ESSAY – Thanks to the Danish ballet master Hans Beck, we have a treasure trove of knowledge and insight into August Bournonville’s dance, preserved and passed down through generations. In this essay, Dinna Bjørn examines the structure of the classes of The Bournonville School, their connection to Bournonville’s principles of “Applomb” and “Vigueur”, and how the classes serve as a key not only to the style, but also to the spirit of Bournonville.

To dig into the six Bournonville classes known as The Bournonville School is like looking into a big treasure box full of precious choreographic gems. It is true that the classes are, first of all, an invaluable tool for preparing oneself for dancing Bournonville’s ballets on stage—but not only that.

Dancing one of those classes from one end to the other builds up stamina and strength, and, when executed with the proper attention to all the stylistic and technical details, you certainly get every part of your body warmed up and worked through! And you will be ready to dance anything afterward!

There is, therefore, a very good reason to be thankful to Hans Beck and his contemporary colleagues for the work they did when they put together these classes at the beginning of the last century.

The six classes were based on their recollection of certain exercises Bournonville used to give in his classes, as well as variations from his ballets.

It is thanks to this material, and to the fact that these classes for almost half a century were danced every morning both by the students of the ballet school and the dancers of the company, that we have preserved not only a theoretical but also a practical knowledge of Bournonville’s classes—a knowledge that has been passed on from one generation to the next.

Using The Bournonville School Today

However, there is a problem if one wants to use the structure of these classes as a model for a specific study into Bournonville’s pedagogical system, because the exercises were not collected or put together in this specific order by Bournonville himself, but by Hans Beck and some of Bournonville’s last pupils.

Even the specific selection of steps and the variety of exercises are based on those pupils’ random recollection. Therefore, the structure of the classes most likely reflects Hans Beck’s pedagogical visions rather than Bournonville’s own.

It seems to me as if Hans Beck primarily wanted to preserve the choreographic element of his master’s teaching. Therefore, he did not “waste time” by adding too many elementary exercises that were only focused on the development of one specific technical aspect. Maybe his intention was to leave that to the individual teachers, allowing them to add those elementary exercises by their own choice and according to their needs?

Because it is clear, when you read Bournonville’s own words in his two interesting and eye-opening books on pedagogical subjects, the Études Chorégraphiques (1861) and New Year’s Gift for Ballet-Lovers (1829), that he definitely recommended this himself and also used this kind of simpler exercise in his teaching. It also becomes evident when you read his advice to teachers that he constantly adjusted his own classes to the needs of each individual dancer.

My conclusion is, therefore, that if you want to teach the Bournonville style and prepare the students for executing his choreography on stage today, you have to use these six classes as a base of inspiration from which you can choose and take out specific exercises or parts of exercises and also put them together in other ways in order to meet the individual needs and adapt to the level of the dancers in your class.

But in order to be able to do that, it is absolutely necessary to have those classes under your skin by having danced the exercises yourself and, in that way, knowing them and understanding them from the inside—in addition to knowing the choreography in the existing Bournonville ballets.

Only then can the six classes become the right tool for passing on the Bournonville style and technique to the next generation.

Even though these six classes were not created in this form by Bournonville himself, I will say that they form a solid base from which you can develop into becoming a good Bournonville teacher.

Adapting the Classes to Individual Needs

Now all the classes exist on DVD, which is both a wonderful and a dangerous thing.

Wonderful, because they are kept for eternity that way and accessible to everyone, but the danger lies in the fact that this can lead to the belief that you can now teach Bournonville just by looking at the DVD and memorizing the exercises, without ever having learned them yourself from a teacher with the devotion to and the profound knowledge and understanding of all the stylistic, musical, and technical details—and maybe even without ever having danced them yourself.

At this point, I would like to quote the famous Danish dancer Erik Bruhn, who in his book
Bournonville and Ballet Technique (1961) written more than 50 years ago, said:

“Long after Bournonville’s death, in an admirable effort to rescue his work from oblivion and give it some sort of tangible and permanent form, his followers codified his teaching into arbitrary patterns, with a set class for each day of the week. The establishment of this formula had results which were both good and bad. It preserved, intact, some aspects of ballet technique, which were very much worth saving, and which have vanished in the rest of the world. It also kept the dancers in good practice for the special requirements of the Bournonville repertoire, and so helped to save his masterpieces. However, it had the harmful effect of making it possible for anyone who had memorized the order of the classes to teach ‘the Bournonville system.’ Any exercise is good only in the hands of one who knows how and when to use it. Bournonville himself stressed the fact that his exercises should be applied ‘according to the individual needs of the pupil.’”

So, already then, Erik Bruhn was clearly aware of the danger that exists when you try to capture something that has to do with living art and continuous work in progress by putting it into a fixed form.

