Hans van Manen timeline

For Van Manen, the nineties are exceptionally productive years. For Nederlands Dans Theater, he creates one masterpiece after another. The first is Visions Fugitives, with a starring role for two important new Van Manen muses: the beautiful, extremely feminine Fiona Lummis and the impressive, sensual Jean Emile. 

Lummis says later about the work, “Hans is able to create dynamics and drama simply by putting two people on stage together. The drama comes from the personalities of those people and from the music, as well as from the way Hans pairs up the dancers (..) You ‘hear’ the choreography in the music. The repressed tension of the ballet, the mystery of the first pas de deux, the individual dynamics of each of the three couples, the scene where we run among each other in the dark, as a premonition of what is to come – it all works; it’s all completely logical when you listen to the music.” Although of course, she says, Van Manen also adds ‘that one surprising twist’. “Throughout the ballet, everything seems fine and dandy, and so the ending, where Jean kills me, comes unexpectedly – even for me at first.”

Van Manen first used music by Johann Sebastian Bach as early as 1972 (for Opus Lemaître), and he continues to do so regularly throughout his career. One of his most beautiful and most successful Bach ballets is undoubtedly Fantasía, created in 1993 for six leading dancers from Nederlands Dans Theater: Fiona Lummis, Sol León, Cora Kroese, Jean Emile, Paul Lightfoot and Jorma Elo. The title is deliberately written with an accent over the ‘i’, says Van Manen, “in order to avoid any confusion with Disney’s Fantasia.” According to Jean Emile, the ballet is about ‘dreaming and saying farewell to dreams’. “It’s about saying goodbye to something you actually don’t want to say goodbye to. But”, he stresses, “Hans never lays it on too thick. He can say twenty million things with just one simple movement.”

After the premiere, there are regular comments that Fantasía is supposed to refer to the ballet Adagio Hammerklavier, which he created precisely twenty years earlier. One critic even calls the ballet “Adagio Hammerklavier Revisited”, but Van Manen says, “I put that reference in deliberately, of course. I heard Bach’s music and thought ‘hey, that sounds very much like Hammerklavier; the same notes, the same rhythm and the same reticence. So I thought it would be great fun to quote myself. And then some newspapers wrote, ‘He’s repeating himself’. How stupid! I wasn’t born yesterday!”

For the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the painter Piet Mondrian, in 1994, Van Manen creates Compositie, for Nederlands Dans Theater’s Holland Festival programme. In an austere white, grey and black set, with two square tables and four plain cubic stools by each table, eight dancers play an intriguing game of attraction and rejection in beautifully mirrored patterns. The leading German dance critic Jochen Schmidt once labelled Van Manen as ‘ein Mondrian der Balletbühne’, following which the name ‘Mondrian of dance’ becomes widely used in the Netherlands as well. Van Manen himself, however, more or less dismisses the comparison. “I suppose there may be some similarities: the clarity and tension and the shared principle of ‘less is more’. But in contrast to Mondrian’s paintings, my ballets are not abstract. After all, they’re always about people and human relationships.”

However many masterpieces Van Manen creates in his second period with Nederlands Dans Theater and however much praise he receives for them, in the mid-nineties there are also critics who think he is repeating himself too much. One of them even uses the expression ‘déjà vu’, and this criticism does not fall on deaf ears. In 1995, Van Manen hits back ruthlessly with a sublime, virtuoso duet for NDT 2, which he calls Déjà vu and in which he brilliantly reveals various aspects of a long-term relationship. Or in his own words, “Déjà vu is about two people who are in constant opposition. They really have a go at each other.” 

Van Manen deliberately sets the duet to Arvo Pärt’s Fratres, a composition that has already been used often by choreographers and has even been described as ‘danced to death’. But Van Manen would not be Van Manen if he did not succeed in giving the universally known composition a completely new overtone, whereby his two dancers compete with the score, as it were.

