Perfect dancing but boringly beautiful

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.