[Review] The Wild Duck – Vildanden – with the Norwegian National Ballet

This was my fifth experience of watching Henrik Ibsen interpreted through dance, following Stina Quagebeur’s Nora for English National Ballet (based on Nora Helmer, the central character in A Doll’s House), The Lady from the Sea (by Yabin Wang for the Kilden Teater of Kristiansand) and the two forerunners to this work (Ghosts and Hedda Gabbler) in the Ibsen trilogy created by Marit Moum Aune for Norwegian National Ballet. While Ibsen trails Shakespeare by some numbers in providing narratives for choreography, the latter provides for much greater versatility in genre, time, and place; while Ibsen’s works are invariably deep psychological dramas set in 19th-century Norwegian upper-middle-class domesticity.

Ibsen is embedded so deeply in the Norwegian psyche it is hardly surprising that four of my five experiences of Ibsen ballets have been performed in his homeland. The gentleman seated next to me chuckled his way through what appeared to be sombre moments in the text. When I asked about the humour, he replied that it was the clever subtleties in the danced interpretation that had amused him. It proved to me that a deep level of understanding is only possible for Norwegians and Ibsen experts. He doesn’t travel well in dance.

It has taken ten years for the Norwegian National Ballet trilogy to be completed and The Wild Duck is possibly the most insular, and therefore ambitious, of all the projects. The nineteenth-century Norwegian passion for hunting is a subliminal theme and the titular wild duck is a waterfowl that was wounded by Håkon Werle and – as is apparently the norm – suicidally dives to the bottom of the lake. However, Werle’s dog retrieves it, still alive and it is revived by his neighbours, the Ekdals. The duck is kept in the Ekdal attic as a good luck charm alongside diverse wildlife – pigeons, rabbits etc – with which the aged father, Gamle Ekdal, relives his former life as a great hunter by wandering upstairs for the occasional potshot.

Werle’s son, Gregers, has returned to his father’s home after a fifteen-year exile, his raciness implied by a beige/brown costume combo that contrasts significantly with the formal black attire of the other men. Another costume quirk is that all the men are properly dressed, including clever facsimiles of formal footwear suitable for dance, but all the women (with one exception) are barefoot, and their legs are so frequently splayed wide open that it becomes a fashion show of crotches cloaked in colour-coordinated shorts. One assumes that the reason for this contrast between the stiffly dressed men and the flimsiness of the women’s costumes was to signify the latter’s vulnerability. Ibsen’s storylines were never particularly charitable towards men so this would make sense.

In common with every Ibsen story, the Ekdal household is riven with intrigue, masked by secrets and lies. Håkon Werle has claimed droit du seigneur and raped his former servant, Gina, but she is now married to Hjalmar Ekdal. After his return, Gregers Werle rents a spare room in the Ekdal house, and the crux of the drama lies in Gregers resolute honesty (the domestication of the wild duck appears to be an analogy for truth overcoming lies) even though his mission to reveal the truth eventually tears the Ekdal family apart resulting in the ultimate tragedy.

However, as a non-Ibsen expert, I spent a lot of the ballet – it’s comparatively short, just one act of 75 minutes – playing hunt the character (partly because two key characters are omitted altogether)! Performing as the duck, Grete Sofie Borud Nybakken was easy to identify because she spent the first half of the ballet wearing a Disneyesque duck’s head. Nybakken’s performance was slick and smooth with a moving demonstration of the duck’s injured wing (although the rescue by the dog is not shown)! 

One consistent benefit in Norwegian National Ballet is the quality of their child performers – I raved about Nathaniel Liodden as a dead boy replicated by an AI avatar in Alan Lucien Øyen’s Nothing Personal earlier this season – and here again, Eva Lund’s performance as the young Hedwig (a child, not an owl) was excellent and also very moving (no spoiler here but if you know the story you will understand why). Hedwig is also portrayed by an adult dancer (Julie Petanova) and the final scene delivers Ibsen’s coup de grace superbly. 

Vasilii Tkachenko brought a carefree attitude to the pivotal character of Gregers and Silas Henriksen was properly prim as Hjalmar Ekdal. The old Ekdal is given just a single drunken entrance, played by veteran character dancer and ballet master, Aarne Kristian Ruutu. It was a pleasure to see Royal Ballet Dancer, Gina Storm Jensen, currently on sabbatical in her homeland, as the elegant Frau Sørby, the housekeeper and fiancée of Håkon Werle. 

The music – by Nils Petter Molvær – was a highlight, particularly in its descriptive passages, some electronic, some dominated by strings and some thumping drum-led rhythms, all recorded apart from the live onstage trumpet-playing by the composer himself. A lot of the action regularly breached the fourth wall by having characters enter and exit via the front of the stage.  

The uniqueness of this trilogy is in its collaborative composition. Although Marit Moum Aune is credited as choreographer, she is an oddity in this profession since Aune has never been a dancer and – by her own admission – cannot create dance. She is in effect a director and team leader who, at 59, brings a life of theatrical experience to bear on coordinating the self-choreographed ideas of her dancers. The result is a pleasing hotchpotch of movement – a lot of which is based around the central domestic set device of a table in the Ekdal house with moments of strong imagery such as an apparently disembodied head held between two sets of legs.

As with her two previous Ibsen creations, Ghosts (2014) and Hedda Gabbler (2017) – both also made to Molvær’s music – the choreography has no discernible style but for all that it is nonetheless enjoyable and descriptive. A more intimate knowledge of Ibsen would have helped me join in with my neighbour’s chuckling, but this Vildanden was still a fascinating and absorbing dance experience. 

Graham Watts

Graham Watts is a freelance writer and dance critic. He writes for The Spectator, Tanz, Shinshokan Dance Magazine (Japan), Ballet Magazine (Romania), BachTrack and the Hong Kong International Arts Festival and has previously written for the Sunday Express, Dancing Times, Dance Europe, DanceTabs, London Dance, the Edinburgh International Festival and Pointe magazine (USA).  He has also written the biography of Daria Klimentová (The Agony and the Ecstasy) and contributed chapters about the work of Akram Khan to the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet and on Shobana Jeyasingh for the third edition of Routledge’s Fifty Contemporary Choreographers.

He is Chairman of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle and of the UK National Dance Awards and regularly lectures on dance writing and criticism at The Royal Academy of Dance, The Place and (until the war) for Balletristic in Kyiv.  He was a nominee for the Dance Writing Award in the 2018 One Dance UK Awards and was appointed OBE in 2008.