Hans van Manen timeline

During his first period with Nederlands Dans Theater – from 1960 tot 1971 – Van Manen creates nearly thirty ballets in total. In this timeline, we include the most important of them. For a complete list of the works, see , click here.

The first work he creates for the company on his return from Paris is Klaar af! – een jazzballet. Van Manen had previously choreographed short jazz pieces, but the dazzling, light-hearted and extremely swinging Klaar af! is his first large-scale, ambitious jazz ballet, set to several numbers by Duke Ellington. The ballet for ten dancers, which soon becomes the hit of the season, fits perfectly with the growing popularity of jazz in the Netherlands and the audience goes wild already at its pre-premiere in Etten-Leur, on 12 December 1960. Han Ebbelaar, one of the dancers in the original cast, later said, “The audience went totally crazy. We didn’t know what had hit us. It was as if they wanted to tear the place down. Since then, we’ve nearly always had to give the dazzling finale as an encore.”

After Klaar af!, Van Manen will go on to choreograph several other jazz ballets, including Voet bij stuk for Nederlands Dans Theater and various television ballets. Voet bij stuk, to music by Howard Brubeck, is praised by the critics for its ‘sophistication’, ‘originality and inventiveness’, ‘humour’ and ‘musicality’: characterisations that will often recur in reviews and descriptions of Van Manen’s work in the future.

In 1963, Van Manen ventures to use a composition by Igor Stravinsky for the first time. He chooses no less than the extremely complex Symphony in Three Movements, in which the composer gives a summary of his whole oeuvre to date, as it were, in the space of around 23 minutes. At the time, no other choreographer has used the piece (‘Stravinsky specialist’ George Balanchine was only to make a ballet to it in 1972), and in order to fully get to grips with the music, Van Manen listens to it literally hundreds of times. He develops the ideas for the ballet together with Marian Sarstädt – a new dancer who has arrived from the famous Ballet de Cuevas. 

Symphony in Three Movements is one of Van Manen’s first pure music ballets, which he explains himself at the time, “I’d like to work further in this direction. Get more classicism out of it, so get rid of all superfluous decoration (..) Dance in dialogue with music (..) Without mime, unfolding a theme purely through movement. But then trying to do it differently each time.”

For Symphony in Three Movements, Van Manen receives his second State Award for Choreography, and the leading British dance critic, John Percival, remarks about the ballet that “the young choreographer is streets ahead of his European contemporaries”. From the twelve dancers in Symphony in Three Movements, Sarstädt and the young dancers Alexandra Radius and Han Ebbelaar – who dance their first Van Manen duet in the ballet – emerge as the most important muses for Van Manen in this period, alongside Jaap Flier and Gérard Lemaître.

In 1964, under the name Omnibus, Van Manen makes a series of five short dance sketches for the Boekenbal (a ball held on the eve of the Dutch Book Week), which still takes place in the Concertgebouw at the time, attended by Queen Juliana and members of the cabinet. The swinging, hilarious Omnibus turns out to be a huge success with the writers and journalists who are present. Later, Benno Premsela remembers that “the concert hall went completely crazy”. In an interview days before the premiere, Van Manen himself says, “Being funny is much more difficult than being dramatic. Humour is based on surprise, and on spontaneous dénouements. That’s why I made the ballet as quickly as possible. With full concentration, of course, but without lengthy puzzling that might affect the spontaneous character.

”In 1988, Han Ebbelaar and Alexandra Radius revive one of the sketches, called Zondag, for their programme Op het lijf geschreven, on the occasion of Ebbelaar’s farewell to the stage. In the piece, a horny old goat (in Ebbelaar’s words) chase after his reluctant wife, who is decked out in housecoat and curlers. The performance was such a success that the sketch was then recorded for television, and Introdans and Stuttgarter Ballett took Zondag into their repertoires.

