Royal Danes in Costa Mesa.

COSTA MESA, California--Royal Danish Ballet (RDB) will perform in four countries this summer. Copenhagen has been designated European City of Culture in 1996 and RDB's tours are a prelude to the major arts festival to be held there next year.

RDB will appear in an exclusive U.S. engagement at Orange County Performing Arts Center (OCPAC), in Costa Mesa, performing August Bournonville's La Sylphide, May 23-25, and A Folk Tale, May 26-28. The tour continues to Catania, Sicily, June 14-18; Covent Garden, London, August 31 and September 1; and concludes in Paris, September 5-6. The London and Paris performances will be in conjunction with Royal Danish Orchestra and Royal Danish Opera.

RDB is one of the world's oldest ballet companies and is renowned for its preservation of ballets by Bournonville, who became ballet master of RDB in 1830 and for forty-seven years choreographed distinctive works that feature swift, precise footwork and soaring, effortless jumps. RDB staged Bournonville festivals in 1979 and 1992. In conjunction with the second festival, RDB made two North American appearances: one at Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and the other at OCPAC.

This tour will be the company's first under its new artistic director, Peter Schaufuss, who trained at the RDB School and whose mother and father, Mona Vangsaae and Frank Schaufuss, were principal dancers in the 1940s and 1950s.

The performances at OCPAC will include the U.S. premiere of Schaufuss's extended version of La Sylphide, which he first staged for London Festival Ballet in 1979 and revived for RDB last September. A Folk Tale is staged by former artistic director Frank Andersen and Anne Marie Vessel, with elaborate sets and costumes designed by Denmark's Queen Margrethe II.

Schaufuss has created some controversy with his radical revision of La Sylphide, which Bournonville first staged in 1836 (following versions by Filippo Taglioni and Louis Henry). Schaufuss has played up the heady drama of the story and has augmented the familiar pure dance passages in the second act, specifically for the corps of sylphs.

"I have tried to reconstruct as much as possible of the original choreography, and to integrate it where I feel it is dramatically right," Schaufuss says. "This means that La Sylphide has once more become a full-length ballet." Schaufuss, who was famous for his portrayal of James, the ballet's male protagonist, adds, "I have tried to restore the same meaning to the figure of James as it had when he was still the central figure of the ballet- other productions have emphasized the role of the Sylph-and this has nothing to do with the fact that I myself danced the role, it is solely justified by the original version."

During the Orange County engagement many dancers who came into prominence during the 1992 Bournonville festival and U.S. tour will perform leading roles. Versatile young ballerinas Rose Gad and Silja Schandorff will alternate the leads in both La Sylphide and A Folk Tale. Petrusjka Broholm, Caroline Cavailo, Christina Olsson and Lise Stripp are other fleet, female dancers to watch for. The epitome of a Bournonville ballerina a generation ago, Kirsten Simone now offers powerful character portrayals, among them Madge, the Witch, in La Sylphide. Dynamic men are Johan Kobborg (a grand prix winner at the 1994 International Ballet Competition in Jackson, Mississippi), American virtuoso Lloyd Riggins, and the dark and dramatic Peter Bo Bendixen. Other men of note are Lars Damsgaard, Morten Munksdorf, and Stephen Pier. Returning to the roster will be the celebrated Alexander Kolpin, who missed the 1992 festival and U.S. tour because of an injury. He is remembered fondly by American audiences for his performances with RDB at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City in 1988 and by Orange County audiences for his critically praised debut in Eugene Loring's Billy the Kid at the University of California, Irvine, in 1989.