Among Highflyers

While taking a scenic bus tour of Oslo one grey afternoon last October, my ‘phone pinged with a surprising invitation from Ingrid Lorentzen, artistic director of Norwegian National Ballet, to attend that evening’s opening of Queen Sonja’s KunstStall (the art hall), a project championed by the Norwegian Queen to transform stables at the rear of Oslo Castle into a performance space.

This new venue opened with a gala performance by Norwegian National Ballet to an audience that included King Harald V and the Royal family together with Prime Minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, and a plethora of government ministers. Witnessing Lorentzen charmingly working the room was to understand that whether to King or corps dancer her radiant smile makes everyone feel the centre of her attention.

It is easy to understand the origin of these political and diplomatic skills for Lorentzen’s paternal grandmother, Annemarie, was the first Norwegian female Minister of Transport, and Communications, followed by a spell as Minister for Consumer Affairs and Administration and then as Norway’s ambassador to Iceland. When I spoke to Ingrid via Zoom just prior to Christmas, Annemarie’s influence on her upbringing opened our conversation: “It was a big thing for me to be able to talk to her about politics,” she explained. “As a child, my dreams were ballet and politics and I wonder if I ended up with a little mix of both.”

Lorentzen comes from a family of high achievers. Two of Annemarie’s children, Harald and Reidar, were international athletes in the Nordic tradition of iron men! Both could throw heavy things a long way! Reidar represented Norway at javelin in the Los Angeles Olympics and Harald – Ingrid’s father - held Nordic records in shot put, discus and javelin, becoming Norwegian champion many times. “My father (who was 79 on 9 January) can still bench press 100 kilos,” she told me proudly with that trademark smile. Completing the set, Ingrid’s mother, Rutt Trøite Lorentzen, was a Handball Champion as well as being a leading authority on children’s early language development.

Lorentzen was born in Trondheim, far away from any professional ballet and it was seeing a performance on television, aged two that began her love for the art. “I asked my parents every day for two years and eventually got to do jazz classes at four and then ballet, two years later. I cherished one book in English about children learning ballet,” she recalled. Although Lorentzen can’t remember the title, she does remember one fateful line: ‘…dancers must not grow too tall!’

Her height was an issue that plagued those formative years. “I was always considered to be too tall, but I had a big desire to dance” (throughout our interview Lorentzen continually illustrates her words with soft and descriptive arm movements). She tried to emulate her parents’ sporting success, but games always turned to dance: “I remember my father laughing because I was doing balletic leaps across the handball court!”

Although Lorentzen didn’t follow in her father’s footsteps, she learned from him the importance of repetition. “My father used to talk about the beauty of repetition to refine technique, making the distance a little longer each time.”  This patient building of technique that she saw in her father’s athletic prowess, helped hone her own focus on perfecting classical ballet. “He was all over the detail and I could see how essential that was,” she recalled, adding: “for him it was never about force but always the rhythm and flow of the throw.”

Lorentzen’s formative years as a ballet student were restless “I didn’t have any realistic hope of becoming a professional ballet dancer. I knew how far behind I was and while I was training to be a dancer, I was planning to become a schoolteacher (Grandmother Annemarie’s pre-political career).” The late choreographer and pedagogue, Gunvor Winge was an important early mentor. ‘What a teacher she was,’ Lorentzen wrote in Winge’s obituary, three years’ ago: ‘Gunvor had an intense understanding of…movement quality, footwork and resistance. I was 13 when we met and 14 when she said “good” for the first time… (I) dreamed of applying to the National Ballet Academy “I give you a 50% chance,” said Gunvor. I had never received stronger odds.’

The breakthrough came shortly after Winge’s cautious prediction when Arne Fagerholt, then the youngest principal at Norwegian National Ballet saw Lorentzen dance in Trondheim and suggested that she should audition for the National Academy. “I went into the toilet and cried because I’d always been told that I was too tall.”

The next few years were a blur of changing schools. “I had so little time to come from that local background and aspire to professional level and so I jumped schools to absorb everything that I could.” One of Lorentzen’s strengths that serves as an example to any aspiring dancer is the clarity of knowing when to move on to be able to grow. “I couldn’t stay in any situation if it stopped being good for me and I had the gift of knowing when I needed to change.” But this self-awareness came at a cost. “Unfortunately, I gained the reputation of not being steady, people didn’t trust me because they thought I would leave.”

At 17, after less than a year at the National Academy in Oslo, Lorentzen moved to the Royal Swedish Ballet School, although she left Stockholm before the school year was over to escape negative influences. “They exist everywhere, and I needed to detach myself so that it wouldn’t bring me down. The only thing you can control as a young person is what you do for yourself.” After Sweden, Lorentzen continued her ballet studies in New York and Paris, seeking out teachers such as David Howard and Gelsey Kirkland to continue her improvement.

Her early professional career was similarly eclectic. “I didn’t land a permanent job in a classical company,” Lorentzen recalled. “Companies had seemed interested in me but I kind of lost it during my late teens.” She believes this loss of interest was partly due to weight gain after attempting to diet at a young age. “I struggled with eating for a short period and when you starve yourself at that age you can then easily gain weight, making you less attractive to classical companies,” she said, disarmingly explaining this age-old problem.