When it comes to the Bournonville classes, it is also important to be aware that they were made for professional dancers and not for ballet students, even though, for many years at The Royal Danish Ballet, the ballet students also did those classes.

From my father, Niels Bjørn Larsen, who entered the Royal Danish Ballet School in 1919, I know that during his ten years in the school, he did the morning class every day together with all the other students of the school, from ages 6 to 16—and they all did the Bournonville classes!

After the barre, the youngest students only did the first four or five exercises in the center, the older ones continued with a few more exercises, and only the oldest ones completed the whole class. Through this constant physical repetition of the same exercises, they all learned to execute all the exercises by the end of their education!

This is not the way it is done anymore and, I strongly believe, not the way Bournonville himself would have recommended it!

However, again: it is thanks to this “teaching method” that those classes have survived and have become “second nature” to several generations of dancers in Denmark.

Applomb and Vigeur

Now let us look at those six classes, their structure, and their order of succession.

Each class consists of between 22 (Wednesday’s class) and 25 (Monday’s class) exercises—142 exercises in total. Some quite short and others very long.

There is a certain structure in each class that seems to follow Bournonville’s own two “keywords”: Applomb and Vigeur.

In his little booklet New Year’s Gift for Ballet Lovers, he explains that these are the two main technical qualities that each dancer should always strive to be in complete command of during everyday class work: 

Applomb – meaning the constant maintaining of the center feeling in all movements, especially in the adagio movements, and the awareness of the connection with the floor, always having the center vertically over your standing leg (one could also call it balance, because he calls the pirouette “the triumph of the applomb”, where you turn around your own center in perfect balance!).

Vigueur – meaning the rapidity and sharpness of the feet in all the crossing and beating movements when you leave the floor and start moving into the air.

By combining these two qualities, you will then achieve the ability to shift weight easily from one leg to the other and to change directions quickly in the middle of a sequence.

Bournonville emphasized that all exercises in a class should be exercises to improve either one or the other of these qualities, or the combination of the two!

When you look at the six classes, you will find that each class starts with three or four exercises that are specific exercises for the Applomb.

No. 1 is always an Adagio, followed by No. 2: a Port de Bras, either in fourth or in fifth position, followed in most of the classes by another slow exercise for applomb: No. 3: Andante with pirouettes. The exception is in Wednesday’s and Friday’s classes, where exercise No. 3 is a pirouette combination in a different tempo, and No. 4 is then a different and more choreographed type of Adagio.

The main “body” of the classes consists of different exercises of allegro movements—from 8 exercises (Wednesday) to 13 (Saturday); beginning more static (with tendu, fondu, posé chassé, and pirouettes of different kinds), still with the main focus on the Applomb, and gradually moving in different directions into the air, exercising the Vigueur (ballonné, sissonne fermée, sissonne ouverte, échappé, glissades, jetés, and petits sauts with batterie).

This group of exercises gradually moves into the bigger jumps, the grand waltzes, mixed with some specific steps for women (quick allegros with batterie and specific pointe work exercises) and for men (brisé volé, grand pirouettes, grand cabriole, tour en l’air), ending with some real variations, male and female, from Bournonville’s ballets (some known, like Señor’s variation from La Ventana (Monday), Gurn’s variation from La Sylphide (Tuesday), and from The Flower Festival in Genzano (Saturday); others from ballets that are no longer performed on stage, and therefore forgotten).

This last part of the class consists of 8 (Tuesday and Saturday), 9 (Thursday and Friday), 10 (Wednesday), and 12 (Monday) different exercises.

Dance is an Expression of Joy

When you look at Monday’s and Tuesday’s classes parallel to each other, you could be tempted to believe that they have been switched and that they originally appeared in the opposite order!

Because Tuesday’s class is, in many ways, much simpler and the most basic of all the classes (examples: No. 4: Tendu, No. 5: Posé Chassé, No. 6 and 7: Changement and grand plié, No. 11: Sissonne fermée, No. 15: Brisé, and No. 19: Crossing Step), whereas Monday’s class is already more elaborated choreographically (examples: No. 4: Tendu and Posé Chassé, No. 5: Pirouette with grand plié, No. 6: Rond de jambes sauté with pirouette, No. 7: Ballonné, No. 12: Polka step, No. 18: The 7-step).

But maybe Hans Beck did it with an absolute purpose, remembering what Bournonville, first of all, wanted dance to express. For Bournonville, dance should be an expression of joy and of the urge to move naturally and gracefully to music, so it is good to be reminded of that, even in class!

Therefore, you start the week with exercises that are more “dansant”—but that at the same time make you aware of all the technical challenges you meet within those combinations, so that the day after, you can go back to basics and work with the separate elements in the much more elementary exercises of Tuesday’s class.

