Royal Flash

When Flemming Flindt was named director of the Royal Danish Ballet a year ago, the ballet world was caught flatfooted. At 29, he was not only one of the youngest dancers ever to head a major ballet company, but his skills as a choreographer were largely unknown and untested. In the U.S., audiences knew him mainly as the fellow who had choreographed a blatantly erotic sequence for the Metropolitan Opera's Faust.

But that sort of daring was exactly what the Royal Danish Ballet was looking for. Typical of the new look he has given the Danes is his flashy new production of Bartok's nightmarish The Miraculous Mandarin, which has been running in Copenhagen for the past few weeks. A series of taut opening scenes, ominously underscored by Bartok's crashing, nervous music, sets the sordid story: a leering, undulating streetwalker lures her men to a shadowy room where a trio of gangsters beat and rob them. The last victim is a hideously ugly, stooped Chinese mandarin, danced by Flindt himself. After a grotesquely forceful solo, he engages the streetwalker--provocatively danced by Vivi Gelker--in a scorching sensual pas de deux. The gangsters move in and repeatedly stab and then strangle him. But he refuses to die, and in desperation they hang him from a "column of lust." Still he lingers, and the streetwalker, strangely touched by the power of his passion, embraces him and, after one final moment of redemption, he expires.

Romp & Stomp. The Danish critics, many of whom were skeptical of upstart Flindt at the outset, agreed that, in a year of forward strides, Mandarin was the grand jete. When Flindt took over, he started straight off to dress up the troupe's traditional repertory and leaven it with new modern works.

Boldly, he choreographed "total theater," in which a work was not "evaluated solely on the intricacy of its movements but on its overall theatrical impact." His first full-length ballet was a total-theater version of The Three Musketeers, a romp-and-stomp spectacle in which the Danish swashbucklers made Douglas Fairbanks look like a party poop. Later, he enlivened and internationalized his programs with Afternoon of a Faun by America's Jerome Robbins, Card Game by South Africa's John Cranko, Aimez-vous Bach by Canada's Brian MacDonald, and Agon by Denmark's First Eske Holm, a Flindt protege. Brash, bristling with energy, Flindt has reorganized the training methods of the company and its dance school, initiated open auditions and, for the first time, hired non-Danish dancers. ("Five million Danes are not enough to draw from," he says.)

Not the least of the company's attractions is the passionately extroverted dancing of Flindt himself, who spells his strong roster of male soloists at least once a week. Trained at the Royal Ballet, Flindt twice left the company to roam the world, dancing with a wide variety of troupes, most recently the Paris Opera Ballet. Having brought all that he learned back home, Flindt now fills his hall for every new program. The venerable ballet of Denmark is clearly in the hands of a Royal flash.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.