Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – After an absence of over 40 years, DUTCH NATIONAL BALLET returns to New York with two stacked programs

• By drediman
• November 22, 2025
• No Comments

This week, Dutch National Ballet in a highly anticipated return has arrived in New York for its first major engagement in more than 40 years. During its relatively brief run at New York City Center (tonight is the final performance), the renowned company — which has thrived under the artistic directorship of Ted Brandsen, who has held the leadership position for over two decades — is presenting a pair of stacked programs of fascinating juxtapositions from its rich and varied repertoire, featuring both familiar works, as well as New York premieres of pieces by a number of notable European contemporary ballet choreographers. Throughout, the company’s tall and long-limbed dancers were sublime — often breathtaking — fully embodying the company’s aesthetic that sleekly emphasizes elongated lines and steady control.

Program A got underway with Brandsen’s The Chairman Dances. Set to a 1985 John Adams score of the same name, the upbeat ensemble piece brings the stately elegance of ballroom dance to the American composer’s rhythmic minimalism. Then came two very different of pas de deux, Wubkje Kuindersma’s Two and Only and Jerome Robbins’ Other Dances. The former is set to a pair of wistful songs by singer songwriter Michael Benjamin — who performed live on guitar and piano — which Kuindersma has translated into emotive and sensual choreography for two men, danced sharply by Timothy van Poucke and Conor Walmsley. In Other Dances, Bolshoi superstars Olga Smirnova and Jacopo Tissi altered the tone of the characterful classic, trading in punchy musical accenting with an interpretation that felt out the Chopin’s piano score, daringly letting its chords linger in the air. After the intermission came the US premiere of Alexei Ratmasky’s Trio Kagel, a playful piece for three dancers that found the typically stoic company at its most animated and the important choreographer at his most humorous. Suffice to say, the performance brought welcome relief to the relative somberness of the rest of the evening. Represented the most across the two programs was DNB resident choreographer Hans van Manen, whose coolly virtuosic, if somewhat unmemorable Frank Bridge Variations (set to the music of Benjamin Britten) concluded the bill.

Speaking of van Manen, Program B commenced and ended with two of the choreographer’s classic works from the 1970s — Adagio Hammerklavier (1973) set to a Beethoven piano score, and 5 Tangos (1977) set to a suite of tango music by iconic Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla (perhaps intentionally continuing the spark created by Ratmansky in the fist program). More than any of van Manen’s works here, the gloriously subdued Adagio Hammerklavier perhaps most definitely represents his style, which seductively explores with choreographic “negative spaces”, wherein looks, glances, and even stillness fill the space and whose expressiveness lands with as much potency as movement. Like Frank Bridge Variations, the ballet/tango hybrid 5 Tangos (also the closer) is an interesting if not wholly successful exercise in contrasting. Here, van Manen’s formalism and tendency for repetition (those outward V arm placements!) ultimately clashed with the organic passion typically associated with tango. For better or worse, this is tango deconstructed. In between these dances were works that are firmly rooted in contemporary dance, starting with Thando, an explosive, if redundant duet — performed with aplomb by the pairing of Anna Tsygankova and Giorgi Potskhishvili — by Olivier Award-winning South African choreographer Mthuthuzeli November. Perhaps most satisfying of all, both visually and choreographically, was Wings of Wax, prolific European contemporary dance maker Jiří Kylián’s strikingly abstract, distinctively kinetic interpretation of the of the story of Icarus.

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DUTCH NATIONAL BALLET
Dance
New York City Center
Each programs runs approximately 2 hours (with one/two intermissions)
Through November 22