Aesthetically speaking, last week’s performance by the Nederlands Dans Theater 1 was one by the slickest of the season. Fashionably engineered juxtapositions of black and white, sets that stun on account of their elegant simplicity and mechanical complexity, chic costumes that de-gender dancers, scores decadently à la mode and clockwork dancing came together seamlessly to make a powerful visual impact. Beauty can be boring, though.
Created by Paul Lightfoot and Sol León, who are the driving force behind Nederlands Dans Theater 1, Sehnsucht (‘longing’) and Schmetterling (‘butterfly’) came across as perfectly structured concoctions of derivative formulae, though they lacked any spark. In the former, a would-like-to-be languorous duet took place in a revolving room, which was reminiscent of similar, though much more meaningful, confined spaces of the past 20 years. Even when the danced action developed into an ensemble, the architecturally impeccable deployment of the corps lacked inventiveness and drew heavily on long-established features of European modern and postmodern dance history.
I also wished they had not used Beethoven’s music. And not because some consider it impossible to dance to. After all, great masters such as Isadora Duncan, Léonide Massine and Maurice Béjart, among others, used it very successfully. Yet such great dance-makers paid careful attention to the multilayered cultural and artistic discourse such music inevitably comes with and did not use it as a meaningless, though sophisticated, soundtrack — which is what I took exception to in Sehnsucht.
Unfortunately, musical choices and their relationship with the dance action were a problematic leitmotiv throughout the whole evening. In Schmetterling, the unbearably long selection of songs and excerpts from recordings by Magnetic Fields and Max Richter also failed to impress. Each song-based danced number was a tritely graphic choreographic (forgive the pun) translation of the lyrics into action.
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