The Royal Danish Ballet

In one of the Royal Danish Ballet’s recorded performances, James leaves his wedding preparations to follow a creature he cannot keep. In another, Teresina and Gennaro finally celebrate their marriage in the streets of Naples. Both ballets belong to August Bournonville, yet La Sylphide and Napoli ask quite different things of the same company. A gesture has to tell the audience what a character wants. A jump has to retain its ease even when the steps are intricate. And in Napoli the life of the crowd matters as much as the fate of the couple. Anyone watching the theatre’s recordings can see why storytelling occupies such a large place in the Copenhagen tradition. Both full recordings are offered for Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands only.

The Royal Danish Theatre dates its history at Kongens Nytorv to 1748. At its opening the dancers numbered just three. Bournonville, who trained and danced in Paris, brought a French schooling back to Copenhagen. The theatre credits him with developing a particularly demanding tradition of male dancing and preserving qualities of a style that subsequently changed in France. The survival of nineteenth-century ballets here depends on people able to transmit roles as well as steps. In the theatre’s recording of La Sylphide, Nikolaj Hübbe revisits Bournonville’s ballet of 1836. Jón Axel Fransson dances James, Ida Praetorius the Sylph and Kizzy Matiakis the witch Madge. This is the cast of a recording, a different question from who will dance a role this season.

Amy Watson took up the artistic directorship on 1 November 2024. She had joined the corps in 2000 and become a principal in 2007. Her own repertory ranged from Teresina in Napoli to Balanchine and Robbins. She also taught the company. That background gives the present director firsthand experience of the distance a dancer may have to travel between two ballets on the same playbill.

The 2026/27 programme makes that distance visible. In Cathy Marston’s Jane Eyre, which runs through 18 November, narrative ballet takes on a novel told from its heroine’s point of view. George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker follows on the Old Stage and then on tour. Another side of the ensemble emerges in The Perfect Human, the new creation by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber that draws on a short film by Jørgen Leth. Gregory Dean’s Cinderella returns in spring, and Giant Steps brings together Justin Peck, Ulysses Dove and Pam Tanowitz. The theatre’s Koreorama initiative gives emerging choreographers room to experiment alongside these guest voices. For an audience coming to Copenhagen through Bournonville, that is a reason to look beyond a single heritage programme and see what the same dancers do next.