Following her breakthrough performance of Kjersti Alveberg’s Lokk in the Eurovision contest for young dancers of 1991, Lorentzen spent four years as a freelance dancer before joining Skǻnes Danseteater in Malmö. Two years’ later, in May 1997, after seven years and four auditions, she was accepted into Norwegian National Ballet, becoming a principal dancer in 2000.   

Her dance career was counter-intuitive to the norm for any classically trained ballerina. “It was the wrong order,” Lorentzen acknowledged, “but not because I chose it that way. I didn’t debut as Odette/Odile in Swan Lake until I was 30!” Lorentzen acknowledges the importance of her classical coaching whilst in Malmö, especially from the late Adrienne Matheson and the company director and choreographer, Patrick King. In Oslo, she was coached by Olga Evreinoff, a pupil of Natalia Dudinskaya.

The itinerant nature and contemporary dance experience of Lorentzen’s formative years were in stark contrast to her desire to work in a company, her preference for classical ballet and her eventual career stability. “I love working in a company,” she explained, adding “it was tough for me as a freelancer to establish something and then leave it for something else. Continuity was a problem for me and now here I am in the same company for 25 years! And ballet and theatre were always my first loves, never contemporary. I don’t think I’ve ever said that out loud before,” she added with confessional laughter.

Despite this, Lorentzen considers herself fortunate to have worked with many major choreographers during her contemporary dance career, such as Mats Ek, Jiří Kylián and Paul Lightfoot/Sol León. “The experience of dancing their works was a huge advantage when I joined Norwegian Ballet.”

Lorentzen’s fifteen years as a dancer in Oslo were combined with an eclectic performing life elsewhere. She appeared in 35 productions away from the Opera House including theatre and film, performing as Eva Linde in Genanse og verdighet at the National Theatre (2000), the starring role in the film and stage production of Lille Frøken Norge (2003) and as Solveig in Peer Gynt (2004). 

The desire to return to Oslo was for the best of all reasons. “I came because of the man,” she acknowledged, noting that our interview was on the day following the 30^th anniversary of beginning her relationship with Otto Jespersen, the Norwegian comedian, actor and activist. They met when Ingrid was 21 and Otto, 38, and their daughter, Alva, was born in 2008. “I returned to Norway just to be with him,” she explained, adding that he has been influential to her career, “especially through the way he sees humour in the smallest of things.” Nowadays, Otto is also of more practical help. “He is deeply supportive of my job and takes care of everything at home.”  

In 2012, the (then) Opera House CEO, Tom Remlov, invited Lorentzen to join the selection committee to find a successor to Espen Giljane as Ballet director. “I remember sitting in his office and giving my thoughts and then at a follow-up session he asked me to apply for the job! My instinctive reaction was to give him the name of someone that I thought he should call instead of me. However, he suggested that it might be ten years or more until the next train leaves and so if I would ever consider it then I should do so now. I remember feeling a strong sense of responsibility if they were going to hire a new director. It wasn’t so much that I needed to do it but that someone had to do it,” she said with a hearty laugh.

Lorentzen was appointed to the job in August 2012 at the relatively young age of 40.  Again, she is refreshingly honest. “When I joined in 1997, it was not the company of my dreams, but I thought that by working from the inside I could make it so.  I believe strongly in working collaboratively with colleagues, backing and supporting each other. As a dancer, my competitors became my closest friends and, when I became director, I wanted to establish a solid and mutually supportive group since I believe that is the only way to grow.”

Xander Parish left the Mariinsky Ballet in St Petersburg in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and together with his wife, Anastasia Demidova, they were offered new contracts by Lorentzen to join Norwegian National Ballet. I asked Parish what was special about her leadership, and he replied: “Ingrid is not only a great director who does everything she can to lead the company to ever-increasing heights but also a person who understands her dancers’ needs from a personal, human perspective. She has found a rare balance in this respect, and it is a pleasure to work for her.” I encountered similar praise when talking to other company members.  

In twelve years of running the ballet company (Lorentzen is on an extension to her third contract), she has created and consolidated a new brand for Norwegian National Ballet: one that embraces the physical theatre of Alan Lucian Øyen’s Nothing Personal alongside the classicism of Natalia Makarova’s Swan Lake topped off by the national significance of Marit Moum Aune’s unique interpretations of Henrik Ibsen’s seminal plays. On the day that we spoke, Lorentzen was about to announce The Wild Duck, to premiere in March 2024, as the third in this trilogy, following Ghosts and Hedda Gabler; the unique twist being that Aune initiates direction, but the dancers create the steps for their own roles.

My mention of a new brand brings an enthusiastic response. “I wrote that in my application for the job,” Lorentzen exclaimed. “I haven’t thought about it so clearly before, but I think this thread goes through my life: a strange mix of not having the self-belief that I can do something but at the same time being very clear about what I want to do. I wrote that we needed a brand – we needed signature works like the Ibsen pieces. I wrote what I ended up doing, not that I thought that I could, but what I thought had to be done.”

Despite her modesty, Lorentzen is a major figure in the cultural life of her homeland. As we speak, she is preparing to head up a major theatre jury and the International Ibsen Award Committee. It’s no surprise that her company was selected to open Queen Sonja’s KunstStall! At just 51, she has clearly a lot more yet to give in a career that, from eclectic beginnings, has evolved into progressing a burgeoning international reputation for Norwegian Ballet as an exciting company with a solid brand and a diverse repertoire.