http://sacslouisvuittonfr.webs.com/THIS year’s Edinburgh Festival has left me purring with satisfaction,chanel pas cher. It was good to see Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and interesting to see Zumzum-Ka,chanel pas cher, but the dance event of the Festival has been the chance to see no fewer than 13 ballets by the Dutch choreographer Hans Van Manen. He has long been one of my favourite choreographers,chanel sacs.
We first saw his work in this country in the 1960s when Nederlands Dans Theater arrived with its three directors, Van Manen, Benjamin Harkavy and Glen Tetley,Sacs Louis Vuitton. Those were adventurous times. Not only did NDT present a nude ballet at Sadler’s Wells,lunettes chanel, but some enterprising spirits liberally sprinkled the stage with itching power, and the unknowing nude dancers, rolling on stage as all avant-garde dancers must,Sacs Louis Vuitton, found themselves uncontrollably unable to stop scratching,Louis Vuitton Pas Cher, adding a fresh set of contortions to the choreography until the curtain came down and blessedly released them,Lunettes Louis Vuitton. (So savage was the powder, the dancers had to be taken to the local hospital’s casualty department and the Dutch were left with a rather grim view of the English attitude to art.)
Even then Van Manen’s choreography stood out like a good deed in a naughty world. His work entered the repertory of both our Royal Ballet and what is now the Birmingham Royal Ballet and was much admired,chanel sacs. Why then have we been given so little chance to see more of his ballets,lunettes chanel? Looking back at some of the junk we have had to sit through,sac chanel pas cher, this becomes an unforgivable omission.
All credit to the Edinburgh Festival for reminding us what we have been missing,bijoux chanel. Van Manen has made more than 70 ballets and they are to be found in the repertory of companies all over the world,chanel pas cher.
What makes him so special,sac chanel? Most importantly, he has remained faithful to the concept of dance as existing to express the joy of moving to music,Louis Vuitton Pas Cher. He is nothing if not musical, and his dancers and his dance bring an additional dimension to the music,sac chanel pas cher. He also never forgets that dance in the theatre is about making beautiful movements that are a joy to look at,sac chanel pas cher. His dancers are beautiful,Lunettes Louis Vuitton, his dance is beautiful.
All too many modern choreographers seem so interested in distortion and ugliness in their desire to shock that sometimes they seem to forget the purpose of the exercise, which is to give visual pleasure,Lunettes Louis Vuitton.
Van Manen never forgets that. His work is an excellent example of what we are increasingly recognising as the way theatre dance is developing. Classical ballet remains the main stream, largely because of the range and vocabulary it brings with it, but contemporary, avant-garde and jazz dance have brought a whole fresh set of movements and ways of looking at dance that wonderfully increase its possibilities,sac chanel. They do exactly that in Van Manen’s creations,Sacs Louis Vuitton.
What of the vexed question of “story” ballets? British audiences are thought to be old-fashioned because they still like to know what it all means,Chaussures Louis Vuitton. The three best British choreographers,lunettes chanel, Ashton, MacMillan and Bintley, have tilted our dance in the direction of narrative,Louis Vuitton Pas Cher, finding metaphors in movement for the emotions of their characters in recognisably dramatic situations,Chaussures Louis Vuitton.
Van Manen does not tell stories. He is on record as saying that “dance expresses dance and nothing else”. Yet this is palpably untrue about his ballets. They are always “about” something,Chaussures Louis Vuitton.
Take Metaphors, which opened the Dutch National Ballet’s first programme (of two) at the Playhouse and looked just as good as when I first saw it in the 1960s,sac chanel. Here he deliberately challenges the classical convention of the pas de deux, providing a duet for two men and then another for two women. But there is more than that. He is also playing with the idea of mirror images so that one set of dancers reflects the movements of another. The results are fascinating.
And his dancers are never just patterns in space. They are always real people, who often vividly express a very human emotion. Van Manen has a sure sense of drama. His Trois Gnossiennes to Satie, the second ballet on the bill, is as much about a relationship between a man and a woman as about dance expressing dance.
DNB’s 5 Tangos has become a classic, performed everywhere. Here the idea is to find a fresh dance language to fit the tango rhythms of Piazzolla’s mesmerising music. During the rehearsals Van Manen repeatedly shouted, “No Spanish kitsch!” The dance is as fresh as paint. Yet consider the dramatic mood of each tango,or I’m a Dutchman, sharply different, and each loaded with emotion, with drama. If this is not a modern version of the narrative ballet I should like to know what is.
Also on the bill was a work made last year for the Dutch National, Three Pieces for Het. This, very much the creation of a master craftsman, shows the fluency of movement, a consistency of invention, that make it wonderfully clear that Van Manen is at the height of his powers. Once again he turns convention on his head. He starts off with a crowd of dancers and ends with just two – not just patterns in space but two people attracted to each other.
The audience could hardly have been more enthusiastic. This was due in part to the superb dancers. The same size as our own Royal Ballet, the company is directed by Wayne Eagling, once one of the leading male ornaments of the Royal Ballet, for whom in happier days MacMillan made ballets.
In Holland Eagling has shown himself an excellent director. He has brought together a stimulating repertory, encouraged new work, shown his own skills as a choreographer without hogging the repertory, and above all has brought the company to an enviable pitch of dance quality. Of course he has not done this all by himself, but surely one mark of a good director is that he surrounds himself with gifted teachers and assistants.
If and when the powers-that-be take the Eyre Report to heart and start looking for a new director for the Royal Ballet, they might look long and hard at Eagling.http://sacvuitton2013.webs.com/
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