strongly with the tradition of acting, and that is probably why I'm still here, that I get from our repertory the opportunity of going back to these parts and developing.'

Alongside this he clearly gets a lot of fulfilment from roles made for him by contemporary choreographers. He speaks with pleasure of Jorma Uotinen's 2005 Jord ('Earth') and of Kim Brandstrup's Ghosts last season, and most recently he's been working with Jiri Kylian, who created a short pas de deux for him and Gudrun Bojesen to music by Schubert. 'Having Kylian create something, even though it's only three minutes, was a wonderful experience - very calm, and we had a good time together. After that, I almost feel I could stop dancing tomorrow and would be completely fulfilled.... But of course I won't, because now I have the experience, and the physique is still kind of OK, and I have some wonderful years ahead and I want to get the best out of them.' It's going to be very interesting to see how Nikolai Hübbe casts him. A combination of strong acting roles (including Bournonville's of course) and new work which uses him as a mature dancer could make the next phase as rewarding for the audience as for him. Unlike the many who have left for opportunities in the wider world, he's happy in Denmark. 'I have my family here, I have my roots, I have my love for the Royal Danish Ballet - good and bad; and I have a lot to learn, and a lot to do here.'

Danseglæde og springkraft is published in Denmark by Gyldendal www.gyldendal.dk