Nederlands Dans Theater / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, NYC / March 9-14, 2004
Come to us from The Hague and holding forth at BAM for the first time since 1999, Nederlands Dans Theater has changed while the New York audience wasn’t looking. For over a quarter century, it has been shaped by Czech choreographer Jirí Kylián, long its artistic advisor and still chief provider of its repertory. But, judging from Program A (a trio of Kylián works from the last two years), with which the group opened its weeklong run, the choreographer has abandoned the rooted-in-the soil-eyes-on-the-stars mode in which he forged his reputation for the sex-cruelty-and-angst-as-gorgeous-visuals realm that we know best from high-end fashion photography of the last decade.
The accompanying sound scores, all by Dirk Haubrich, punctuate white noise with brief, startling intrusions. This aural element only exacerbates the fact that the Kylián’s stage pictures are so tightly controlled as to leave one’s muscles twitching spasmodically from the relentless tension. I have neither the time nor the patience to return for Program B, which promises: yet another recent Kylián; Symphony of Psalms, to allow comparison of the old style with the new; and a single piece by another choreographer, which may or may not prove that the door is open a crack. Details follow on what I did see.
27’ 52”, named for its duration—a fact high-handedly left unmentioned in the house program—actually seems to take place in a photographer’s studio. The space is bare and dark except for two elements: floor cloths and hanging drop cloths (essentially moving walls) of heavy white plastic, like those camera folk use to reflect the artificial illumination they so closely control, and the high-power light fixtures themselves, which recall prison searchlights. The place (for which Kylián takes a “décor concept” credit in the program) is, in other words, nowhere—without landmarks, without character, without evidence that nature even exists. The spiritual equivalent of such a vacuum is familiar to the clinically depressed.
Six dancers—three men, three women—venture into this bleak arena and proceed to disport themselves in various physically impressive, theatrically ominous ways to prove that love doesn’t stand a chance. A relationship that’s already fraught is hardly improved by an extra man who, in the guise of photographer’s assistant, functions as a potential rescuer turned betrayer—and a voyeur. Coupling, postmodern style, has abandoned any claim to privacy, you see; intimacy lies in the public domain. One woman meets her male partner in fighting mode—lash out even before you say hello is the greeting style here—and they segue into agitated unison and mirror-image stuff. Is this the postmillennial way of bonding?
Antipathy, fury, victimization prevail. The women bear the brunt of the last, predictably; Kylián has never displayed much empathy for the female of the species. Finally we see one couple stripped to the waist—Adam and Eve?—who engage in something that, chez Kylián, may qualify as tenderness, though it reads equally as mutual manipulation. In the end the woman tries to flee from her guy, gives in, lets him wrap her in a floor cloth that morphs into shroud, thinks better of this and escapes, spies the “assistant” at the far end of the cloth and runs to him, only to have him shroud her while the first guy shrouds himself, the cloth turned to its reverse side, which is—you guessed it!—black. So, stretched cross-stage, we have this flat black tarmac with body bags at either end. The remaining drops fall from above with ominous thuds. I hope the dancers are getting danger money.
I don’t mind Kylián’s underlining the fact that human connection is a tough business. What I chafe against is his presenting defeated love as a given, without alternatives, and, moreover, as glamorous and therefore desirable. Reiterated, this take on the subject is not merely arid, it’s boring as hell. Maybe it is hell.
Last Touch, the most ambitious and compelling piece on the program, 
offers an interior lavishly draped in dust sheets and a sextet of inhabitants in Joke Visser’s heady gloss on Victorian dress, whose interpersonal proclivities, largely erotic, are similarly veiled. At first the people are almost as still as figures in a wax museum, suspended in a living death. When they finally begin to move, their animation is frail and sporadic; as it’s defined in this piece, dance lies somewhere between stasis and slow motion.
It takes several long minutes for the eager if
hesitant man in the doorway to creep up behind the lusciously ripe virgin who’s absorbed in a book, place his hands over her eyes—Guess who, my pretty one!—and tip the rocking chair in which she’s cradled so far backward, her head almost touches the floor. All the succeeding ploys follow the same pattern of dilatory invasion of private domains with covert cooperation at the receiving end, reluctance simply augmenting the delights of desire.
The exquisitely retarded advance to orgasm—which is, finally, achieved, three couples simultaneously, and marked by a raucous outburst in the score and the burning of the book—that advance, as I was saying in this seemingly endless sentence, is made all the more delectable by the fact that the women are swathed in miles of fabric. The effect is, if you can excuse the word, ravishing. The conventions of the negligee, the wedding gown, and widow’s weeds—fantasy genres in themselves—are here allowed a surreal dimension. The dust sheets are transformed into bed sheets with which the gentlemen screen, wrap, and caress their ladies, while the ones covering the floor, rippling like creamy waves, spill off the front of the stage toward the spectator’s lap, as if inviting a little interactive play.
My favorite moment in the piece? The Repressed Spinster/Wicked Witch/Mrs. Danvers woman’s kissing the candle flame that will ultimately ignite the book. It goes pretty much unnoticed, though, in the thick fog of psychological paralysis that shields the neurotic figures in this strange pantomime from any reality that might call for forthright and vigorous action. Like opting for a simple yes or no.
None of this is new. In dance, Martha Clarke has done it several times over, with more edge. And, God knows, she has not been alone. Ultimately, though, the mode derives from literature, from those marvelous novels of suffocating erotic obsession: Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, which no one, regrettably, reads anymore; Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which is still read and relished—or at least enjoyed in its movie version; and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, which has essentially been relegated to university curricula for English majors. Last Touch fails, in the end, because it can’t or won’t avail itself of the novels’ resources: words, characters, plot. The dance is merely titillating spectacle, defeated by its self-indulgent combining of tortoise pace with injudicious length.
Serving as the program’s curtain raiser, Claude Pascal (a name invented by Kylián to signify something he elects not to explain in the house program) has all the trademarks of the choreographer’s latter-day style: a sleek, stark décor, here with swiveling mirrored panels; elegant, stylized period (here Edwardian) costume contrasted with subtly sexy practice clothes; an enigmatic text in more than one language; an eerie, ominous atmosphere in which the beautiful is doomed to come to no good; bodies honed to perfection only to be put to ambiguous purpose. The costumed passages are duly absurdist; the pure dance passages, charged with disaffection and anomie. Much of this mishegaas is new to Kylián, but dance fans on several continents, having been subjected to it for some time, may not need to have their dancing served up with lines like “When you switch off the light, you see only the inside of yourself.” On second thought, they may find them oddly applicable to the choreography at hand.
Photo credit: Stephanie Berger: Paula Sánchez and Václav Kunes in Jirí Kylián’s Last Touch
© 2004 Tobi Tobias