Nederlands Dans Theater

Nederlands Dans Theater’s Stop-Motion. Photo by Rahi Rezvani.

Last seen in Melbourne in 2011, the same year current Artistic Director Paul Lightfoot took over as the company’s Artistic Director, the acclaimed Nederlands Dans Theater has returned to Australia for an exclusive season at Arts Centre Melbourne.

Sehnsucht, the first of two works choreographed by Lightfoot and Sol León in this triple bill, takes its name from a German word describing a deep and intense yearning for something missing from one’s life (a concept which has also inspired bands such as Einstürzende Neubauten and Rammstein). It begins with dancer Prince Credell alone, crouched and spotlit on the stage. As he slowly unfolds, behind him – in a rotating cube depicting an ordinary room – a man and a woman (Parvaneh Scharafali and Medhi Walerski grapple and struggle, their tensely intimate movements conducted at one moment on the floor, the next on the ceiling as the room slowly turns.

It’s tempting, though perhaps too literal to read Sehnsucht as a response to Europe’s refugee crisis, with Credell – the dark-skinned outsider – staring longingly at a domesticity he cannot access and blind to its realities. But as the work builds, adding an ensemble of 12 dancers moving with military precision to the fanfare and bombast of Beethoven’s fifth symphony, this impression of an outsider struggling to penetrate or pass through a wall or barrier – here comprised of bodies – intensifies.

At the end of the piece, after a return to the off-kilter domestic, Sehnsucht ends with Credell returning to his original crouched position on stage – a pose he holds long after his fellow performers have taken their curtain call and the house lights have indicated interval.   

The second work, choreographed by Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and entitled Solo Echo, begins theatrically, with snow softly falling at the rear of the stage. The dancers enter to the music of Brahms, the influence of classical ballet clear in an extended leg or a group line but contrasted by movements which speak to a more contemporary choreographic language: a quick drop to the floor, a rolled hip and leg.

The company’s precision, especially in the group work where they extend and pull as one, is extraordinary, as is the sense of tension they evoke through grappling hands, though a sequence in which the men’s boisterous movements are softened by the presence of a woman feels heteronormative and traditional despite the dancers’ compelling athleticism.

A restrained sense of loss and longing builds through Solo Echo as bodies slip through supporting arms to collapse into the cushioning snow. Like the crystalline structure of a snowflake itself, Pite’s work is cold but beautiful.

The final work in the program is a recent work by León and Lightfoot, Stop-Motion, performed to the softly melancholy music of Max Richter. Featuring projections of the choreographers’ daughter and a slow-motion projection of a falcon in flight, the piece evokes transformation and decay, the dust of ages, inevitability, mutability and change.

The dancers are fluid, muscular, and precise, both in solos, duos and group work, whether holding a frozen pose or running backwards, like a rewound memory of times past. As the piece builds towards its climax, the choreography moves beyond sadness to conjure a compelling sense of freedom, matched by stark yet simple stagecraft as lighting rigs descend and curtains fall. It’s an exquisite moment, and a moving end to a fascinating evening.

Rating: 4 ½ stars out of 5

State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne
22-25 June 2016