Hans van Manen timeline

In September 2020, after six months of corona restrictions, Dutch National Ballet returns to the stage. In this month, in view of the limited audience numbers for each performance, the company presents two productions per evening: Back to Ballet - Classic, a programme compiled of several works, followed by Van Manen’s video ballet Live. The performances of Live sell out so quickly that the company puts on an extra performance.

On 30 March 2021, the Hans van Manen Foundation is established. The primary aim of the foundation is ‘conserving, managing and archiving the Dutch cultural heritage of the choreographic work of Hans van Manen’. On the same date, the board of the foundation (comprising Ted Brandsen, Henk van Dijk, Rien Meppelink and Oscar Hammerstein) appoints Rachel Beaujean director of the Van Manen Foundation, at the express request of Van Manen himself. She is therefore given official responsibility for all the stagings of Van Manen’s ballets, both in the Netherlands and worldwide.

For the occasion of the 50th birthday of Queen Máxima, on 17 May 2021, Hans van Manen and Ted Brandsen (artistic director of Dutch National Ballet) create an occasional duet for principal dancers Anna Tsygankova and Constantine Allen. The work, entitled Embrace, is included in a television programme involving various Dutch artists, to celebrate the power of music. At the time, Máxima is the honorary chair of ‘Méer Muziek in de Klas’ (More Music in the Classroom). The music for the new duet - Astor Piazzolla's Adiós Nonino and Ariel Ramírez' Alfonsina y el mar -  is performed live by bandoneonist Carel Kraayenhof, along with musicians Juan Pablo Dobal and Douwe Eisses, and singer Izaline Calister.
 

On 6 November 2021, at 50 Jahre Hans van Manen, a gala to mark the 50th anniversary of Van Manen’s collaboration with the German company Ballett am Rhein, Van Manen is presented with an honorary membership of the company by artistic director Christoph Meyer. Keep Going, Van Manen’s first work for Ballett am Rhein, and also his first work for a company outside the Netherlands, was created in 1971. Since then, Ballett am Rhein has taken 22 of Van Manen’s works into its repertoire. On the occasion of the golden jubilee, the American filmmaker Daisy Long makes a film portrait of Van Manen – with the addition of archive material from the Düsseldorf Theatre Museum – which is shown at the gala. There is an extensive accolade from Van Manen’s good friend Martin Schläpfer, choreographer and Ballett am Rhein’s artistic director between 2009 and 2020. 

When Olga Smirnova, prima ballerina with the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, makes the switch to Dutch National Ballet in March 2022 – following her sharp criticism of the Russian invasion of Ukraine – she does so partly in order to be able to work with Van Manen. Smirnova says, “Diana Vishneva, who I really admire, danced his ballet Live, and I remembered how fantastic she thought it was to work with him.” Shortly after her first rehearsals with Van Manen, Smirnova says enthusiastically, “He’s incredibly precise with regard to style and steps, but at the same time you get plenty of scope to give your own interpretation of his ballets.”
 

In May and June 2022, Dutch National Ballet puts Hans van Manen’s 90th birthday in the limelight. In May, there is a tour of the Netherlands with the programme Hans van Manen 90, comprising his ballets Metaforen, Concertante and Grosse Fuge. In June, there is an extensive Hans van Manen Festival for the second time, in which a total of 19 works by the master choreographer are performed over a three-week period by Dutch National Ballet, Dutch National Ballet’s Junior Company, Nederlands Dans Theater 1 and 2, Introdans, the Wiener Staatsballett, Ballett am Rhein and Stuttgarter Ballett.

On 17 June 2022, the Belgian publisher Hannibal publishes Dance in close-up, a photo book in which around 45 photos by Erwin Olaf zoom in on the details that make a Van Manen ballet a Van Manen ballet – based on the principle ‘the devil is in the detail’. The book is created in close collaboration with Van Manen and Rachel Beaujean, using many dancers from Dutch National Ballet as models. The photos are also exhibited from 19 June to 24 July 2022 in Galerie Ron Mandos, in Amsterdam. In the same month, the Dutch broadcasting company NOS shows a five-part television documentary with the same name, which follows Olaf and Van Manen throughout the photo sessions. 

Shortly after the publication of Olaf’s book, Just Dance the Steps premieres on 25 June 2022 at Cinedans FEST. It is a documentary for which film director Willem Aerts followed Van Manen for five years. The documentary has since been shown on television twice by the Dutch broadcasting company AVROTROS, and it has also been released in a longer version. In one blogger’s opinion, on dedocuptate.com, “Van Manen is right in the middle of life, which for him is inextricably bound up with dance and choreography. He still directs, encourages and corrects like he always has. A demanding man, that much is clear, totally in his element (..)

In June 2022, Prof. dr. Gabriele Klein is appointed endowed professor of Ballet and Dance, to the Hans van Manen chair, at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). The new chair is set up partly on the initiative of Dutch National Opera & Ballet. Klein is the first endowed professor in the field of ballet and dance in the Netherlands. She combines the UvA chair with her position as endowed professor at Universität Hamburg.

In October 2022, Van Manen is met with resounding applause in New York, at the American Fall for Dance Festival. In two completely sold-out performances at New York City Center, four principal dancers from Dutch National Ballet, Maia Makhateli, Olga Smirnova, Constantine Allen and Jakob Feyferlik, enthral the audience with an impeccable rendition of Variations for Two Couples. The theatre news website BroadwayWorld writes, “The two couples, with their exquisite partnering, performed the classic dance impeccably with its fascinating romantic and playful elements. It was a joy to witness ballet at its best with Dutch National Ballet's signature grace and style.” And another platform CriticalDance says, “A finely-crafted, crystalline little ballet that was very well danced by all four of its dancers (..) Van Manen is now 90, and his prolific body of work is well-recognized in Europe. It’s long overdue for his simple but pristine dances to be featured in programs by American companies.”

On 9 June 2023, the Dutch publisher Prometheus publishes the new biography of Hans van Manen, Gelukskind (Child of Fortune), written by author and Slavonic specialist Sjeng Scheijen, who previously made an impression with his standard work about Sergei Diaghilev, among other publications. Scheijen had exclusive access to Van Manen’s archive and spoke at length with the choreographer, his friends and loved ones, and with artists and dancers with whom Van Manen worked. Christiaan Weijts discusses the biography in the Dutch weekly De Groene Amsterdammer, “Colourful, distinctive and passionate: Sjeng Scheijen gives Hans van Manen the biography he deserves (..) 

The German magazine tanz has set up a Lifetime Achievement Award, which is presented for the first time to two winners: John Neumeier (who directed Hamburg Ballett for 51 years) and Hans van Manen. The magazine calls Van Manen “one of the most prominent choreographers of our time”, going on to write, “Hans van Manen has modernised and refined classical ballet and cast it in an elegant, contemporary mould. He receives the honour for his beautiful, incomparable creations, and for the minimalist stories with maximum impact through which he has innovated European dance.”

Besides his career as a choreographer, in the period 1980-1990 Van Manen also built up a limited but carefully composed photographic oeuvre. In November 2024, he donated 86 photos from this oeuvre to the Rijksmuseum. “Not because he’s planning to die anytime soon”, as the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant wrote, but because the 92-year-old choreographer and his husband Henk van Dijk want to get the (re-)allocation of their valuable art collection well organised now already. Van Manen’s portraits are mainly of dancers and (other) male nudes. His photos, just like his choreographic works, are characterised by the apparent simplicity of the composition, whereby the main point is to capture beauty. They are stylised with precision, always in the square dimensions of the 6 x 6 negative and always printed to perfection.