The Dutch National Ballet celebrates Hans van Manen’s 90th birthday with a festival and a tour. During the Hans van Manen Festival, the international dance world will gather to pay tribute to the great master of Dutch ballet. With the Hans van Manen 90 tour – which took place last May – the company presents three jewels from his extensive oeuvre.
Choreographer Hans van Manen (1932) has been a great source of inspiration to dancers and audiences for years. He is internationally recognised as one of the great masters of contemporary ballet. All his ballets – more than 150 – have an unmistakable signature. Clarity of structure, refined simplicity and an aversion to unnecessary decorative frills are the core elements of his highly musical choreographies, which, without becoming anecdotal, always revolve around human relationships.
For his creation, Van Manen was inspired by two movements from Jacob ter Veldhuis’ Goldrush Concerto, music that, he says, ‘swings like the plague, with incredibly fierce rhythmic sections and an extraordinarily interesting succession of instruments’. Two Gold Variations does not tell a continuous story. The choreographer wanted the dancers to do something new and different each time. But in the end, everything does interlock somehow and the ballet evokes the atmosphere of an increasingly fierce dialogue between a man and a woman, multiplied by six other couples.
Other works at the festival: Vivo e giusto uit “Mouvements Eclatants” van Carlos Micháns and Symphonieën der Nederlanden by Louis Andriessen
Composers in the crosshairs of our attention