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Trouble Dutch

Is the Hollywood of concert dance being torn down?

By Zachary Whittenburg

Jirí Kylián
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    Ana Lopez of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in Jirí Kylián’s 27'52"

    Photo: Todd Rosenberg325.da.HubbardKylian9.jpg[title]147627891
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    Billy Cannon, Emily Proctor and Joseph Watson of Aspen Santa Fe Ballet in Jirí Kylián’s Stamping Ground

    Photo: Rosalie O’Connor325.da_.stampinggroundasfb.jpg[title]147624532
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    Kevin Shannon and Ana Lopez of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in Jirí Kylián’s 27'52"

    Photo: Todd Rosenberg325.da.HubbardKylian1.jpg[title]147627733
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    Katherine Bolaños and Samantha Klanac of Aspen Santa Fe Ballet in Jorma Elo’s Red Sweet

    Photo: Rosalie O’Connor325.da.AspenSantaFeBallet1.jpg[title]147628974
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    Kevin Shannon of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in Jirí Kylián’s 27'52"

    Photo: Todd Rosenberg325.da.HubbardKylian2.jpg[title]147627755
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    Ana Lopez and Alejandro Cerrudo of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in Jirí Kylián’s 27'52"

    Photo: Todd Rosenberg325.da.HubbardKylian3.jpg[title]147627776
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    Billy Cannon, Sam Chittenden, Katherine Bolaños and Katie Dehler of Aspen Santa Fe Ballet in Jorma Elo’s Red Sweet

    Photo: Rosalie O’Connor325.da.AspenSantaFeBallet2.jpg[title]147628997
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    Hubbard Street Dance Chicago resident choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo in Jirí Kylián’s 27'52"

    Photo: Todd Rosenberg325.da.HubbardKylian4.jpg[title]147627798
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    Kevin Shannon of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in Jirí Kylián’s 27'52"

    Photo: Todd Rosenberg325.da.HubbardKylian5.jpg[title]147627819
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    Benjamin Wardell and Meredith Dincolo of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in Jirí Kylián’s 27'52"

    Photo: Todd Rosenberg325.da.HubbardKylian6.jpg[title]1476278310
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    Sam Chittenden and Nolan McGahan DeMarco of Aspen Santa Fe Ballet in Nicolo Fonte’s Where We Left Off

    Photo: Rosalie O’Connor325.da.AspenSantaFeBallet3.jpg[title]1476290111
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    Meredith Dincolo and Benjamin Wardell of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in Jirí Kylián’s 27'52"

    Photo: Todd Rosenberg264.ac_.da_.Kylian.jpg[title]16370712
  • [title]

    Ana Lopez and Alejandro Cerrudo of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in Jirí Kylián’s 27'52"

    Photo: Todd Rosenberg325.da.HubbardKylian7.jpg[title]1476278513
  • [title]

    Ana Lopez and Alejandro Cerrudo of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in Jirí Kylián’s 27'52"

    Photo: Todd Rosenberg325.da.HubbardKylian8.jpg[title]1476278714
  • [title]

    Sam Chittenden and Katie Dehler of Aspen Santa Fe Ballet in Nicolo Fonte’s Where We Left Off

    Photo: Rosalie O’Connor325.da.AspenSantaFeBallet4.jpg[title]1476290315

Ana Lopez of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in Jirí Kylián’s 27'52"

Photo: Todd Rosenberg
05/13/2011

You might call Czech artist Jirí Kylián the Christopher Nolan of dance: Only an infrastructure developed over a century (the state-supported European concert-dance system, or “dance’s Hollywood,” as I’ll call it) allows him to create as big as he thinks (dances such as Bella Figura and 27'52" are akin to The Dark Knight and Inception).

In this analogy, the world-renowned Nederlands Dans Theater, based in the Hague and Kylián’s artistic home for more than three decades, would be Warner Bros.

It faces an uncertain future: The cultural council of Holland recently proposed cuts of up to half its annual budget. (The Dutch National Ballet, the country’s largest dance company, faces a 26-percent amputation.)

Just as European cinemas rely heavily on the fruits of Hollywood, American dance companies often turn to works made in Europe when seeking bankable returns on carefully made investments. Hubbard Street Dance Chicago presents 27'52" at the Harris Theater Thursday 19 through Sunday 22, and Aspen Santa Fe Ballet brings a rarely seen but significant 1983 piece by Kylián, Stamping Ground, to the same venue on Tuesday 24.

NDT may also be downgraded to “regional amenity” status. Its tours to Buenos Aires, Chicago, Melbourne and other cities, where fans fill the largest opera houses available, would take a back seat to appearances in Dutch suburbs such as Rijswijk, Voorburg and Wassenaar. A statement released May 4 by NDT’s leadership—which includes artistic director Jim Vincent, previously at Hubbard Street—called the council’s plan “baffling.”

