International Dance Day. Something that naturally catches my attention, given that I have a protagonist like Christian la Cour. Formerly a principal dancer in the Royal Danish Ballet and now a top detective in the police force. But he is still a dancer at heart. As he once explained to Anna, his legs would wither if he didn’t dance.
He still does his ballet exercises, and once danced as a kind of extra in grand balls.
Becoming music
Christian knows the feeling of not just dancing to music but becoming music. Letting it fill the body so that every fibre in the body is music and expresses the music directly in a symbiosis that is hard to explain if you haven’t experienced it or have that kind of musicality. He loves dance. Loves music. Is a fan of Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, the Ballets Russes, Diaghilev, Fokine, and, not least, Nijinsky. Christian has, of course, danced Bournonville, as a boy instructed by the man himself.
I have been fascinated by ballet since I was about 4 years old and danced to classical music before the evening news on tv in a full tulle skirt and tights in my own choreography. Became music. Nothing came of it, though, when you don’t have either a dance school or a ballet school nearby – my parents even drove me to another town to dance, but when you’re four, you don’t dance. So it was ‘hare and hounds’ or ‘London Bridge is falling down’, which I staunchly declared was not dance and refused to participate in. That was the end of my dance career.
Mad about ballet
Later, Thomas Grimm produced some absolutely wonderful ballet programmes for DR. I watched ‘The Triumph of Death’ filmed 50 years ago, and later Matthew Bourne’s entirely unique Swan Lake with men only 30 years ago, I was completely mad about. It is the only Swan Lake I can really stand to watch.
When I lived in Copenhagen, I could see ballet at the theatre and ended up preferring the TV version. When dancers jump, they land very hard. And with some solid thumps that disturb the music. I never got used to that sound, which TV could apparently edit out or at least reduce.
When I imagine Christian dancing, he is a kind of blend between Nureyev and Baryshnikov, who are the ones that stand out most in my memory. Yes, it has been quite a while since I saw much ballet. I have an even older ballerina hanging on the wall at home – Gerda Gulda. In a photograph where my great-grandfather is in the process of modelling her while she stands as a model.