Royal Danish Research Articles

Virtuosity in the wings

The article analyses artistic practices and institutional patterns that concern the collaborative creation, maintenance and transformation of dancing bodies at Royal Danish Ballet. Classical ballet conventionally relies on the myth of the solitary artistic genius who gives herself to the artform with extraordinary devotion and discipline. Yet, a series of interviews that I conducted with employees at the Royal Danish Ballet, highlight the outstanding individual on-stage performances as heavily reliant on the backstage expertise, care and commitment of many; the principal dancer’s body as collectively produced.

Filmmaking as a Tool for Investigating the Positive Spatial Experiences of Disabled People.

Current studies at the intersection between architecture and disability focus on addressing the immediate needs of disabled individuals and often overlook the potential of built environments to create positive experiences. Additionally, conventional approaches for investigating disabled people's spatial experiences often fail to capture the inherent nuanced sensory and emotional aspects. This paper describes the process of filmmaking and the use of film to explore its contributions and limitations in the understanding on how personal and contextual factors influence individuals' positive spatial experiences. The film Places and Small Pleasures, produced by the Cluster for Spatial Inclusion at the Royal Danish Academy in collaboration with Nossell & Co, serves as a case study for a reflective inquiry. The filmmaking process involved participant interviews, transcript analysis, storyboarding, shooting, editing, and final screening. The analysis of the interviews with four selected participants revealed key spatial attributes and contextual phenomena contributing to their described positive experiences. Four distinct narratives emerged, highlighting the participants' diverse bodily conditions, emotions and feelings in their favorite places. Representations of their experiences through the film incorporated verbal and non-verbal cues, their bodily reactions, and contextual phenomena, offering an immersive sensory richness for the viewers. By capturing the embodied experiences of the four participants within their personal and spatial contexts, the filmmaking process enhanced understanding and empathy, enriching disability studies and fostering academic discourse in this domain through positive stories.

Диспут Ховитца: свобода воли, ответственность и безумие

For the first time, detailed information about the Howitz dispute is presented in Russian. His events are a vivid and original example of how philosophy has a decisive impact on public life. The debate about free will involve not only philosophers, but also doctors, lawyers, politicians, theologians and writers. They published works analyzing the problem of free will in the context of the philosophy of Hume and Kant, and sought to adapt the results of their re­search to Danish public life. The results of the philosophical debates related to the Howitz dispute formed the basis of the Danish legal system, but its influ­ence extends far beyond the borders of the country. The article reconstructed the events of the Howitz dispute based on the material of Danish dictionaries and studies of the 19th century, as well as a few English-language sources. It exa­mines Howitz’s philosophical concept as outlined in his major work, which pro­voked the debate. The author pays special attention to discussing the current state of historical and philosophical discussions around the dispute. The pa­per analyzes the latest hypothesis about the connection between Arthur Scho­penhauer and the Howitz controversy. It was probably in connection with the Howitz dispute that Schopenhauer’s competition essay “On the Foundation of Morals” was rejected by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences. The article questions the assertion that the members of the competition jury knew Schopen­hauer’s philosophy well, but there is no doubt that Schopenhauer’s views were similar to Howitz’s concept, which the members of the competition jury were fiercely opposed to. Thus, the refusal Schopenhauer received from the members of the competition jury can be considered in the context of the Ho­witz dispute, which captured the Danish intellectual community in the first half of the 19th century

Rice and Arak: the South Indian Diet of the Early XVIII Century through the Eyes of Europeans according to the Documents of the Danish Royal Mission

Since the beginning of the XVIII century, the Danish Royal Mission has been working in the South of India. For the first years, it consisted mainly of people from the University of Halle. Many historical sources have been preserved, according to which this page of the history of the penetration of Christianity into Asia and the formation of European Oriental studies is being reconstructed today. Lutheran pastors studied languages, translated sacred literature, preached, created schools, built churches. A significant amount of research has been devoted to these problems. However, the daily life of Europeans in the South Asian region at the beginning of the XVIII century until now has attracted little attention. Numerous reports on the work of missionaries in India allow us to envision how the Lutheran ministers of the church adapted to local household traditions, including culinary traditions. The first head of the mission, B. Ziegenbalg in his works gives overall information about the diet of local residents. In addition to telling about the main dishes and drinks of India, he provides valuable data on the relationship between cooking and Indian medicine. His works also contain materials concerning the specifics of the diet of ascetics. Finally, in connection with culinary topics, his materials preserve data about the economy of the region (trade relations, cultivated crops, prices for basic food and beverages, etc.). The texts of Ziegenbalg allow us to raise an important academic problem of meeting, interaction and mutual adaptation of two completely different cultures – European and Indian.