And then, the day after, in Wednesday’s class, you are more ready to combine it all in one of the most “dansant” and choreographic classes of them all, where each exercise is a little dance in itself (examples: No. 3: Pirouettes, No. 6: Rond de jambes sauté with pirouettes, No. 7: Posé Chassé, No. 11: The Dark Step, No. 12: Quatre Royale-step, No. 13: The Big Waltz, No. 14: Traverse, No. 16: The Big Backwards Step).

In Thursday’s class, you go more back to basics again (examples: No. 4: Posé Chassé, No. 5: Tendu simple, No. 10: Half Chinese-step, No. 11: Ballotté), however still in a more “dansant” form (examples: No. 6: The False Preparations, No. 7: Posé Chassé with pirouettes, No. 8: Rond de jambes sauté and sissonne, No. 12: Sissonne and cabriole, No. 16 and 17: The “Balloon-steps”).

The Friday Class

Friday’s class is the class that somehow falls a bit outside of this attempt to find rules and reasons for the order of the classes, since it consists primarily of the exact choreography from Bournonville’s The Dancing School section of his ballet Konservatoriet!

One could be tempted to say that Hans Beck here jumped over where the fence was very low by simply taking these steps from the ballet in their scenic version to form one of the weekly classes!

However, we can also be thankful for that, because this is the way the choreography has survived—by being danced in class every Friday!—so that we can still perform The Dancing School from Konservatoriet in its original version, whereas the rest of this ballet’s choreography has been lost.

But it does make Friday’s class different in its whole structure from the other five classes and, in that way, also more difficult to “categorize”.

Only five of the 23 exercises are not from Konservatoriet, and they are No. 2: Port de bras, No. 4: Adagio, No. 5: Balances, No. 6: Pirouette, and No. 8: Posé Chassé. All the exercises from Konservatoriet are conscious attempts by Bournonville to show examples of the pure old French style and the Parisian school, in which he himself was trained during his early study years in Paris.

Thus, they are more of an homage to the source from which he later developed his own characteristic style. That makes Friday’s class more academic, in a way, with very difficult steps in quite short exercises, because when Bournonville choreographed this section in his ballet Konservatoriet, he had to compress an entire class into a passage of just 15 minutes!

A Class to Relax The Mind

Saturday’s class is an interesting combination of very basic steps (examples: No. 1: Adagio, No. 6: Pirouette, No. 10: Ballonné and Rond de jambes sauté, No. 11: Saut de basque and Attitude) and very choreographic and advanced combinations (examples: No. 15: Petit Allegro, No. 18: The Big Spanish Step, No. 22: The Galop, No. 23: The Big Joking Step, and No. 24: The Doorstep!).

A class to “relax the mind”, in a way, and just let your body remember all that was taught and worked on during the week, because all the exercises are “variations over those themes.”

Specific Steps for Female and Male Dancers

The majority of the class exercises are “unisex” steps, which means that they can be done by both women and men, but there are 11 exercises that have specific versions of the step for female and male dancers.

In Monday’s class, they are No. 18: The 7-step and No. 20: Charlotte Skousgaard; in Tuesday’s class, it is only No. 15: Brisé (where the difference is that the men continue with one extra section); in Wednesday’s class, they are No. 14: Traverse and No. 16: The Big Backwards Step; in Friday’s class, it is No. 12: The Coupé Ballonné and Jeté-step with different endings, and No. 17: The Cabriole with different port de bras; and in Saturday’s class, they are No. 12: La Reine and No. 14: The March Solo, where the ladies have an extra section that the men do not do.

Mostly, it is just one section of the exercise that is different for women and men, and sometimes it is just a single step. For instance, the men perform a tour en l’air, while the women do a soutenu or a pirouette.

Certain Characteristics

As mentioned earlier, many of the exercises consist of selected sequences from Bournonville’s choreographical works, and therefore it is characteristic that each exercise is made up of many different types of steps; a simple series of just assemblés or just jetés does not exist in these six classes (even in those exercises I have called more basic!).

Pirouettes are almost always prepared by or followed by jumping steps, like échappé, jeté, ballonné, assemblé, and changements. However, many exercises contain series of the same kind of step, executed in different directions and with different épaulement.

For instance, No. 15 in Monday’s class includes sissonnes fermées in both effacé and croisé, No. 13 in Wednesday’s class features sissonne attitudes landing in both effacé and croisé, and Thursday’s No. 12 consists of cabrioles in both effacé and croisé.

Certain exercises with a similar structure are repeated in several of the classes, for example, No. 3 in Tuesday’s, Thursday’s, and Saturday’s class: the Andante with pirouettes. This exercise is always structured in four sections following a certain pattern—starting in effacé going forward, reversing in effacé going backward, then continuing in croisé going forward, and ending with the reverse in croisé going backward.

