Nederlands Dans Theater Review
April 4, 2024 | New York City Center – New York City, NY, USA
There is no question that the Nederlands Dans Theater dancers are tremendous. If we could map the etchings of dance movement in the air, the artists would move beyond any pre-existing blueprints.
Both hummingbird and albatross, the dancers embody the extremes: when they are still, it is as if death has entered the room and when they are bold, electricity floods from their extremities. If you want to see risk, see NDT. That said, the program itself was where that risk met a wall.
Last seen in NYC in 2020, about two weeks before the city shut down for Covid, the company performed Gabriela Carrizo’s brilliantly spooky The missing door. The show left a mark on me, not only because it was the last live art I saw before we all hunkered down and fought over toilet paper, but because it was steeped in rich newness teetering the line between dance and theater. It was intensely altering.
In 2016, NDT was also at City Center, this time with visually stunning work by Leon-Lightfoot and Crystal Pite’s The Statement which again left an impression on me – so much so that I ran back to City Center when it was on 2023’s Fall for Dance program. Perhaps going into a show anticipating novelty was too much pressure and although I was impressed with the physicality on stage, NDT landed in the realm of ordinary with this program.
Nederlands Dans Theater Review
William Forsythe’s N.N.N.N. is performed without music but integrates sound via the dancers’ breaths, hand slaps, and the occasional synchronized gasp.
Echoing George Balanchine’s famous sentiment “see the music, hear the dance”, Forsythe makes instruments of the dancers.
Akin to the clang clang that accompanies imaginary light-saber fights, nearly every movement received a punctuated exhale. And because the dancers were movement, percussion, and woodwind, they relied on purposeful glances to synchronize with each other.
Built upon two core movements (a limb dropping and a limb swinging) and an intricate order of operations, the work is mathematically sophisticated, a cartography of extremities. Most dance is the movement of appendages, but this was a study in hinges and balls in sockets; this was not four people on stage but eight arms and eight legs.
They revisited a braided formation multiple times, creating a recognizable anchor, in which they hooked elbows in labyrinthine figures as they organized and reorganized themselves, sometimes in a fast tempo and other times in a drunken stupor. Every revisit ended with an exhaustive group exhale, and like a fist squashing clay, they would spread out, released from their magnetic grips.
N.N.N.N.’s plainness is part of its cleverness. Unburdened by scene-stealing stage designs and lighting, movement is its essence and the dancers the perfect vessels.
Against the two latter pieces which were similar in tone, it stood out as the differentiator and left me questioning if we were meant to view the three-part evening as two halves.
The Point Being and Jakie were each accompanied by techno thumping music, ominous lighting, and flesh-colored costumes and seemingly emanated from the same mysterious world of light horror.
Sibling duo Imre and Marne Van Opstal’s The Point Being featured slow motion crawls and gut-scraping hands straight from movie scenes that implore viewers to yell “don’t go in there!”
The lighting design by Tom Visser and scenery by DRIFT (an experiential installation team) were ghostly shapeshifters in the form of lost spotlights and nebulous rainbow glows with choreography of their own. A huge, layered net featuring what looked like small lights at every intersection of string floated in and out of stage. A wondrous swirling light created a flashing silhouette effect which prompted the theater goer next to me to murmur, “wow”.
Although classic contemporary shapes like side tilts and sickled feet abounded, there were other interesting moments: hands pinched into tight claws painted circular patterns in the air, pairs met up for ominous waltzing. But finding no central hook to hark back on, the piece meandered and included many false endings – possibly an echo of the title, which is itself an incomplete sentence.
Perhaps Jakie would have shone more in a different program mix but following The Point Being, it immediately gave a feeling of more of the same.
The duo behind it, Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, offered up intense, hypnotic, and seductive restraint as if a haunting swarm of bees did a lot of drugs and then went to the club (a striking scenario).
Tightly formed in a central huddle for most of the piece, the dancers are on demi-pointe bourréeing, evoking a distant hum with the pads of their feet. One or two dancers would stray, not far, from the group to do a move of their own.
Most memorable was a repeated shaking leg. Like a hard-working antenna probing a flower, the dancer’s leg vibrated with minuscule precision.
Subtle hand expressions like pointed fingers held against cheeks and pinched index fingers and thumbs near ear lobes made for further creature-like evocations.
The continuous foot padding stomps became a blood-pumping metronome as the dancers buzzed to the finish line against Ori Lichtik’s cyclical soundscape. Repetition can be an effective tool, and Jakie does reach satisfying peaks, but what the work is paired with in a program can detract from that execution.
Through it all, the dancers remained deeply committed and honored each piece’s textures. However, the unbalanced program left more to be desired, dulling each work rather than finding ways to make them shine.
Featured Photo for this Nederlands Dans Theater review of the company in Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar’s Jakie. Photo by Rahi Rezvani.
