Royal Danish Reviews

It's long been one of my great ambitions to see the Royal Danish Ballet on their home ground, and after a few days in wonderful Copenhagen in wonderful spring weather, I can only wonder why it's taken me such a long time to get round to it. Ballet tickets are cheap there - practically the only things that are - with top price for a triple bill being around £29, going up to £36 for three act pieces. Copenhagen is also a wonderful source of second hand dance books, though to appreciate most of them you need either to read Danish or to think the money well spent for the photographs alone - I'm in the second category, though curiosity may impel me into the first eventually.

Like everyone else I would have chosen to see the company in a Bournonville evening if I could, but these are fairly rare these days (though there's more than usual next season, with 4 productions) and I could only catch a triple bill: Lifar's Suite en Blanc, Mats Eks's Grass and Maurice Béjart's Bolero. The least said about the last of these, the better: I know there are people who enjoy it, and even friends whose opinion I trust tell me that with the right cast it can come over quite strongly, but for me it merely confirmed how right I've been to avoid it up to now. For the record, the principal role was danced by Kenneth Greve - his only performance, I think, as he's been off recently with an injury.

Grass was the first of Mats Ek's works I've seen live - he's better known on television over here, though that should soon be put right. It's an unexpected piece to find in the repertoire of what we think of as a traditional company, but it went down very well with the audience and I enjoyed it too. Ek clearly has something he wants to say and a vocabulary that lets him say it - in itself a rare enough thing to be very welcome - and although the declared theme of this (a man's progress through life) wasn't always particularly clear, the movement and the staging were well able to hold the interest throughout.

Lifar made Suite en Blanc for the Paris Opera Ballet, and it looks like it. I've rarely seen a ballet that so demands a cast of stars - or at least of self-declared stars - and it's not a criticism of the Danes to say that they couldn't really field enough egos to fill out the choreography. Chief pleasures came from Silja Schandorff in the pas de deux and Johann Kobborg in the Mazurka - though he was even better circling the stage in a huge sweep during the finale. RBS-trained Claire Still, in the pas de cinq, looked rather miscast and unhappy, but she is one I'd look forward to seeing in something else. Gudrun Bojesen and Christina Olsson were neither of them quite up to their important solos, though Olsson in a particular looked technically very secure. Lifar's choreography is extraordinary to watch - everyone must get his or her 30 seconds of limelight, and there's no such thing as a supporting role: in a pas de trois, for instance, if the woman is having her moment at centre stage, the two men aren't admiringly watching , they're doing their own virtuoso turn off to one side. Done by the right company and in the right, rather tongue in cheek, spirit it could be magnificent fun.

A worthwhile trip, then, but I hope next time I'm in Copenhagen I'll be able to see a more satisfying programme and get a better measure of the company's status.