“THE EVENING PASSED AS USUAL”: LATE AUTUMN IN DENMARK THROUGH THE EYES OF THE RUSSIAN SUCCESSOR (THE DIARY OF GRAND DUKE MICHAEL ALEXANDROVICH, OCTOBER 17 - NOVEMBER 20, 1899)

For the first time, a thematic fragment of the diary of the Successor and Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich is published, covering the period of his stay in Denmark in the late autumn of 1899. The diary records demonstrate the calm and measured daily life characteristic of the Danish Royal Family during the reign of King Christian IX, the grandfather of the Grand Duke, and describe the peculiarities of the stay of representatives of the Russian Imperial House visiting Danish relatives. This text of the diary is given in accordance with the methodological recommendations adopted in Russia for the publication of archival document.

Hamlet and Its Danish Double. The Historical Performance as Medium for a Utopian Monarchy

The first Hamlet production in Danish, performed 1813 at The Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen, went through substantial cuts and changes in the text. The re-cycling of sets from other performances were used in the production of Hamlet and turned the reworked version of Hamlet into a negotiation of the utopian heroic vision of the Danish monarchy, despite its painful bloody conflicts of power. It is my point, that this production of Hamlet, by the dramaturgical choices made, became, what I would determine as, a plain “theatricality” of the play and with the desire for a peaceful future without conflicts. The invisibility of Shakespeare’s “utopia” was transformed into an almost theatricalized “anti-utopia” or dystopia in this production with an affinity for melodrama. How seemingly strange and paradoxical this dramaturgy was, the production of the first Danish Hamlet paved the way for a historically very long stylized form of reality in its impact on the long ninetieth century Danish theatre history. The theatrical way of thinking, as embedded in Shakespeare’s play, was adopted into a theatre mentality where dreams would echo the idea of the Royal interest and taste, leaving an impression of conform aesthetics. The dramaturgical choices from 1813 lasted until the time when Henrik Ibsen’s naturalist plays would have their opening nights at the very same Royal Danish Theatre.

“You Uncultured Northerners Don’t Know What Rhythms Are”

This article is a presentation of the ethnomusicologist Birthe Trærup (1930–2022) who was a pioneering fieldworker and disseminator of Eastern European folk music in the 1950s. She concentrated her fieldwork among Albanians in Kosovo in the period 1959–1976, but also visited other countries and other areas of the former Yugoslavia. Despite being a pioneer, she has not received the attention she deserves. The Danish Folklore Archive at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen contains a wide range of material donated and bequeathed by Trærup.

Ecotoxicological Risk of World War Relic Munitions in the Sea after Low- and High-Order Blast-in-Place Operations.

Submerged munitions from World War I and II are threatening human activities in the oceans, including fisheries and shipping or the construction of pipelines and offshore facilities. To avoid unforeseen explosions, remotely controlled "blast-in-place" (BiP) operations are a common practice worldwide. However, after underwater BiP detonations, the toxic and carcinogenic energetic compounds (ECs) will not completely combust but rather distribute within the marine ecosphere. To shed light on this question, two comparable World War II mines in Denmark's Sejerø Bay (Baltic Sea) were blown up by either low-order or high-order BiP operations by the Royal Danish Navy. Water and sediment samples were taken before and immediately after the respective BiP operation and analyzed for the presence of ECs with sensitive GC-MS/MS and LC-MS/MS technology. EC concentrations increased after high-order BiP detonations up to 353 ng/L and 175 μg/kg in water and sediment, respectively, while low-order BiP detonations resulted in EC water and sediment concentrations up to 1,000,000 ng/L (1 mg/L) and >10,000,000 μg/kg (>10 g/kg), respectively. Our studies provide unequivocal evidence that BiP operations in general lead to a significant increase of contamination of the marine environment and ecotoxicological risk with toxic ECs. Moreover, as compared to high-order BiP detonations, low-order BiP detonations resulted in a several 1000-fold higher burden on the marine environment.

