This programme mastered the art of openings and endings. Three times, the rising curtain exposed a striking opening tableaux and each piece closed in similarly memorable ways. With few exceptions most of the content sitting between these emphatic book ends was always absorbing.
Nederlands Dans Theater has carved its own particular niche in the world of contemporary dance. I hesitate to describe it as unique because others have been in a similar league, but the baton is now firmly in the grip of this leviathan of modern dance. Because it’s the best of the best, the company’s dancers are beyond Olympian in their quality of movement. They turn softly like whipped cream and accelerate with the speed of a gazelle or the attack of a firecracker but without ever losing that essential smoothness. They are an extraordinary bunch, diverse in body shape and height but uniform in elite movement skills, assembled at the company’s headquarters in The Hague from across the globe (just two of the 26 dancers were born in The Netherlands).
NDT’s first programme in the UK since 2018 was suitably eclectic and evidenced the changes made to the company’s repertoire under the artistic directorship of Emily Molnar (since August 2020). Here was a mix of old and new, respecting the company’s heritage while introducing new works by the hottest choreographers of today.
Arguably at the top of this list is Crystal Pite. Works by this Canadian choreographer grace the repertory of companies around the world and NDT has a slew of them. Pite has a history of collaboration with key figures in the world of theatre, notably Jonathon Young in Betroffenheit (2015) and Revisor (2019). Figures in Extinction [1.0] is the first outcome of a collaboration between Pite and Simon McBurney, the artistic director of British theatre company, Complicité and they plan two further adventures in articulating the climate crisis. It is an unashamedly sentimental polemic about extinction although this is surely one subject where any amount of sentimentality is allowed.
McBurney’s voice introduces the work and is featured throughout, as is that of his young daughter, Mamie, whose plaintiff words, spoken about a bird that flew from the McBurney garden, “Where has she gone, has she gone forever?”, were an inspiration for both Pite and Papa McBurney during the work’s creation. It focuses on the loss of a dozen animal and plant species plus a glacier or two, each introduced by surtitles although towards the end of the piece, the rapid flashing of hundreds of names makes the extent of mass extinction clear.
Pite’s choreography is delivered in a series of brief vignettes (structurally reminiscent of David Bintley’s Still Life at the Penguin Café), each articulating imagery relevant to the extinct subject, helped by Nancy Bryant’s imaginative costumes. The neatest twist was the occasional presence of a climate change denier (the irrepressible Jon Bond), twisting and turning himself inside-out while lip-synching, in typical Pite style, to a recorded voiceover (by Max Casella) taken from actual speeches denying climate change. The implication that climate change denial is itself becoming extinct is an important statement in this thoughtful and arresting work.
Gabriela Carrizo has built a strong reputation as a creator of physical theatre at Brussels-based Peeping Tom. La Ruta brings a similar dystopian dream, peppered with isolated moments of humour, to the NDT repertoire. The setting is a misty night time at an isolated bus stop with a scenario that is part Midwest horror, part Swan Lake (or perhaps The Birds), part Kurosawa, part hit-and-run, part….. well, you get the picture, it’s a work of many random parts that adds up to very little at all. A couple of people dressed in traditional Japanese garb wander down the road speaking incoherently; a man runs aimlessly back-and-forth carrying a dead duck (perhaps it was a swan, hard to tell), another (Boston Gallacher) has the heart of a roadkill deer transplanted into their chest; and a fork-lift truck delivers a large package, which when unwrapped is a statuesque human onto which an unseen flock of birds delivers the longest stream of bird poo imaginable! It would take several reviews to do justice to the countless images that Carrizo delivers through her multi-tasking group of seven performers but perhaps you get the gist. It’s the stuff of nightmares.
These two new works enveloped Jiří Kylián’s gorgeous Gods and Dogs, enigmatically sub-titled as ‘an unfinished work’. Kylián was the NDT director for 29 years (almost half the company’s life) and this piece, which premiered in 2008 was, astonishingly, his 100th work for the company. However, Kylián’s repertoire was not performed (at the choreographer’s own request) for a few years from 2014, which seemed like removing Shakespeare from the RSC. Anyway, he’s back and unfinished or not (and I guess this is one of Kylián’s many in-jokes) Gods and Dogs is an astoundingly beautiful, riveting work of pure dance, which contrasted dramatically with the piece that went before. Enough said.
