News Release
July 2005
Bethlehem, Pa., August 2, 2005—Patricia N. McAndrew, who normally
works in an office at Lehigh University, is spending this week in Copenhagen, Denmark,
as guest of the Royal Danish Ballet.
McAndrew, who graduated from Moravian College in
1968, expanded her senior Honors project on the Danish choreographer August Bournonville
(1805-79) into an English translation of his memoirs, My Theater Life. She was able
to study and work in Denmark with the aid of a Fulbright fellowship. More recently, she
has translated the letters of Bournonville to his daughter.
The Royal Danish Ballet, which
Bournonville directed from 1830 to 1877, invited McAndrew to attend a symposium on Bournonville’s
work that is being held the first week in August.
August Bournonville is one of the most
revered names in ballet history. He was trained by his father, the great dancer Antoine
Bournonville, and then went to Paris to train with Auguste Vestris. While a soloist with
the Paris Opéra Ballet, he also choreographed
and trained dancers. (His most famous student was Lucille Grahn.) He created more than
50 ballets, mostly for the Royal Danish, but also for the Paris Opéra and theaters
in Stockholm, Vienna, and Moscow. He also staged operas.
Many of his works have been passed
down from generation to generation in the Royal Danish Ballet and are still in the active
repertory of the world’s ballet companies today.
Among these are “Napoli,” “Far From Denmark,” “The Kermesse
in Bruges” and “The Conservatory.”
Bournonville’s style emphasized clean, accurate footwork rather than bravura leaps
and turns, and it became apparent over time that this “grounded” approach
to dancing made bravura work less risky for the dancers.
Though ballet took its first
steps in the court of Louis XIV of France, who was a gifted dancer, the art form quickly
shifted to one in which men did little more than support women dancers and help them
hold their balance. Bournonville, who came a century after the French dancing-masters,
placed the training and athleticism of men on an equal footing with those of women. The
Royal Danish Ballet is still known as a training ground for male dancers, as well as
a repository of Bournonville’s choreography.
McAndrew works at Lehigh University,
Bethlehem, as a coordinator of volunteers for the campus art galleries. She is also an
adjunct curator. With an interest in the history of the Civil War and other 19th-century
American conflicts, she has curated an exhibit about the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine,
which started the Spanish-American War of 1898, and edited a book about Frank Wilkeson,
a Civil War soldier and explorer of the Pacific Northwest. She is also a free-lance editor
and publisher for historical groups such as the Stephen Vincent Benét Society.
Recently she founded her own company, Moon Trail Books.
