Danish delight

Johan Kobborg’s staging of La Sylphide is one of the Royal Ballet’s super hits. It is thus a good and glorious thing that it is back on stage. This time, too, the brief two-acter is aptly coupled with a short piece: Frederick Ashton’s Rhapsody on some evenings and Kobborg’s Napoli Divertissements on others. While the former foreshadows La Sylphide’s tragic mood with its 20th-century dark, neo-Romantic undertones, the latter is, in my view, a more pertinent coupling. After all, Napoli and La Sylphide are the two most internationally known works by the French-born August Bournonville, the dance-maker who in 19th-century Denmark developed a unique response to the dominating modes of French Romantic ballet. Kobborg’s selection of dances from Napoli, including the ballet’s final spirited tarantella, reveals a deep appreciation of the distinctive traits of Bournonville’s style. The apparently pause-less flow of the danced action, the particular interaction between steps and musical accents, as well as more well-known Bournonvillean choreographic ideas, such as the low  arms, the humming-bird-like quality of  the footwork and the lack of technical disparities between genders, are perfectly highlighted by each pyrotechnical  dance number.