Sorting URLs out: seeing the web through infrastructural inversion of archival crawling

Web archives collections have become important sources for Internet scholars by documenting the past versions of web resources. Understanding how these collections are created and curated is of increasing concern and recent web archives scholarship has studied how the artefacts stored in archives represent specific curatorial choices and collecting practices. This paper takes a novel approach in studying web archiving practice, by focusing on the challenges encountered in archival web crawling and what they reveal about the web itself. Inspired by foundational work in infrastructure studies, infrastructural inversion is applied to study how crawler interactions surface otherwise invisible, background or taken-for-granted aspects of the web. This framework is applied to study three examples selected from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork observations of web archiving practices at the Danish Royal Library, with findings demonstrating how the challenges of archival crawling illuminate the web’s varied actors, as well as their changing relationships, power differentials and politics. Ultimately, analysis through infrastructural inversion reveals how collection via crawling positions archives as active participants in web infrastructure, both shaping and shaped by the needs and motivations of other web actors.

Design and Evaluation of a Multisensory Concert for Cochlear Implant Users

This article describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of vibrotactile concert furniture, aiming to improve the live music experience of people with hearing loss using hearing technology such as cochlear implants (CI). The system was the result of a series of participatory design sessions involving CI users with different hearing assistive setups (bi-implant, bimodal, and monoimplant), and it was evaluated in a concert scenario (drums, bass, and female vocals) at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. The project aimed to improve the music appreciation for CI users by providing a multisensory concert designed with CI challenges in mind, but not excluding normal-hearing individuals or individuals with other forms of hearing aids from participating in the event. The evaluation was based on (video-recorded) observations and postexperience semistructured interviews; the data were analyzed using event analysis and meaning condensation. The results indicate that tactile augmentation provides a pleasant experience for CI users. However, concertgoers with residual hearing reported being overwhelmed if the tactile stimulation amplitude exceeds a certain threshold. Furthermore, devices that highlight instrument segregation are preferred over ones that present a tactile mixdown of multiple auditory streams.

Land without Dreams, 2018

Land without Dreams is produced by FIX&FOXY in collaboration with Eventministeriet at The Royal Danish Theatre. Actor: Lise Lauenblad. Director and writer: Tue Biering. Dramaturge: Tanja Diers.

An offer the journal couldn’t refuse

The article describes a two-year project (running from 2021 to 2022) that worked on getting Danish Open Access journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The project was run in partnership by Copenhagen Business School (CBS Library), Royal Danish Library and Aalborg University Library, in close collaboration with DOAJ. All of the journals that participated are hosted on the libraries’ Open Journal Systems (OJS). In this article the authors demonstrate some of the challenges the journals and the project group faced in the inclusion process and in the assistance the project provided, as well as learning outcomes and perspectives.

Proteomic identification of beer brewing products in the ground layer of Danish Golden Age paintings.

The application of mass spectrometry-based proteomics to artworks provides accurate and detailed characterization of protein-based materials used in their production. This is highly valuable to plan conservation strategies and reconstruct the artwork's history. In this work, the proteomic analysis of canvas paintings from the Danish Golden Age led to the confident identification of cereal and yeast proteins in the ground layer. This proteomic profile points to a (by-)product of beer brewing, in agreement with local artists' manuals. The use of this unconventional binder can be connected to the workshops within the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. The mass spectrometric dataset generated from proteomics was also processed with a metabolomics workflow. The spectral matches observed supported the proteomic conclusions, and, in at least one sample, suggested the use of drying oils. These results highlight the value of untargeted proteomics in heritage science, correlating unconventional artistic materials with local culture and practices.