Metaforen follows at the end of 1965, created like Essay in de stilte for twelve dancers, with Alexandra Radius, Han Ebbelaar, Marian Sarstädt and Gérard Lemaître as soloists. Of all Van Manen’s more than a hundred and fifty works, this is the oldest one still being performed today – with great success. Using an imaginary mirror wall on stage, Van Manen not only plays a refined game of reflection and symmetry in Metaforen, but also calls into question the traditional gender division in classical ballet, in two duets – the first for Ebbelaar and Lemaître, and the second for Radius and Sarstädt. 

The scene in which Ebbelaar puts Lemaître on his shoulder in a typical ballerina lift leads to enormous controversy at the time. Even colleagues at Danstheater beg Van Manen to take out the lift. “But he wasn’t worried about it, and rightly so!”, says Ebbelaar in the book Levensdans. “Hans intended no sexual connotation whatsoever. For him, it was purely about the emancipation of the male dancer. He merely wanted to show that a classical pas de deux could be danced equally well by two men.”

At the premiere of Metaforen in Cologne, on 5 December 1965, the ballet is not yet finished. Van Manen has to stop rehearsing on being admitted to the Boerhaave Clinic, in Amsterdam, where – to the great fright of his dancers – he turns out to have pericarditis: an inflammation of the lining around the heart. It is only a few weeks later, after his recovery, that he adds the section with the jeté’s, preceding the adagio, to Metaforen.

In March 1966, Van Manen creates the duet Vijf schetsen in just five days, for his young muses Alexandra Radius and Han Ebbelaar, to Paul Hindemith’s Fünf Stücke für Streichorchester. The ballet marks a breakthrough in the career of the dancing married couple. Alexandra Radius says, “We danced the duet very often, both in the Netherlands and abroad, and it opened up an international career for us, as we also danced it for our audition for American Ballet Theatre” (where the couple worked for two years, from 1968, before making the transition to Dutch National Ballet). 

Van Manen’s ballet is received with standing ovations, and the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Handelsblad writes, “It is not difficult to understand why this ballet became a highlight of the performances given recently by Danstheater in London. The natural perfection with which Radius and Ebbelaar deliver the crisp choreography makes it one of the more exciting theatre events of late.”

Although the bond between Van Manen and managing director Carel Birnie worsens considerably after the tour of America, due to an escalating conflict (Birnie wants the planned tour to Greece to go ahead despite the military coup that has taken place there, which Van Manen fiercely opposes), Van Manen’s productivity at Nederlands Dans Theater remains undiminished. He has already expressly distanced himself from mime and the anecdotal in dance, and in the late sixties this leads to several works that revolve around experimenting with form, whereby he regularly imposes restrictions on himself and his dancers. For instance, he uses a stopwatch for Variomatic, which premieres on 6 July 1968. 

He has a dancer come on stage every 83 seconds, and as soon as all the dancers are on stage, he has one of them go off again every 83 seconds. In this work, he also experiments for the first time with the repetitive dance phrases of minimal dance, a genre that other choreographers in the Netherlands would only bring to fruition from the mid-seventies. 

In the autumn of 1968, Van Manen creates Three Pieces, an anniversary ballet, as it is the hundredth production presented by Nederlands Dans Theater since its foundation in 1959. The ballet for sixteen dancers swathed in lingerie, to music by the Polish composer Grazyna Bacewicz, takes place against the cool, white tiled set (designed by Jan van der Wal) of what appears to be a bathroom or swimming pool, and its theme is voyeurism, or as Van Manen puts it, “Watching while others make love.” In this masterpiece, which is later performed by various other companies (as recently as 2016 by Introdans), three elements come together that will often surface in Van Manen’s later works: eroticism, aggression and humour. After the premiere by Dutch National Ballet, in 1985, the Dutch dance critic Anton Koolhaas writes in Vrij Nederland, “Three Pieces (..) which on seeing at afresh once again makes a wonderful impression, as a truly extraordinarily powerful and beautiful ballet for its formal idiom; ironic and surprising (..).”