Royal Danish Ballet review: Superb 'Sylphide'

Cal Performances kept a long-delayed date with living history Tuesday evening at Zellerbach Hall. The glorious Royal Danish Ballet, absent from local stages for a half century, returned with an engrossing production of August Bournonville's "La Sylphide," its culture's most familiar and venerable (1836) ballet, given here in an expansive 2003 staging by artistic director Nikolaj Hübbe and Anne Marie Vessel Schlüter.

This is one of the world's most distinctive and enduring classical dance traditions, one in which speed, airiness, softness and humanity dominate every gesture. Bournonville's only tragic work, a moral fable on the perils of pursuing fantasy at the cost of worldly contentment, encompasses an encyclopedia of emotions, translated throughout into an exhilarating pageant of linked steps and mime that epitomize this legendary choreographer's movement style and philosophy. With Bournonville, one cannot separate the two.

Every fresh staging of his works prompts a measure of consternation among Bournonville savants, who regard the loss of a traditional detail as a major crime. Not to worry here: this production sustains the narrative thread, highlights the iconic set pieces and finds particular pleasure in the ensembles of the wedding guests and 16 attendant sylphs. In Mads Blangstrup's James, the Danes have brought us a superb protagonist, an arrogant Scots fellow who engineers his dire destiny. In Blangstrup's buoyancy, smoothness in transitions and quicksilver emotional responses, one finds the best of the tradition. The Sylph of veteran (American-born) Caroline Cavallo maintains a lovely teasing quality and sustains the awesome balances, although at this stage of her career, her elevation seems circumscribed.

Nicolai Hansen dispatched the hapless Gurn with wondrous specificity of gesture; Camilla Ruelkkye Holst was the uncomprehending Effy. And Lis Jeppesen, in earlier decades a haunting Sylph, has transitioned to Madge, the witch whose ravaged beauty, sense of injustice and emotional yearning precipitate the tragedy; a brilliant portrayal. In the pit, Henrik Vagn Christensen conducted the Berkeley Symphony in a stout reading of the Lovenskiold score.

To open this long but infinitely rewarding evening, Hübbe revived former artistic director Flemming Flindt's "The Lesson," that eerie 1964 number about the homicidal dance master who cannot abide imperfection. Thomas Lund delivered a stunningly deranged characterization. Ida Praetorius' leggy, annoyingly pert student, made an ideal foil.