This triple bill includes works by Gabriela Carrrizo, Jiří Kylián, Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney. Nederlands Dans Theater dancers are well-known for their willingness to try anything and instantly physicalize any idea.
LA RUTA directed by Gabriela Carrizo.
The stage, very dark and foggy, has a cinematic film noirish look, a surreal road movie. Cars, headlights blazing, screech along a bleak and lonely road. People walk, stumble, spin, bend backwards and contort. Bodies, alive and dead, are bundled, dragged and lugged around to sounds of traffic, birds and fragments of music by Shostakovich. The dancers’ bodies are extraordinarily flexible, legs and arms all over the place.
Argentinian choreographer Gabriela Carrizo, famed for her experimental style, expects the audience to work out for themselves what is going on in her weird, dreamy, fragmentary and brutally dangerous horror scenario.
GODS AND DOGS by Jiří Kylián
“Surely,” says Jiří Kylián, “no positive developments can be accomplished without the help of a healthy portion of madness?” His mysterious ballet, so he says, and he should know, visualizes the fine line between normality and abnormality. A huge curtain of silver threads provides a background for the dancers.
Gods and Dogs, the 100th piece Kylián has created for Nederlander Dans Theater, is described as “an unfinished work” and refers to his fascination for the beauty of what is left incomplete. In an article, published in the programme, he writes interestingly about the function of clothes.
FIGURES IN EXTINCTION [1.0] by Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney.
This work is a major new collaboration between Nederlands Dans Theater and Complicité. Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney, artistic director of Complicité, working together for the first time, make a powerful political statement about climate change and the fact that the globe is facing mass destruction.
Their fascinating and disturbing work, brilliantly created and performed, catalogues and portrays a very long list of extinct animals, birds, plants, glaciers, lakes, etc, etc, destroyed by the actions of humans. The UN currently estimates that more than a million are at risk of extinction.
The dancers, closely knit and intertwined, produce striking and exciting images. A beautiful sight is the wielding of the huge horns of a Pyrenean ibex. The dancers are so flexible. The exaggerated movement given to a climate change denier is a witty complement to his recorded speech.
Figures in Extinction [1.0], the first of a planned trilogy, already feels like a modern classic. I can’t wait to see what Pite and McBurney do in the next two works.
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