NDT2 is a company of incredible dancers. The younger sibling of Nederlands Dans Theater is made up of the best of international dance graduates (under new artistic director Emily Molnar). Maybe there’s something magic in the energy and ambition and discipline you take into your first big job, matched with precocious technique.
It shows in Hans van Manen’s Simple Things, from 2001, a quartet danced with immense finesse, the performers’ classical grounding evident in smooth-as-silk chainé turns and silent, springing jumps. The technical command and celerity of the dancers shows in an entirely different way in Marco Goecke’s new work The Big Crying, with its sharp, glitching angles, fast-forward speed and precise articulation. They nail its demanding complexity. Ricardo Hartley III is especially eye-catching, stretching into the most elastic backbend, his dancing so clean you could eat your dinner off it.
