The youngest of the 18 dancers who make up Nederlands Dans Theater 2 is 20, the oldest is 26 – and every single one of them is utterly astonishing. Watching them move is just a pleasure, their fluid technique, elegant limbs and disciplined shapes fitting themselves to whatever choreography is thrown at them.
Quite a lot is thrown at them in this triple bill, which makes you marvel at their adaptability as well. They begin the night flexing and shuddering in sharp staccato in the choreography of Marco Goecke’s The Big Crying, a knotty piece written in response to the death of his father. It casts its dancers in fierce, shadowy groups as they twitch and surge in constricted, contracted gestures that seem to mimic scenes from life, if only you could crack the code.
I suspect your reaction depends on how much you like Tori Amos, who provides the melancholy score, alongside a soundscape of roaring trains and the dancers’ screams. It’s very intense but it ends on a note of resolution, as bare-chested Emmitt Cawley sinks to the floor, stretching his body out of its tight-wound state and begins to dance to REM’s Losing My Religion, sung like a dirge.
I am a sucker for all this sort of thing, and found myself both riveted and moved. It was nevertheless a relief to move on to the next piece, aptly called Simple Things and choreographed by the granddaddy of Netherlands dance, Hans Van Manen, now 89 and still a master of clear, clever dance-making.
This piece is a 20-minute quartet that seems to be about nothing yet is full of something. Set to a mixture of accordion, modern piano and Haydn, and elegantly designed by Keso Dekker, it begins with two men – marvellous Cawley and the equally wondrous Auguste Palayer – dancing side by side with fluent joy, their arms and hands flicking in relaxed time to the music.
Two women – Cassandra Martin and Kenedy Kallas, both lovely – enter and dance with them in turn, changing the mood, sweeping their legs across the stage in languorous turns or jumping like satyrs, feet tucked up high. The steps are elegant and classy; the entire piece, with its little hints of story, has an attractive openness and responds perfectly to its score.
Johan Inger’s Impasse, which closes the evening, has a darker purpose but equal facility, expressing a deep idea incoherent dance form. It takes three innocent youngsters – Annika Verplancke, Austin Meiteen and Cawley – and sets them jumping across the expanse of their lives, holding hands, stretching their limbs with a sense of possibility.
Through a door at the back of Inger’s own set, lit by Tom Visser, the world crowds in in the shape of an enticing group of dancers, at first in black and then like a wild cabaret. Sophisticated and sassy, this society demands the youngsters give up their freedom to conform, losing the space they have marked as their own. The choreography is a thrilling mixture of swagger and challenge. The dancers, as they do all night, hold the stage with utter and transfixing confidence.
