Emily Molnar, the artistic director of Nederlands Dans Theatre, is committed to giving her dancers, as she has said, “creative action and a greater sense of belonging.”
This matters in the studio. You want it to matter on stage. But without meaningful dances in dance, it can only mean very little—especially not in promoting the individuality that comes, one hopes, from creative action in principle.
The company, under the artistic direction of Molnar since 2020, returned to Downtown New York on Wednesday supported by Van Cleef & Arpels’ Dance Reflections and three works including ‘NNNN’ (2002) by the Honorable William Forsythe. (As a dancer, Molnar was a member of his ballet in Frankfurt.) It’s not Forsyth at his best—it’s too playful to soar—but at least it was terse, with dancers who looked like real people. As the evening wore on, this was not necessarily the norm.
In Forsythe’s work, four men create a score using their breath, which provides the rhythm and choreographic pulse alongside Thom Willems’s barely there score. Waving their hands, resting their hands on each other’s shoulders, they inhaled and exhaled fervently. Their breathing, sharp and drawn out with the occasional thump, mirrored the rise and fall of their limbs.
They bumped and smacked each other as they lined up side by side, tangling and unraveling like interlocking puzzles, yet there was something to their flow as their movement from the start seemed premeditated. It was like they were waiting to see how their weight fell instead of being guided by it.
Still, the Forsythe trick is better than nothing. The other works in the program were created by duets — which really goes to show that two choreographers are not better than one. In “The Point Is”, the Dutch choreographic couple Imre and Marne van Opstal—they are siblings and former members of the Nederlands company—collaborated with Lonneke Gordijn and DRIFTan Amsterdam studio, to create a light installation that interacted with dancing bodies.
Thin rope ladders, like curtains, hung before and behind the dancers in a landscape of shadows and spotlights, sometimes shining like searchlights. As for the look, beige and dusty? It was right out of “Dune”. With choreographies credited to the van Opstals and DRIFT, the dancers, buoyed by an aching kinetic quality, left their humanity behind. Instead they transformed—sighs—into creatures with faces masked in expressions of painful concentration.
The work is supposed to explore, in part, the concept of synchronicity. While female dancers did, at times, collaborate—embodying a dull and recognizable slow-motion quality—women were not always equals, but bodies susceptible to manipulation. At times, there was dragging from the ankles and wrists, along with a posture that left me cold: a masculine grip just below the chin, fingers wrapped around the neck.
Beyond the sculpturally elegant duets and trios, the groups criss-crossed the stage in regular walking patterns that offered another layer but little intensity. Perhaps the point of “The Point Being” was that it was a light show For dance than dance. Throughout, the design, which featured lights moving along the side of the stage, changed to create—at its best—an elegant dawn glow. But mostly within this choreography of space, bodies were reduced to little more than a pointless kind of boneless articulation.
Another choreographic duo, Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar presented “Jakie”, largely an ensemble for 16. Like most of Eyal and Behar’s dances, “Jakie” was a foray into a world of steely, androgynous sensuality, a path blazed by Eyal over his many years with the Batsheva Dance Company and Gaga motion language by Ohad Naharin. Wearing unitards that matched their skin tone, the dancers presented themselves as both naked and genderless as they ran in demi-pointe, balancing on the balls of their feet as they moved more or less as a pack: formations of clumsy Barbies, torqued and twisted, sweaty and huddled.
Set to a pulsating score by Ori Lichtik (there’s also music by Ryuichi Sakamoto, performed by Alva Noto), “Jakie” was deliberately repetitive as the dancers, more jittery than hypnotic, moved as one under its revealing lighting Alan Cohen. More than a dance, ‘Jakie’, with its shaking legs and twisted torso, was an extended vibration. The dancers pinched their earlobes and held their fingers in the air, which added shapes—horns or gills—to their silhouettes. From the Netherlands, it was more of the same: dancers pretending to be aliens.
Nederlands Dans Theater
Until Saturday in downtown New York, Manhattan. nycitycenter.org.