Emily Molnar, the artistic director of Nederlands Dans Theater, is committed to giving her dancers, as she has said, “creative agency and a greater sense of belonging.”
That matters in the studio. You want it to matter onstage. But without substantial dances to dance, it can’t help but to matter very little — especially not in promoting the individuality that comes, one hopes, from having creative agency in the first place.
The company, under Molnar’s artistic direction since 2020, returned to New York City Center on Wednesday with the support of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels and three works, including “N.N.N.N.” (2002) by the esteemed William Forsythe. (As a dancer, Molnar was a member of his Frankfurt Ballet.) It isn’t Forsythe on his best day — it’s too knowingly playful to really soar — but at least it was succinct, with dancers that looked like real people. As the evening dragged on, this wasn’t necessarily the norm.
In the Forsythe work, four men create a score using their breath, which provides the rhythm and the choreographic pulse alongside barely-there music by Thom Willems. Swinging their arms, resting their hands on one another’s shoulders, they inhaled and exhaled with fervor. Their breathing, sharp and drawn out with the occasional whoosh, mirrored the rise and fall of their limbs.
They tapped and lightly smacked one other as they lined up side by side, tangling and untangling like interlocking puzzles, yet there was something off about their flow as their movement right from the start seemed premeditated. It was as if they anticipated how their weight dropped instead of being guided by it.
Still, gimmicky Forsythe is better than nothing. The other works on the program were created by duos — which really goes to show that two choreographers aren’t better than one. In “The Point Being,” the Dutch choreographic pair of Imre and Marne van Opstal — they are siblings and former members of the Nederlands company — collaborated with Lonneke Gordijn and DRIFT, an Amsterdam studio, to create a light installation that interacted with dancing bodies.
Delicate rope ladders, like curtains, hung in front of and behind the dancers amid a landscape of shadows and spotlights, which sometimes flashed like surveillance beams. As for the look, beige and dusty? It was right out of “Dune.” With choreography credited to the van Opstals and DRIFT, the dancers, emboldened by a lugubrious movement quality, left their humanness behind. Instead they transformed — sigh — into creatures with faces masked in expressions of pained concentration.
The work purported to explore, in part, the notion of synchronicity. While dancers did, at times, team up — embodying a ponderous and recognizable slow-motion quality — the women weren’t always on equal footing, but bodies prone to manipulation. In moments, there was dragging by the ankles and wrists, along with a position that left me cold: a male grip just under the chin, fingers wrapped around the throat.
Aside from sculpturally gooey duets and trios, groups traversed the stage in orderly walking patterns, which offered another layer but little tension. Perhaps the point of “The Point Being” was that it was a light show for dancing rather than a dance. Throughout, the design, which featured lights moving along the side of the stage, shifted to create — in its finest moment — a sleek daybreak glow. But mainly within this choreography of space, bodies were reduced to little more than an aimless kind of boneless articulation.
Another choreographic duo, Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, presented “Jakie,” largely an ensemble work for 16. Like most dances by Eyal and Behar, “Jakie” was a foray into a world of steely, androgynous sensuality, a path paved by Eyal’s many years with Batsheva Dance Company and Ohad Naharin’s Gaga movement language. Wearing unitards that matched their skin tone, the dancers were presented as both nearly nude and sexless as they teetered in demi-pointe, balancing on the balls of their feet as they moved more or less as a pack: formations of awkward Barbies, torqued and twisted, sweaty and strained.
Set to a pulsing score by Ori Lichtik (there is also music by Ryuichi Sakamoto, performed by Alva Noto), “Jakie” was purposely repetitive as the dancers, more jittery than hypnotic, moved as one under Alon Cohen’s apocalyptic lighting. More than a dance, “Jakie,” with its quivering legs and contorted torsos, was an extended vibration. Dancers pinched their earlobes and held fingers in the air, which added shapes — antlers or gills — to their silhouettes. From Nederlands, it was more of the same: dancers posing as aliens.
Nederlands Dans Theater
Through Saturday at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org.
