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Until Saturday 25

Returning to Hong Kong this week, the Nederlands Dans Theater I opened this year’s New Vision Arts Festival with a diverse mixed programme featuring three works by different choreographers. It fittingly included a recent work by Jiri Kylian, its famed former artistic director from 1975 to 1999. The last time the NDT toured Hong Kong in 1999, Jiri Kylian was in his last season as its artistic director. After his retirement, Kylian has continued his association with the company as a resident choreographer.

This 2006 work, Tar and Feathers, is typical of Kylian’s style – dark and relentlessly gloomy. Six dancers are clad in black, and the stage is in semi-darkness. The set includes a piano raised to half-way up the stage, and a white sculpture glowing like ice. A narrator regularly recites Samuel Beckett’s final poem, What is the Word, while Dirk Haubrich’s astringent piano score, interrupted by occasional wolf snarls makes for a tense atmosphere.

The best parts of the work are the several duets which are mostly fraught with anxiety. There is sufficient contrast and variety in tone to differentiate the duets. An absorbing episode has two duets being danced simultaneously. Kylian’s choreography for the ensemble dances for the six dancers is less interesting; the movements are choppy in phrasing. The unexpected and surreal ending, with one woman watching her five fellow dancers turned to phantoms, is however rather ludicrous.

Similar in vein to this Kylian work was the opening work, Shoot the Moon, set to powerful music by Philip Glass and choreographed in the same year 2006 by Paul Lightfoot and Sol Leon, the other resident choreographers of the NDT. This short, well-crafted work for five dancers is also persistently dark and full of tension, but is effective theatrically. The revolving set consists of three different rooms, inviting the audience to observe the interlinking action of the dancers in each room. Occasionally, film projections above the stage of the dancers also complement the dancing.

The newest work was Renature, which was only created in September by Wayne McGregor, currently the resident choreographer of The Royal Ballet. The piece is about the environmental struggle to recapture the original nature, but the theme isn’t very clearly depicted. It is obvious that the writhing, semi-nude duet in the beginning represents Adam and Eve, and that the green carpet carried by all the seven dancers at the end perhaps represents nature. But it is hard to find any allusions to nature in the rest of the piece which nevertheless has plenty of excitement in terms of pure dance. McGregor’s choreography is fluent. Dancers have vibrant upper bodies, with rippling arm movements. The choreography is frenzied and full of razor-sharp steps. The duet in the middle is striking.