NDT 1 in The Point Being, Photo by Rahi Rezvani.

By Emma Schneider

What does one come to see at a dance performance? There are components of productions that help to create a whole—costumes, lighting, music, etc.—yet, it would be difficult to argue that dance companies should prioritize anything above the quality of the dance itself, the simple fact of their dancers moving through space. The Nederlands Dans Theater’s April 5 performance at the New York City Center at times adhered to this ideal but also veered into the dangers inherent in deviating from it. 

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The most profound feature of William Forsythe’s N.N.N.N is its silence. The stage appears completely still except for the sounds of moving bodies. A dancer enters the stage and tries to move himself. Each time he places his arm into place it flops, boneless—the line of the body breaks at the wrist. As each man enters the stage, bonelessness remains, their bodies now support each other, producing chain reactions. The four dancers come together to fight, play, clap, slap, and groan. Thom Willems’s musical score fades into the background, barely perceptible—the main noise was from the bodies: a separate “breathing score” of men panting heavily, in rhythm, with nothing to muffle it. 

The sparse music draws in the audience as gestures alone tell the story. The pairings of the dancers (two in purple and green and two in black), the simplicity of the costumes, as if they had just come from a particularly graceful game of pickup basketball, made me think of sports, working out, the pure gracefulness of Bernardo Montet’s choreography of male bodies in Beau Travail, a movie which came out in 1999, two years before N.N.N.N premiered. The work felt in conversation with the movie’s blurring of boundaries between exercise and dance, the film’s military drill sequences, produced similar tensions to the cascading pushups present in N.N.N.N. Both the work and the film are visual stories where gesture and the tension produced in the space between bodies create narrative more than any other element.

Perhaps dance is best when stripped down to the basics. Following this logic, N.N.N.N makes dance about movement: there is no set except for the stage, no garish lighting, and while featuring an accompanying score, the music never distracts. This piece was a Rube Goldberg machine of bodies exploring what happens when bodies forcefully interact. Bumping into each other, the interactivity unspools unselfconsciously. The stage goes dark, in the piece’s final moments, and the four men burst apart from one another. The reaction doesn’t stop as much as explode.

The second piece on the program, The Point Being, (a U.S premiere), could not have been a more striking contrast, both in tone and style. Choreographed by Imre Van Opstal and Marne Van Opstal, it opened with booming cinematic music and strobing lights revealing dancers’ bodies in various states of repose and distress. The scenery, designed by DRIFT, was confusing. A chicken wire apparatus hung over the stage—was it a cage? The ominous clouds of stage smoke reminded me of Dune or the moon landing. The music, composed/created by Amos Ben-Tal/OffProjects, was electronic and overwhelming. Dancers waited to join activity outside circles of light, while pairs struggled within them. The costumes didn’t help. Both genders wore unflattering ruched nude tops and loose-fitting shorts. The choreography alternated between mass and individual movement. Described as a “multidisciplinary creation” the program promised to explore concepts of synchronicity. The messaging was indistinct. Are we all sheep? Are we able to work together to delay the apocalypse? Are we doomed? The piece kept promising to end, and then breaking its promise and continuing beyond the point of reason. We get it. I wanted to say. We understand that this is the future. For a dance as plotless as this one seemed to be, it felt ploddingly pedantic. Also—the music was just too loud. 

The final piece on the program, Jakie, choreographed by Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, shared the issues of overproduction with The Point Being, but redeemed itself through the deliberate movements in its choreography. Dancers bunched together in swarming formations and moved in tight controlled arrangements to techno influenced music. The choreography seemed to contain parodies of the shapes of classical ballet and tributes to voguing alongside the obvious influence of the Bathsheba Ballet company and Gaga dance techniques. As the dancers kept in formation, one or another dancer would break free and shake. A leg trembling, or an arm ecstatic, breaking up the singular pulsing mass. The emotions expressed in these moments seemed to come from within the dancers themselves, showing how they were physically moved by the music, and urged to break free of the crowd. The costumes were unobtrusive nude bodysuits, which did their best to emphasize the dancers’ shapes. Despite the excellence of the movement the lighting was too dark and took away from the piece. Audience members, afterward, could be heard complaining. The design, like that of a high fashion photoshoot, was at times beautiful but distracted from the joy of the dance.

The Nederlands Dans Theater, with an outstanding raft of dancers to pull from, is trying to push the boundaries of what is possible within dance. But it is possible to try too much. At the end of the night, NDT had demonstrated that Forsythe’s N.N.N.N, with its restraint, taste, and innovation, was in fact, the exception, not the rule. The other two works had two choreographers, complex costumes, electronic music, and constantly shifting lighting. All this work should result in excellent dance, but instead, it produced overburdened productions, where stage technology frequently overshadowed, or even diminished the dancers. The NDT and its choreographers (disciples of Forsythe and Ohad Naharin) believe in offering dancers the ability to make their own choices and experiment with movement. This philosophizing is great, but it only matters if the audience sees its results. NDT should step back, and let us watch its dancers move, occasionally in silence.