Each section finishes with a signature pirouette, always in the following order: attitude en dedans finishing in à la seconde en face, attitude en dedans finishing in attitude effacé, attitude en dedans finishing in first arabesque, and en dedans pirouette in sur le cou-de-pied, finishing in relevé à la seconde (sometimes called the renversé pirouette by Bournonville).

Since this type of exercise exists in three of the six classes, it must be a sign that this was a favorite type of exercise in Bournonville’s own classes.

Monday’s class No. 3 is somewhat similar in structure but consists of only three parts instead of four, omitting the pirouette finishing in first arabesque.

However, over time, there has been some discussion about whether the three-part Andante belonged to Monday’s or Tuesday’s class, since the music can fit both. My own teachers have performed it both ways.

In the version now available on DVD, the three-part Andante has been assigned to Tuesday’s class, and the four-part one to Monday’s class. However, the two exercises are still very similar in structure. Wednesday’s class No. 4 is an Adagio with grand jeté and pirouettes, very different in its structure, whereas Friday’s class No. 4 is a much shorter Adagio in only two parts without any pirouettes.

Altogether, there are 12 different Adagio exercises in the Bournonville classes to choose from—some without and some with pirouettes, some very square and academic with grand pliés, dégagés, and développés (Tuesday’s, Thursday’s, and Saturday’s No. 1), while others are more choreographed, with unexpected and intricate combinations of steps (Monday’s No. 1, Wednesday’s No. 1 and 4, and Friday’s No. 1).

It is interesting to notice how Bournonville uses the grand plié as an important element in the exercises for the Applomb, for instance, as a preparation for pirouettes from 5th position (Monday’s No. 3 and 5, Tuesday’s No. 3) or for changement de pied (Tuesday’s No. 7, Wednesday’s No. 5, and Thursday’s No. 7).

In a grand plié, you are forced to maintain the vertical center feeling throughout the movement—toward the floor and upward again—which makes it an excellent exercise for keeping your center vertically over your feet.

Another signature exercise is the Posé Chassé, which exists in all six classes and is always among the first eight exercises. In Monday’s No. 4 and Saturday’s No. 4–5, the Posé Chassé is incorporated into the tendu exercise, whereas it appears as a separate, very long, and quite basic exercise in Tuesday’s No. 5 and in Thursday’s No. 4.

These two exercises go through all the possible directions: en face forward and backward, à côté to the front leg and to the back leg, effacé forward and backward, and croisé forward and backward. And even, in Thursday’s exercise, in the more seldom-used direction: épaulé, where the body stays en face, and the shoulders are twisted at an angle over the hip bone. In Wednesday’s No. 7, there is a rhythmically interesting and more choreographic version of the Posé Chassé, and in Friday’s No. 8, the Posé Chassé is combined with all kinds of small jumps and quick pas de bourrées.

Many of the exercises, especially the first ones in the center (examples: Monday’s No. 7, Tuesday’s No. 8 and 11, and Wednesday’s No. 9 and 11), have to be executed with the arms held in bras bas (preparatory position), which enables you to give full attention to the positions of the feet and the direction and placement of the shoulders and head (the épaulement).

Bournonville’s Musicality

In some of the allegro exercises, there is a sudden change of rhythm in the last section (examples: Monday’s No. 23 and Wednesday’s No. 11), which indicates that Bournonville must have used this trick in his classes to make the dancers more aware of the importance of paying attention to the musicality of the exercises as well.

Musicality is a keyword when it comes to characterizing the special Bournonville style. And musicality always goes hand in hand with technique, because in order to execute ballet exercises with the right musicality and phrasing, you need to master the technical aspects of the exercise first.

However, performing an exercise in the Bournonville classes in the musically correct way actually also helps the dancer technically. This is an interesting paradox of the Bournonville style and technique, and by doing the classes, you will gradually find the key to this paradox!

The Gift of Bournonville

Having now completed this attempt to analyze the structure of the Bournonville Classes, I want to conclude by once more praising the choreographic value of this collection of exercises and the satisfaction for both teacher and pupil that lies in working with all the details in them.

You never stop being impressed by Bournonville’s original way of putting steps together, and you constantly discover new surprises in the composition of steps.

And the reward is the joy that comes naturally when you are finally able to dance these steps with full attention to every aspect they contain: the musical phrasing and accents, the “light-and-shadow” quality of step combinations, the changing dynamics, the épaulements, and the unstrained, graceful, and fluid arm movements that contrast with the sharp and rapid footwork, connecting the series of steps into sequences of pure dance.

This is the gift you find at the bottom of Bournonville’s treasure box.

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Top photo: August Bournonville, painted by Emilius Bærentzen in 1841-42. Privately owned.