Person-centered and experiential psychotherapy systematic literature search in Danish: a bibliographical survey, 1960-2022

ABSTRACT This systematic literature search aims at mapping all currently available Person-Centered & Experiential (PCE) literature in Danish language and is part of an effort to strengthen the PCE-tradition in Denmark. The methodological approach in this literature search consisted of three phases: 1) The collecting phase was based on known literature by Danish PCE-experts as well as a systematic literature search in the Royal Danish library database using PCE-keywords and known author names. 2) The sorting phase was based on using inclusion and exclusion criteria. 3) The reporting phase consists of this paper, a presentation at the PCE2022 conference and publishing the results online and in www.pce-literature.org. The result of the systematic literature search was a total of 144 Danish PCE-literature references distributed on the four sub-categories: 1) PCE-literature by Danish authors (47 references), 2) PCE-literature translations (25 references), 3) humanistic literature by Danish authors (33 references), and 4) humanistic literature translations (39 references). Literature by motivational interviewing is most common with person-centered approach and emotion-focused therapy (EFT) next in line. The discussion covers the status of motivational interviewing among PCE-therapies, the general lack of Danish PCE-literature, and a call for more translations into Danish of major PCE-literature.

Arresting Actors: A Sámi Drum and its Complex Relations

ABSTRACT The article centres around a well-known artefact in Sámi history, the more than 300-year-old drum that once belonged to Poala Ánde/Anders Poulsen, that has recently been returned to Sápmi after a long restitution process. Sámi drums were deemed sorcerers’ devices and routinely confiscated and destroyed during seventeenth century Danish autocracy; their users prosecuted and sometimes executed. In the early 1690s, the drum was seized and sent to Copenhagen and the Royal Danish Art Chamber, whereas the owner was killed in custody while awaiting the judicial decision. The case involves one of very few preserved Sámi drums accompanied by a contemporaneous indigenous voice conveyed in the trial document. Paradoxically, at the same time as Sámi drums were confiscated and, in many cases, destroyed, some were embarking on journeys as attractive collectors’ items. Today, Sámi drums are frequently “arrested” in museum exhibitions as “shamanistic devices”, often echoing old tools and tropes of othering. The article argues that there is a tendency to translate actors like Poala Ánde/Anders Poulsen and the drum into categories that immobilise them, and which prevent historical configurations to enter the narrative. It also contends that discussions about what the figures on the drumhead represent have dominated the reception and steered attention away from individual aspects of the drum and its vibrant materiality. In line with the biographical approach of the exhibition Ruoktot ­– The Return of the Sámi Drums by the Sámi Museum in Kárášjohka, I explore the entangled agency of the drum to help consider material aspects and concurrent meanings.

Traveling Images: On Carl Rasmussen’s “Greenland Paintings”

In 1870–71, the Danish painter Jens Erik Carl Rasmussen traveled to Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). Not much is known about the visit, yet his travels to Nuuk and Maniitsoq provided the artist with visual material for his paintings for more than twenty years afterwards. One outcome of Rasmussen’s travel was the work Midnight Atmosphere by the Coast of Greenland. The Danish Royal Gallery acquired this painting, an idealized imagination of a colonial setting, in 1872, where the work came to represent the first collection of a “Greenlandic” motif. Subsequently, this artwork continued to travel in and out of other political settings, such as the 1931 colonial exhibition in Paris. This article follows the trajectory of Rasmussen’s Midnight Atmosphere through the archives and through its institutional settings in order to consider how images travel and how travels create images. It is argued that while the itinerary of the artist remained entangled within the colonial system, the trajectory in and through various institutions was similarly central to the colonial control of Kalaallit Nunaat as both place and image.

The avant-garde consumers: A new perspective on quality evaluations of performing arts

This article further investigates a well-established issue in consumer research concerning cultural offerings, namely the relationship between expert (critics) and audience quality evaluations. We provide a new perspective by arguing that such a relationship must consider the heterogeneity of consumers and experts alike. This article addresses the issue of quality evaluation of performing arts, and the purpose is to determine the relationship between, on the one hand, the criteria adopted for quality assessment, and on the other hand, the preferences for particular theater performances. This is done by simultaneously considering heterogeneity among the consumers and among the critics, which is a new approach in the literature. Using data from newspaper critics’ evaluations and from surveys completed by a sample of operagoers at the Royal Danish National Theater, we perform a multilevel latent class analysis, and we find three distinctive segments: The the unexperienced audience, the conventional connoisseurs and the unconventional avant-gardes. The avant-garde consumers and experts are localized as a distinct segment of audience, with different preferences and different evaluation criteria than the other audience segments (the conventional connoisseurs and the unexperienced audience). Newness and innovation are the most important criteria for the avant-garde consumer segment. The goal of an opera house or a theater is not just to increase attendance and revenue, but equally to innovate the artform. In this perspective, the avant-garde consumers are an important segment for the opera houses and producers of other cultural products, and a better understanding of the early adopters of artistic innovation (the avant-garde consumers), their preferences, evaluation criteria, and behavior, would seem to be crucial information. We suggest future empirical research could focus on avant-garde consumers as an important segment of the audience.