Former NDT director Glenn Edgerton says that a shift toward the American model (corporate and individual giving, supplemented by grants and foundation support), while not ideal, could be possible—but not in a single summer. “It’s crippling to make such drastic changes. For Jim, having just gotten there…he doesn’t deserve it. He needs to see his vision through, and needs the time and the resources to manage that.”

It’s hard not to see this news as just the latest domino to fall. Another global dance ambassador in the Low Countries, Antwerp’s Royal Ballet of Flanders, found itself up against government-mandated reorganization that would essentially rout the hard-won, highly praised vision of its director since 2005, Kathryn Bennetts. The Australian-born expert in William Forsythe’s choreography took to Belgian television in October with a sharply worded rebuttal to cultural minister Joke Schauvliege. Bennetts’s resignation, at the end of her contract next year, still stands; the situation is at an impasse. And British dance companies are scrambling in the aftermath of drastic arts cuts proposed earlier this spring. Those have been especially contentious; some actually saw their budgets increase (Wayne McGregor, Hofesh Schechter), while others were left gutted (Ballet Black, Henri Oguike).

Dance without the boundary-pushing creations made in Europe would be like film without Hollywood.

Which isn’t to say that dance performances need to be expensive. It’s about preserving an art form’s ability to think big. Forsythe’s massive, evening-length opus Impressing the Czar garnered Flanders the dance world’s attention when Bennetts revived it in 2006. (Created in Frankfurt in 1988, it had lain dormant for over a decade.) Will the next generation of artists even attempt to create such immersive, avant-garde dance-theater experiences? “Creativity needs time,” says Edgerton. At NDT, “we would have a week of technical rehearsals in the theater, whereas [at HSDC], we have a day.”

ASFB’s dancers learned Stamping Ground from Kylián répétiteur Patrick Delcroix, a star dancer at NDT from 1986 to 2003. (In 2001, he was knighted in arts and letters by the government of his native France.) When I call him in Munich, Germany, where he’s paying one of his first dance schools an annual visit, Delcroix is hopeful that, if confirmed, the cuts go toward thinning personnel, not grounding NDT.

“I understand both sides,” he says. “And it’s not bad bad, like you have in the States…where you don’t get much [state] money, and you have to run around to get sponsors.… Maybe it’s a good time to clean up, a little bit, the mess.” What worries him most is the future of Europe’s experimental and freelance scene, which faces the bleakest outlook of all, he says. “You have to prove to [the council], if you have a program, that you will make money,” he explains. “It’s, of course, impossible to prove that you will make money.”

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago performs Kylián’s 27'52" Thursday 19 through Sunday 22 at the Harris Theater, where Aspen Santa Fe Ballet brings his Stamping Ground on Tuesday 24.

Comments (2)
May 18, 2011
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Of course it is impossible to prove that you will make money in any endeavor. However, maybe this is the time that European dance needs to go small and begin to produce new, different art works. This offers a series of checks to put things into balance between how choreographers craft and how public money is spent. It's not such a bad thing. It forces people to be more creative.
By Anonymous (not verified) on 5/17/2011 at 3:52 pm
POPULISM AND NONSENSE ART The government cuts as mentioned in this article are part of a much broader initiative from the current rightwing Dutch government to finally get rid of the art forms that are considered 'elitist', i.e. cost money and are not 'commercially viable'. The NDT is victim of populism, not of the financial crisis (enormously expensive building projects like the amsterdam underground go on as planned). The Hague sinks into a populist pool: also the famous Residentie Orkest (one of the oldest in Europe)will shut down. It all stems from the idea that art is just a private form of entertainment and should not need public money, while it is an old European idea that art, i.e. art of real quality, fulfils a public function, being something like an aspirational space for thought experiment and presenting the higher human faculties the level to which a civilization should try to strive - at least as an orientation point, an ideal, to balance all the negative things going-on in society. Europe's identity rests for a great deal on its culture which is cultivated by the state. Holland is an exception in this kind of subsidy cuts: in France, the arts budget has been increased instead of cut. But there is also another problem playing-up: much subsidy money is wasted on nonsense-art, like conceptual avantgarde art and modernist music which is nowadays merely a primitive repetition of ideas from decennia ago and does not contribute anything to the world or civilization. This has, for many people, contributed to the idea that artists in general are no longer to be taken seriously, it has given teeth to the populist philistines who now increasingly populate Dutch politics.... It shows what happens if the art world cultivates nonsense on public expense and primitive populism sees its chance to attack 'elitist snobbery'. While it should be clear that a civilization who lets its culture erode, invites the beginning of barbarism: the beginning of the end. John Borstlap Amsterdam (composer)
By John Borstlap (not verified) on 5/25/2011 at 6:18 pm
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