The Royal Danes

Once ballet was akin to fairy tales, a simple affair of story and emotion, told through gesture, mimicry and music. By the 18th century it had become stylized, replacing most of the dumb show with elegant attitudes and virtuoso movement. In this form it was nourished and preserved by the Russians. But there is one major company which still clings to the older, simpler style: the Royal Danish Ballet. Last week the Royal Danes, making one of their rare visits outside Scandinavia, were at London's Covent Garden.

To the knowing audience, the company seemed to have come out of bygone times, when there was still dancing on the village green. Blond ballerinas danced freely, often just on their toes, rather than always formally on pointes. The performances depended almost as much on mimicry as on footwork. There was none of the tense, hushed atmosphere of the Russian ballet, with its emphasis on the technically difficult solo and pas de deux.

The Danish ballet, artistically isolationist, has stayed close to home for most of its proud, 202-year history. The opening-night program in London was chosen to underline the company's age and traditions. It began with a gay trifle called The Whims of Cupid and the Ballet Master, and moved on through an unabashedly romantic La Sylphide (1832), in which a forest witch vamps a young Scot (to unfamiliar music by Hermann Lovenskjold). The piece offered a show-stopping Scottish dance and was full of good-humored stage tricks (a sylph vanishes, later is seen flying up into the rafters). The modern ballet (1942) was Qarrtsiluni, by Knudage Riisager, a tom-tom-thumping, gyrating Eskimo rite.

Among the standout performers: Character Dancer Gerda Karstens, as a dour old Quaker lady whose stiff movements and deadpan face seemed to disapprove of what her feet were doing; lithe, pretty Ballerina Inge Sand, who danced Delibes' Coppelia on the second night; Erik Bruhn, who bounded through the Nutcracker; and Frank Schaufuss and Mona Vangsaa, who gave a touching performance of ill-fated young love in Romeo and Juliet. Londoners, used to the heady perfection of Sadler's Wells, loved the more natural Danes, brought them back again & again to bow to the applause--a thrill they seldom get at home in Denmark, where tradition strictly limits curtain calls.

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