NDT 2 – Sadler’s Wells, London

Choreographers: Marco Goecke, Hans van Manen and Johan Inger

For the first time since 2016, Nederlands Dans Theater bring their youth company to Sadler’s Wells with three performances including two UK premieres that explore loneliness, connection and stagnation, themes that are unsurprising given two years of pandemic limitations on interaction and social development. But the company brings an athletic and creative vigour that intriguingly, and often quite effectively, work against the melancholic subject matter.

Marco Groeke’s opening piece The Big Crying, the first of the evening’s UK premieres, has a unique style, drawing on notions of mechanisation and industrialisation to present its dancers as automated marionettes creating distinctly angular movements and shapes as Groeke places them in various formations. As a dance style, it feels fresh, perhaps unlike anything else as the performers move in staccato double time, almost in fast forward taking tiny but quick steps to complete leaps, lunges and stretches initially to the sounds of metal clanking and whirring while incorporating ballet, tango, tap and contemporary dance.

Yet, it is incredibly polished; actions are fully followed through, only very quickly, and Groeke uses synchronicity and formation to explore his subject matter in the abstract. The expressiveness comes through its style, a man mutely shooting, a period of bent-over pain and the feeling that the world goes on regardless of individual loss or grief, leaving the performer isolated.

Simple Things is the programme’s segue piece, a revival of Hans van Manen’s 20-minute quartet from 2001 that investigates the discomposing effect of relationships. Belying its jaunty opener and conclusion in which two male dancers perform looser, high-spirited moves that incorporate country and folk dance, the longer middle section is a beautiful classical ballet to a gentle piano accompaniment in which movement is slow and deliberate, elegant and calming across a series of pas de deux watched by the other male dancer.

Is this romantic jealousy or something else? Creating lovely shapes and patterns, the romanticism is dampened by the emerging male-female conflict, a sense of challenge that develops in Van Manen’s choreography leaving only the lighter, easier connection of men in its concluding message.

The final premiere Impasse by Johan Inger has the clearest, most theatrical storytelling as three dancers find their physical and emotional space invaded by others who coerce them to join a new style. The ease and freedom of the early section morphs into an oppressive blur of noise and activity, first as a group of coordinated performers in black introduce a new style before a more colourful carnival bring chaos and separation that overwhelms the stage. Inger brings spatial changes into the final segment, reducing the area in which the original trio exist and starts to weigh them down.

NDT2 takes three very different dances and finds a meaningful connection between them using an eclectic but energetic soundtrack and staging to add depth to the different levels of storytelling. Heading off on a UK tour after this brief stop at Sadler’s Wells, NDT2’s return is an is engaging evening.

Runs until 19 February and then tours