After Déjà vu, Van Manen surpasses himself – if possible – with Kammerballett, created for eight dancers from NDT 1, with a starring role for the female dancer Sol León, who alongside Fiona Lummis has now become Van Manen’s new muse. In the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, dance critic Astrid van Leeuwen writes, “Like a toreador, the Spaniard Sol León captivates attention in the final section of Kammerballett (..) What Van Manen shows here demonstrates such simplicity, yet is so moving at the same time that you wonder whether the man will ever be able to match this beauty again.” 

And almost thirty years later, Van Manen biographer Sjeng Scheijen notes, “In Kammerballett, Hans made a solo for her (Sol León - ed.) that’s so stunning that even after seeing it ten times in a row you're still blown away. It’s the most beautiful solo ever made by Hans, and the most beautiful solo that’s ever been danced on a Dutch stage.”

Between 1991 and 2006, Nederlands Dans Theater not only has a main company and a company for young dancers  (NDT 1 and 2), but also a company for dancers aged forty and up: NDT 3, an initiative by Jiří Kylián. Van Manen makes several works for the ‘senior ensemble’, the absolute highlight of which is The Old Man and Me, created at the beginning of 1996 for the dancers Sabine Kupferberg and Gérard Lemaître. “Anyone who’s ever been in love is touched by this duet”, said Lemaître about the ballet, in which Van Manen paints a complete picture of a relationship – if not of life itself – in less than twenty minutes. After the swaggering and seduction of the first sections, in the final section the dancers ‘freeze’ in photo poses, like a nostalgic memory of all the good things that have happened. 

After the premiere, dance critic Eva van Schaik writes in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, “As two ‘oldies’, Kupferberg and Lemaître got what they asked for from their evergreen, their old man, but he also gets commitment from them. With a few black outs, the enforced separation is announced. Then they melt away, but their presence will linger in the emptiness forever. I hope that Reve (a famous Dutch author - ed.) also gets to see this ballet, which makes so many books superfluous.”

In January 1997, Van Manen creates “six delightful minutes, which you experience breathlessly from the first to the last second”, as the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad writes. He choreographs Solo for three dancers from NDT 2 because, as he explains at the time, the punishing tempo of Bach’s Violin Partita No. 1 means it can’t be danced by just one person. “It was one of the most exciting creative processes ever”, is how the original cast remembers the creation of this ‘solo for three’. 

“Hans (at the time nearly 65 – ed.) would work with us alternately and when one left the studio exhausted, then the next could come in”, says ex-NDT-dancer Patrick Marin. “But he just kept on going himself, and despite his age he showed all the steps: turns, jumps, rolling on the floor. And… he thoroughly enjoyed it. You could just see that he was in a sort of creative trance. Afterwards, he must have been completely broken, but he never showed it.”

Van Manen’s choreography also shed new light on Bach’s composition. Ex-NDT-dancer Václav Kunes says, “Through Solo, Hans has added an extra layer to Bach’s music. He has visualised so many details, nuances and transitions that are concealed in the score. He also made us see that you have to find the stops and silences in the music, because only then can you deal with the enormous speed of the composition.” “Hans didn’t use Bach”, adds ex-colleague Jo Kanamori, “He actually felt Bach.”

For the first time since leaving the company in 1987, Van Manen makes a new piece for Dutch National Ballet, which has been led by the Canadian artistic director Wayne Eagling since 1991. In Three Pieces for HET, dedicated to his former muse Rachel Beaujean, Van Manen explores the principle of the anticlimax. He deliberately chooses to begin with a group of dancers and then follows with two duets. The first is swirling and nervously energetic, and the second is a tranquil adagio that gradually decreases in movement density. Rather than ‘starting in first gear and gradually revving up the engine’, he has the two dancers ‘change down from fifth to second gear’, as it were. 

Or, as he says himself, “I’ve unravelled a piece of knitting, rather than knitting it.” Sofiane Sylve, who dances the premiere with Gaël Lambiotte, later sums up the effect prosaically: “Afterwards, you’re broken.”

Three Pieces for HET is received with great enthusiasm at its premiere on 14 June 1997. “The ballet is a finely crafted piece of jewellery, in which the gem Sofiane Sylve is set off dazzlingly”, writes the Dutch newspaper NRC. Later on, Van Manen will scrap the first section, following which the ballet still returns regularly to the repertoire as Two Pieces for HET.