Bournonville Variations

Music: Edvard Helsted (The Flower Festival in Genzano, 1858 [Pas de deux], Napoli, or The Fisherman and His Bride, 1842 [Pas de six]) and Holger Simon Paulli (Napoli, or The Fisherman and His Bride, 1842 [Tarantella])
Choreography: August Bournonville
Staging: Flemming Halby
Scenic and Costume Design: José Varona
Lighting Design: Randall G. Chiarelli
Duration: 35 minutes
Original Production Premieres: The Flower Festival in Genzano, December 19, 1858, Royal Ballet (Copenhagen, Denmark); Napoli, or The Fisherman and His Bride, March 29, 1842, Royal Ballet (Copenhagen, Denmark)
Pacific Northwest Ballet Premiere: February 3, 1988

Before the great age of Petipa in 19th-century Russia, ballet flourished first in Paris and then in Copenhagen, where, for nearly fifty years, August Bournonville served as ballet master of the Royal Danish ballet. On account of Denmark’s insularity in the dance world, about a dozen of Bournonville’s fifty ballets, along with the rigorous training he devised, have survived in an unbroken tradition passed on by generations of Danish dancers and teachers.

Pacific Northwest Ballet possess a pure dance suite of Bournonville ballet excerpts, thanks to Flemming Halby, formerly a principal dancer with Royal Danish Ballet and longtime faculty member of Pacific Northwest Ballet School. In 1988, Mr. Halby staged Bournonville Variations for PNB, incorporating the pas de deux from Flower Festival in Genzano (1858) and the pas de six and tarantella from Act III of Napoli (1842). These variations beautifully exemplify the intricate footwork, crystal clarity, incredible lightness of movement, and open, generous-spirited dancing for which Bournonville is famous.

Like most of Bournonville’s ballets, the full-length versions of Napoli and Flower Festival are set among ordinary, petit-bourgeois people of distant lands (such as Italy, Scotland, and Spain) and incorporate folk traditions and dances. In contrast to the typically tragic themes of ballets of the Romantic Period, in which humans are drawn destructively to the elusive spirit world, Bournonville creates a sunny community of average people with recognizable foibles, whose stability is of a piece with this optimistic outlook. Bournonville’s own words supply the key: “Joy is strength, rapture a weakness. Noble simplicity will always be beautiful. …The greatest talent is to know how to disguise technique with a quiet orderliness which is the foundation of real grace.”

Notes Jeanie Thomas; edited by Doug Fullington, 2009.