When his mother died, Hans van Manen made the most beautiful farewell ballet imaginable for her: the duet Two (1990) on the piece Des Mannes Wiegenlied am Sarge seiner Mutter from Busoni. It concludes with the ballerina’s waving hand: the dying person says goodbye and disappears forever.
Now Hans van Manen himself is saying goodbye. He has died, the National Opera & Ballet reported on Wednesday evening. He was 93 years old. He is without exaggeration the greatest choreographer of his generation. Musical to the core, raised in the 1950s by ‘culture pope’ Benno Premsela to be a culture bearer and a self-confident homosexual. Someone who always chose dancers with a strong personality, because his choreographies are always psychological tests of strength, and the dancer must be able to handle that. His muses had to be able to compete with him – which he could test mercilessly.
Hans Artur Gerhard van Manen was born in Nieuwer-Amstel in 1932. He grew up in Amsterdam, around the corner from the Stadsschouwburg. Because he saw dancers at work through the windows, he knew: I want that too. But how? His mother arranged a job as a jack of all trades for her 13-year-old son at the stage hairdresser. There the path to dance was open to the enthusiastic boy, who had literally developed his talent at home on the radio between the sliding doors. The dancer Jaap Flier, contemporary, remembers (in the film Jaap Flier by Jellie Dekker) how he saw the young Van Manen turning pirouettes for himself – clearly because he liked it so much.
In 1951 he was trained as a dancer by the legendary Sonia Gaskell at her Ballet Recital. He exchanged that for the Dutch Opera Ballet in 1952. He was a good, but, as he always said, “not a beautiful dancer.” In the late 1950s he worked in Paris at Roland Petit. By then he had already created his first ballet: Ole, Ole, la Margarita (1955), to music by Polo de Haas, for the Revue Ramses Shaffy.
Rehearsals of a new performance by Hans van Manen at the National Ballet in 2005. Photo Leo van Velzen/Nrc.Hb.
Photo Leo van Velzen
Van Manen made show ballets for television and his love for Hollywood dance films Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire he never made a secret of it. The combination of classical-academic and contemporary, of strict and show, would become the essence of his style as a choreographer. Supposedly simple in movement, in fact secretly refined. Seriously, until he suddenly added something that was completely out of order – and anyone who knew Van Manen personally would hear his infectious laughter in his head.
That unique style is preserved in more than 120 choreographies, which earned Van Manen just about every award possible – and he deserved them all.
Importance of subsidy
In 1959 he made his breakthrough as a choreographer at the Nederlands Dans Theater with the duet The Moon in the Trapezeto music by Benjamin Britten. Not that there was an instant storm, it would take years before a large audience found Van Manen. He has always emphasized the importance of subsidies for the arts. Without it, even he wouldn’t have gotten there, he never tired of spreading that word. Yes, the halls were sometimes eerily empty. But he said: “I do it for whoever is there. The others have been unlucky.” From the 1970s onwards, the halls filled up, at the National Ballet and the Nederlands Dans Theater.
The career of a number of great Dutch dancers coincides with Van Manen’s genius. Such as Alexandra Radius and Han Ebbelaar, who shone in his Adagio Hammerklavier (1973, music Beethoven). Later, Radius danced it with that next top talent, Clint Farha.
Hans van Manen was a brilliant enfant terrible, he liked to put something unruly on stage. The football jump. Dancing in clogs. Dancing in a race with the clock. Men in long skirts. Men dancing a duet. Dancers in high-heeled pumps. All elements of time, motion and personality were reason to be studied, in the expectation of a choreography – which was always short. Van Manen didn’t see any point in a full evening ballet: “Then I’d rather make three.”
He based it on perhaps his most spectacular innovation Live (1979, to music by Franz Liszt). Van Manen was interested in video technology from an early stage. When no one did that yet, he had all his work recorded on videotape by his partner, Henk van Dijk. But he also saw other possibilities. In Live To the amazement of the audience, he turned the video camera into a character. The dancer dances, the camera (used on the spot by Van Dijk) enters into a duel with her. Images of her hands, feet, back, face, appear on a huge screen. It became Van Manen’s most famous piece and his biggest hit.
Hans van Manen with partner Henk van Dijk on the red carpet prior to the premiere of the musical Billy Elliot in the Circustheater.
Photo Jan Daniels/ANP
“Dance expresses dance and nothing else.” With those words, Van Manen accepted the special professorship at Radboud University in Nijmegen in 1988. This salute to his great role model George Balanchine resembled a statement of principles. But he couldn’t mean it. His ballets are too emotional for that and he attaches too much importance to what happens in them. It is not without reason that he emphatically defined the direction of gaze of his dancers. So contained 5 Tangos (1977, music by Astor Piazzolla) a solo by a boy with a consistently downcast gaze. Van Manen said that he saw a version on American TV in which the dancer looked proudly into the lens and how he sneered at the screen: “How wrong you understood that.”
Also read an interview with Hans van Manen’s biographer
‘There is no room for pity with Van Manen, the choreographer of the Netherlands’
Van Manen’s major subjects are emancipation, eroticism, and the battle between the sexes. That battle led to one of his most beautiful pas de deux: Sarcasms (1981, music by Prokofiev). Performed all over the world, but made based on the body and appearance of Rachel Beaujean and Clint Farha of the National Ballet – living legends because they were completely matched to Van Manen and to each other.
In Sarcasms we see a man and a woman challenging each other: anything you can do I can do better. He is hyperactive, she is increasingly icy. Until his posturing becomes too much for her. The woman raises her arm. Lower her hand. And grabs the man by the balls.
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