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Danish culture minister urges Musikhuset Aarhus to drop Russian ballet performance

Given the situation in Ukraine, concert venue Musikhuset Aarhus should cancel the Russian National Ballet's performance on Monday, Danish Minister of Culture Ane Halsboe-Jørgensen said on Saturday.

Published: 26 February 2022 11:01 CET
Ballet dancers perform Swan Lake
The Russian National Ballet is scheduled to perform "Swan Lake" at Musikhuset Aarhus on Monday. CRISTINA QUICLER / AFP

“I do not believe that the National Ballet from Russia should perform on Danish soil in a situation where Russia has attacked a free democratic country. I cannot order Musikhuset to cancel the performance, but it is clearly my position that such events should not take place in the current situation,” Halsboe-Jørgensen said, Danish news agency Ritzau reported.

‘Swan Lake’ is due to be performed at the 3,806-person-capacity concert hall – Scandinavia’s largest – on Monday evening.

The minister also urged other cultural sites to take a critical look at what and who they had on their programmes.

However, when it came to state-owned institutions, Halsboe-Jørgensen’s position was clear:

“I draw a line in my area and say that all cooperation with the Russian state at our state institutions must cease. My ministry has asked state museums like the National Museum of Denmark and the Danish National Gallery to review collaborations and agreements to see if there are any agreements with Russia to be stopped.”

The Russian invasion has caused several other culture clashes across Europe and the United States, AP reported.

Acclaimed Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, chief of Saint Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre and known for his warm Kremlin ties, was suddenly dropped from concerts where he was due to lead the Vienna Philharmonic at New York’s Carnegie Hall.

This came as Munich’s mayor told Gergiev to speak out against Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine or risk losing his job as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic.

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) also made a statement on Friday, saying that no Russian entertainers would be permitted to take part in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“In light of the unprecedented crisis in Ukraine, the inclusion of a Russian entry in this year’s contest would bring the competition into disrepute,” the EBU said in a statement.

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Member comments

  1. What Putin does is horrible; what some other people do, claiming that they understand social sciences, arts and culture is plain stupid…. What does Ballet or Arts or Museum exhibition has to do with Putin?

    Some of the decisions politicians make truly make me feel that one of the key criteria to get a govt. job is to get brain size reduction surgery.

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DANISH HISTORY

Worker finds mammoth tusk in gravel pit in Denmark

A rare mammoth tusk has been found by a machine operator at a gravel pit in Terndrup, north of Aarhus, in the second mammoth find made at the location.

Published: 22 May 2024 09:44 CEST
Updated: 22 May 2024 11:37 CEST
Worker finds mammoth tusk in gravel pit in Denmark

Kristian Lang Hedegaard, a machine operator at the Siem Grusgrav gravel pit in Terndrup, north of Aarhus, was excavating gravel on May 16th when a scoop revealed the tusk. 

“I actually had my colleague on the phone when I picked up the scoop, and then I said: ‘I think, damn it, that I have found a tusk for the cheekbone we found a few years ago,” the machine operator at the pit, which is owned by the bulding company NCC, told TV2.

“We find a lot of sea urchins and things like that out here. But it’s more fun to find slightly bigger things. I think it was about five meters down.” 

Simon Kongshøj Callesen, a palaeontologist and biologist at the Natural History Museum in Aarhus, told TV2 that the gravel deposit was caused by sediment that had bee nwashed there when glaciers melted at the end of the ice age, bringing fossils like the tusk from across Scandinavia.

After it was dug up, the tusk went through a sorting machine, which the museum suspects may have caused some damage, as there appears to be a fresh break on the tusk.  

“It is a unique find. Not many such finds have been made in Denmark,” Callesen said in a press release. “Now we want to make sure that it does not get any more cracks, and then we will register it, pack it up and hope that someone can use it in a research context, which we are always very open to.” 

In its press release, the museum says that as Siem Grusgrav was formed from sediment washed away at the end of the Weichsel Ice Age, the last ice age seen in Europe, when woolly mammoths were common, the tusk is likely to come from a mammoth, rather than from one of the straight-tusked elephants who had roamed Europe until the arrival of the ice age largely pushed them out of Europe.   

In 2020, NCC workers found a mammoth molar tooth at Siem, which is currently on display near the entrance of the Aarhus National History Musuem. 

The mammoth tusk will be cleaned up and stored for future research. Photo: Aarhus Natural History Museum.
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