The city of Amsterdam hosts the world-famous Dutch National Ballet (Het Nationale Ballet) whose repertoire, while remaining strongly classical, also includes more contemporary works. Our group observed their talents in both genres last Thursday night as they danced three dramatically different pieces—William Forsythe’s The Second Detail, Krzysztof Pastor’s Crossing Paths, and Ted Brandsen’s Carmen—performed in Amsterdam’s beautiful Mukieztheater.
Brandsen’s choreography for Carmen stayed within the classical style, though he approached the ballet in a fresh and delightful way. Instead of the conventional Spanish setting, the stage was bare, with a sharply angled background and simple costumes. Brandsen took an abstract approach in his storytelling, which allowed the audience to focus more on the beauty and emotion of the movement. Carmen was the centerpiece of the evening’s show, and while it used Georges Bizet’s music, originally scored for the opera, the ballet was short, lasting only about forty-five minutes.
The dancing was marvelous, and of the three pieces we saw, The Second Detail captivated me the most, in part because it strayed more from classical ballet than the others. The ballerinas still wore pointe shoes, but the movement of the dance was more angular and abstract. Forsythe created a juxtaposition of the beautiful and the ugly, calling upon the dancers to hunch and awkwardly rotate their knees inwards one moment, then to turn out their perfect legs into a spectacular arabesque the next. The Second Detail remained rooted in classical technique and, at the same time, challenged the conventions as “a showcase of the academic ballet technique in its most virtuoso and extreme form.”
Similarly to Carmen, The Second Detail had an austere setting so to keep all focus on the beauty of the dancing. Three grey scrims framed the stage, and a row of stripes lined the stage’s floor, as if the dancers were notes running across an empty music score. The dancers were dressed in monotone, grey costumes, and the music, scored by Thom Willems, provided a strong, yet simple rhythm. The piece seemed to straddle the classical and contemporary dance worlds, for though the movement was looser than traditional ballet, there was not the feeling of freedom that I associate with and experience in modern dance. The presence of pointe shoes rooted the dance in ballet, reiterating the confinement of the genre. Still, the shoes seemed out of place to me. When the lighting of the piece created silhouettes out of the dancers, their feet presented the only gender difference. I have seen a male dancer perform gracefully in pointe shoes, so I wonder why the distinction is still made in more contemporary ballet pieces. I have yet to see a mixed gender group perform all in pointe, but I think the results could be splendid.
After the show we were able to observe the gorgeous view from the Mukieztheater. The theater opened in 1986, and is the central hub for the De Nederlandse Opera and Het Nationale Ballet. The front of the building is a curved glass façade, providing the breathtaking sight of Amsterdam’s river Amstel at night. I left the performance in elation, my mind full of movement and my eyes taking in the splendor, while the little voice in my head whispered, “you need more practice.”
[Pictures and quotes courtesy of http://www.het-nationale-ballet.nl]
-Jenny Oyallon-Koloski
Comments