Hans van Manen timeline

The Damstad Festival is held on Dam Square, in Amsterdam, in June 1950, to mark the five-hundredth anniversary of the shopping street Kalverstraat. Van Manen is sent there by Herman Michels to do the hair and make-up of the singers and actors. One of the groups performing is Sonia Gaskell’s Ballet Recital, founded in 1948. In the two ballets performed by the company, Van Manen spots his former schoolmate Carla Lipp, alongside Louki van Oven and Maria Huisman, two dancers he’d met previously in the Stadsschouwburg. Van Manen is instantly bewitched, particularly by the performance of the extremely talented Jaap Flier, who dances a duet with Marianne Boedijn (later known as Hilarides).

Jaap Flier, in turn, is impressed by the many pirouettes turned by the eighteen-year-old Van Manen following Ballet Recital’s performance on Dam Square, and arranges for him to be introduced to Sonia Gaskell. At the time, Van Manen has hardly any command of ballet technique, yet Gaskell still permits him to join in her classes for professional dancers at her studio at Zomerdijkstraat 26, in the Rivierenbuurt district of Amsterdam. This may be due to a scarcity of male dancers, but is undoubtedly also because she sees talent in him. From then on, Van Manen not only does the classes, but often stays on late into the evening in Gaskell’s studio in order to observe Ballet Recital’s rehearsals. This means he has to give up his job with Herman Michels, but Michels is generous enough to let Van Manen work just one evening a week for him, with full retention of his salary.

After a couple of months, Gaskell gives Van Manen small roles in productions by Ballet Recital; first some mime roles, and then a few dancing roles as well. Later, Van Manen says about this initial period, “I wasn’t a beautiful dancer, but I was a good one. I could turn really well. That’s something you either have or don’t have, and it doesn’t come naturally to most dancers.” However, the collaboration with Gaskell does not last long. In the summer of 1951, she calls Van Manen to account, officially because of his flippant attitude and lack of talent, but probably really because of his affair with Jaap Flier, one of Gaskell’s favourites, whom she hopes to pair up – also romantically – with the ballerina Marianne Hilarides. The discussion gets heated, following which Van Manen decides to leave and never return to the studio on Zomerdijkstraat.

In the autumn of 1951, at the age of nineteen, Van Manen auditions for Ballet van de Nederlandse Opera and is accepted. At the time, the company is still led by the Dutch director Darja Collin, but shortly afterwards she is replaced by Françoise Adret, from France. Adret soon involves Van Manen in rehearsing the Walpurgisnachtballet from the opera Faust and gives him plenty of opportunities to develop as a dancer. Her knowledge and daring make her an important mentor and source of inspiration to Van Manen. “She never gave interpretations of what you ought to feel (..) She was never someone who gave a psychological background to what you did. I learned that from her.”

In 1952, Carla Lipp – who was two years younger than Van Manen and had also gone to the Prinsenschool – joins Ballet van de Nederlandse Opera, and from then on the two form a close friendship. After evening rehearsals, they go out dancing together nearly every night and Lipp is Van Manen’s main ‘swing mate’ for years. “We loved to dance together to jazz, mambos and all the other South-American styles, and we were exceptionally good at it too.”

In the early fifties, Van Manen has his first encounter with the work of George Balanchine, whose New York City Ballet appears at the Holland Festival in 1952 and 1955. It is love at first sight. “I knew immediately that this was of a totally different order! What struck me most was that everything was so clear (..) it all just fitted perfectly. During that one performance, I immediately comprehended forever that a great master was at work here.” Later, Van Manen would regularly declare that Balanchine was always looking over his shoulder in the rehearsal studio. “That’s because he was ahead of me in being as clear as possible in every aspect of a ballet.”

Besides several Balanchine ballets, in the fifties Van Manen also sees works by two other important figureheads of American dance: Jerome Robbins and Martha Graham. He eagerly absorbs these influences, and in the years that follow elements of their work are to be found in Van Manen’s choreographic idiom – albeit with a very personal touch. 

In 1954, Van Manen enjoys his first success abroad as a dancer. During a tour by Ballet van de Nederlandse Opera, he dances a solo in Françoise Adret’s Terrain Vague, in the French town of Aix-les-Bains and in Monte Carlo, among other places.

Ballet van de Nederlandse Opera continues to exist, but only in a much reduced form, and artistic director Françoise Adret is dismissed (the company is anyway discontinued in 1961). Adret leaves for Roland Petit’s company in Paris. Unhappy with all the changes to the company, Van Manen also decides it is time to leave. Although a strong feeling of “I really must go abroad” has already lodged in him, at the beginning of 1959 he first works a few more months on a new cabaret programme by Wim Sonneveld, Rimram, along with people like Conny Stuart and Joop Doderer. 

As the understudy for Albert Mol, who falls ill, Van Manen appears in the programme not just as a dancer, but also as a singer and actor. Although Rimram is not a great success, Van Manen will often say later how much he learned from Sonneveld, particularly with regard to dramatic logic and the cohesion of a scene. “For instance, as an actor you have to see the fire first, and only then point to it and shout ‘fire’.” 

At the beginning of March 1959, Van Manen auditions for Les Ballets de Paris, the company of the celebrated French choreographer Roland Petit, where Françoise Adret is then working as ballet mistress. He has to compete with 130 other dancers and is not taken on straight away. A few weeks later, however, he gets a phone call asking him to come over in mid-June and dance in Cyrano de Bergerac, a large-scale ballet spectacle created by Petit in collaboration with fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. Following his debut with the group, Van Manen remains with Les Ballets de Paris for about a year, performing alongside big stars like the flamboyant Zizi Jeanmaire and Hollywood star Cyd Charisse. It is also where he meets the first big love of his life, and later muse, Gérard Lemaître. 

Shortly before leaving for Paris, Van Manen gets a phone call from Carel Birnie, the former managing director of Gaskell’s Nederlands Ballet, founded in 1954. Along with sixteen rebel dancers from this company and ballet master Benjamin Harkarvy, Birnie is working – still in deepest secrecy at the time – on the formation of a new dance company: Nederlands Dans Theater. Birnie asks Van Manen if he would like to stage his ballets Feestgericht and Pastorale d'éte – Intermezzo for the company. Van Manen is smart enough to agree only on condition that he can also create a new work for the ‘rebel group’. 

In just under a month, Van Manen teaches both existing works in the evening hours (as the dancers are still working for Gaskell during the daytime) and creates De maan in de trapeze for Jaap Flier and Marianne Hilarides (the group’s leading dancers at the time). Before travelling to Paris, he also has to create a further three short television ballets for the AVRO programme Divertissement voor zes. The programme gets a lot of attention in the press, with high praise mainly for Mambo, choreographed by Van Manen.