The Alchemist, Metal-Divider and Transmuter Carl F. Wenzel and his 1776 Award from the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences through Professor C. G. Kratzenstein.

C. F. Wenzel was a chemist and an alchemist. He had deep knowledge of acids, bases and salts, and he was credited with the first formulation of the Law of Mass Action. Yet he was also an alchemist, who on the eve of the Chemical Revolution published his beliefs in transmutation and in the division of metals into their constituents, for which he was rewarded with the gold medal of the Royal Danish Academy of the Sciences. His promoter, Professor C. G. Kratzenstein, was himself a believer in transmutation, even if he voiced some reservations.

Claus Braestrup 17 January 1945 to 7 February 2023.

In the summer of 2002, I was elected president of the 17th World Congress of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology, WorldPharma2010, among others because the three major Danish pharmaceutical companies, Novo Nordisk, Leo Pharma and H. Lundbeck A/S had promised significant sponsorships. One month later, I began a one-year sabbatical at the Saint Antoine Hospital in Paris, and one day in November 2002 I received an e-mail from the famous psychopharmacologist Claus Bræstrup who asked me to give him a call. At the time, he was the research director of H. Lundbeck A/S in Copenhagen. I knew him relatively well but I was not used to receiving e-mails from him, so my first thought was “Oh my gosh, is there a problem with the sponsorship?” But it was not so. It turned out that he was also the chairman of the board of directors of Pharmacology & Toxicology, and he was looking for a new editor-in-chief of the journal to replace Jens S. Schou,1 who at the time had been running the journal for more than 40 years. He wanted to ask me if that could be something for me? To be honest, I was a bit reluctant because I knew that organizing WorldPharma2010 would take a lot of my time, but fortunately I ended up by saying “yes,” and this is one of the best decisions I have made in my career. I went back to Copenhagen for a short meeting with Claus and to sign the contract. This was the only time we met in the context of the journal, because a few weeks later he stepped down as chairman as he had become the president and chief executive of H. Lundbeck A/S. Both of Claus' parents were physicians but he took a different lead and earned a bachelor of engineering in 1967 and a master of biochemistry from University of Copenhagen in 1971. He was a research fellow at the Laboratory of Psychopharmacology at the Psychiatric Hospital Sct. Hans in Roskilde, Denmark from 1971 to 1976. It was here, he discovered the benzodiazepine receptor2 which in fact is not an independent receptor but rather an allosteric modulatory binding site on the GABA-A receptor, and this made him world famous. From 1976 to 1984, he was head of psychopharmacology research at the pharmaceutical company Ferrosan, and when it was acquired by Novo Nordisk, he became head of Pharma Research and Development of Novo Pharma and later of the CNS division and finally of insulin research. In 1994, he was headhunted by the German drug company Schering AG in Berlin, where he was head of the central research division, but 4 years later, he returned to Copenhagen to become executive vice-president of Research and Development at H. Lundbeck A/S until he became the CEO. He retired from H. Lundbeck A/S in 2008. For years, Claus Bræstrup was also a member of the Royal Danish Society of Sciences and Letters, the National Health Science Research Council, and The Danish Academy of Technical Sciences. From 1988 to 1993, Claus Bræstrup was an adjunct professor in neuroscience at the University of Copenhagen and he was awarded the Lundbeck Prize in 1984.

A refreshing dive in Danish libraries: Impressions of af French intern librarian at the Royal Danish Library

A refreshing dive in Danish libraries: Impressions of af French intern librarian at the Royal Danish Library