Dance grandmaster Hans van Manen: “I am not worried at all about the future of my ballets”
Ballet dancer and choreographer Hans van Manen (91) spoke to UvA students Wednesday evening about dance, choreography, and the future of his ballets, which have now been declared to be a Dutch cultural heritage. “If we are going to talk about dance, we must see dance, too.”
An evening theorizing about dance is not on the agenda of world-famous choreographer Hans van Manen. Nevertheless, he was immediately enthusiastic about discussing dance with students of Gabriele Klein, UvA Professor of Dance and Ballet and holder of the Hans van Manen Chair. But under one condition: “If we are going to talk about dance, then we must see dance, too.”
And so on a Wednesday evening in March, two dancers from the National Ballet were in the university theater rehearsing Trois gnossiennes especially for the occasion, a ballet by Van Manen for two dancers set to piano music by French composer Erik Satie that first premiered in 1982.
About 50 audience members have gathered in the university theater. In the front row, students sit with carefully prepared questions in their hands to listen to the Klein seminar on Reconstruction, Deconstruction, Reenactment - How a cultural memory is created for an ephemeral art. This evening with Van Manen is the conclusion of a lecture series Klein organized in collaboration with the National Opera and Ballet to combine theory about dance with practice.
The first word
Before Klein can let the first student say anything, Van Manen intervenes: “May I speak first as usual?” Laughter breaks out. Together with his partner Henk van Dijk and two glasses of white wine, he takes a seat on stage and starts talking about how the performance came about over the course of three rehearsals. “I'm always very much into anecdotes.”
Rarely does he sit still and is constantly acting things out. For example, he stamps his feet rhythmically on the ground. “Rhythm is the basis for dance; it was there before there was music. If you all stomp on the ground for an hour to a rhythm, you automatically get high.”
Van Manen listens intently to the students’ questions but sometimes interrupts them. “The questions are all too long; let us start with one.” Van Manen also sometimes asks his own questions. “How do you create choreography? That question is going to come naturally. I don't think I have an answer to that. Many people think that if you know all the dance steps, you can do choreography. But a pile of bricks doesn't make you a house. Music and dance have to go together. There is dramaturgy in everything; that is absolutely necessary. I know exactly how the ballet begins and exactly how it should end.”
The future of ballet
Finally, a student broaches the subject of dance heritage. Hans van Manen's ballets have been declared a Dutch cultural heritage, but how do you preserve a fleeting art form such as a ballet? That is a subject of study for dance theorists. Unlike the scores for a piece of music, with dance, there is no single way to record it. Van Manen himself did not make any notes of his ballets. But they were photographed by Erwin Olaf, among others, and his partner Henk van Dijk made videos of the ballets from the 1980s on.
“You can think of the videos as the notes of the dance,” adds Van Dijk. “With the advent of video, we were able to capture a live performance in image and sound for the first time. I always tried as much as possible to give the viewer the idea that he was not watching a video, but the dance itself.” Van Manen never used another cameraman after Van Dijk arrived. “What I find so special about Henk is that he understands the choreography and sees what is happening. He is the only one who can capture the whole ballet with one camera.”
There is also such a thing as body memory to preserve dance, which Van Manen refers to when he talks about the dancers on stage. “I know all the ballets, I know every step, every beat. Rachel Beaujean, once a Van Manen dancer and now deputy artistic director of the National Ballet, also knows the ballets. She plays an important role in preserving the heritage and teaches the ballets to new dancers.
Van Manen is still here to give the last word at dress rehearsals, but what will happen when he is no longer around, a student asks. “I am not worried about that at all,” Van Manen responds laconically. “People always want to see the first performance of a show, but today dance is so much better than it used to be. Besides, every dancer does it differently, and that is just fine. Do not ask a dancer to perform a ballet exactly the way you did it. That is the way it goes. But I do not worry about it.”
Overwhelming
“It was overwhelming,” says student Ace Barry later that night, still reeling from the experience. “Van Manen took his own interpretation of the questions to get us all thinking.” “It turned out to be something different than we had expected, but that is what made it interesting,” student Mulan Go confirms. “It was very special to hear a choreographer who has been so important to the history of dance speak for himself.”
