Jiri Kylian may have relinquished overall direction of Nederlands Dans Theater 1, but the company's visit to London this week indicates that it's still business as usual. In other words, NDT continues to be a team of heartbreakingly sleek and avid dancers, served by an expensive design budget, and committed to performing choreography of depressing inconsequence.
It is Kylian (still the company's resident choreographer) who sets the tone, occupying the programme's opening slot with his 1995 work Bella Figura. This impressive showcase is crammed with confidently surprising and expertly lovely moves. The dancers skid over the stage as lightly as dragonflies, torque their bodies into strident curves, bring a burnished beauty to their stretches, and crumple into exquisitely calculated distortions.
But the piece itself is merely designed to maximise our appreciation of each glossy dance image. The curtains are used as picture frames, the lighting flatters the dancers' limbs and the various costumes - from flesh-coloured pants to scarlet crinoline skirts - are there to force our admiration of the dancers' finessed, often semi-naked forms. It is as if Kylian, in making this work, shut down every sense other than his cool, calculating gaze. The music (a collage of baroque and 20th-century extracts) gilds the dance rather than animates it. And for all Kylian's claims that he is exploring the borders between dream and reality, performance and life, Bella Figura lacks not only rhythmic but imaginative purpose. It is all willed and beautiful surface.
The degree to which Paul Lightfoot's Speak for Yourself is indebted to Kylian can be spotted in steps it has borrowed and in its elevation of style over substance. The stage is again beautiful, a grey canvas made eerie by a fog of smoke and a fine mist of water through which the dancers splash in very pretty fashion. But there is no suggestion of anything elemental or transforming in the use of either device: they remain visual accessories to the dance.
In the final piece, Walking Mad, you have to credit Johan Inger for the insouciance with which he dismantles the pretensions of his chosen score. Where Ravel's Bolero is usually a cue for fake Latino sex, Inger uses it to energise a crew of deranged hobos who play hide and seek around a false wall, sift through piles of cast-off clothes and seem to be in search of their collective Godot. The result is cute mayhem, but it lacks the conviction of its own deviancy.
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