Rarely did the top group of the Nederlands Dans Theater convey a message so clearly in a triptych

Hardly anyone will follow Dreams 360 from NDT1 ask yourself: what is this dance performance about? Rarely has the top group of the Nederlands Dans Theater conveyed a message so clearly in a triptych.

The choreographers use strong images in their new work to make a theatrical statement. The one creates a dark nightmare around roadside monuments, the other throws an ironic party around regulation and compliance and the latter shows a striking commitment to climate change and the extinction of animal species. Not that the result has been worked out equally well for all three, but this dance theater is certainly committed. And the evening has a strong warning as a bouncer.

The Spanish Gabriela Carrizo brings in La Ruta all kinds of ghosts come alive on either side of a stripe. A man appears to be reliving collisions on this imaginary highway. From a woman in a raincoat, a deer, a goose, a girl… A road worker with an orange helmet stoically goes through repairing the holes in this death road. More and more boulders are dragged in to slow down the speed, but they are immediately used as a pedestal for a memorial flower or other kind of memento. A Japanese couple performs a blessing ritual with a magic stick, a goose flaps its wings with a loud chatter to fly itself dead against the windows of a bus shelter and a deer looks into the headlights of a car, where a woman has previously been thrown from a door. So much for Carrizo’s nightmare.

Too bad she uses a lot of see-through tricks for the gory images in this shadowy darkness. The magic trick with a stick can be reduced to strings, the transplantation of the beating ‘deer’ disappears in details and the sound composition contains the familiar clatter and hiss behind collisions and short circuits.

As half of the artistic duo behind the Brussels collective Peeping Tom, Carrizo previously worked successfully with Nederlands Dans Theater. In the triptych The Missing Door (2013), The Lost Room (2015) and The Hidden Floor (2017) she and artistic partner Franck Chartier took their characteristic dance suspense to unprecedented heights. But now desperate characters too often dissolve into the mist. And the nine dancers are especially allowed to let their elastic and flexible bodies hit the asphalt a dozen times.

Israeli choreographer Roy Assaf takes in his debut with NDT1 How to Ruin a Dance the profession of a top dancer on the heels. A man in a suit drums up five volunteers from the audience – here too the transparent design quickly reveals itself – to use English spoken commands to force five dancers to perform smooth party steps. The lyrics are ironic, the gold slips and bathing suits are the same. They meekly split between the strings of lights and the draped plush.

Until the piece narrows more and more to everyday outpourings from the life of the phenomenal performer Aram Hasler. In the words of Assaf, she laments that with her rich stage experience she has been condemned to such show passes. The docility of dancers in general and her husband in particular are reviewed. But no matter how swinging, hilarious and coolly executed, at that moment you wonder whether Assaf could not have chosen a more relevant angle to put (dis)obedience and rule-making under a magnifying glass. Is the profession of a dancer in the Randstad the most interesting? Or does he want to expose the dancer’s objectification?

Canadian top choreographer Crystal Pite bets Figures in Extinction 1.0 one of the most important issues of our time on stage: dealing with climate change and global warming. She does that almost literally. With overwhelming images she makes a dance-theatrical variant of a disturbing nature documentary about the list of extinct animal species and disappeared glaciers. From the Pyrenean ibex and the caribou of the South Selkirk Mountains to the rainbow poisonous frog, saber-toothed tiger and Chinese spoon sturgeon.

22 dancers move their hands against the light like a school of fish darting away. Sometimes someone extends their arms into megahorns. Another takes on the role of a slick climate change denier. Until this gossip may also disappear from the face of the earth in 2035, as his voice, which narrows to an echo, at the looming sound of melting ice caps and the ticking list of extinct animal species.