NDT2's young dancers hail from a dozen different countries.
Watch them on-stage, however, and they all belong to one united nation: Nederlands Dans Theater, a realm of exacting standards where everyone is expected to have star quality - but no-one, other than the ensemble itself, is the star attraction. And no matter who comes, or goes, the calibre of performance stays resolutely undiminished. Little wonder, then, that NDT2 stays such a hot ticket - or that Friday's packed house greeted each short piece like blissed-out kids in a candy store. Whatever they do these dancers are, indeed, exceedingly tasty. They can flip from goofy humour, all bendy bodies and knuckle-dragging Neanderthal lurchings - as in Skew-Whiff (a Lightfoot-Leon creation) - to the kind of lyrical, elegant doublework that is a central element of Hans van Manen's Simple Things. They can do splitsecond timing, hands flickaflacking precisely, faces nicely deadpan, in a short firecracker
like Shutters Shut - another Lightfoot-Leon morsel of cunning invention, set to a whimsical poem by Gertrude Stein and crammed with movement to match her word-play. Andrea Schermoly and Alexander Ekman carried off the choreographic witticisms with artless aplomb.
They had also been part of the opening sextet, performing the Scottish premiere of Jiri Kylian's Sleepless. Kylian chooses, yet again, to redefine the space and to play around with fields of vision.
A diagonal wall of white panels slices across the stage, pushing the dancers into a downstage triangle. But there are elastic slits between the panels, and so bodies - sometimes just limbs or heads - can pop in and out, be suddenly engulfed or "spat out" from a gash of darkness. There are moments of panto-clowning, but the underlying feel is of a mysterious, unknown "other" world that the three couples - and briefly ourselves - enter into. Is it a physical space or a mental state?
Whatever, wherever, it inspires dance that jitters as if limbs were electrified by unseen energies and dance that is creamy and undulating, sensual and sleek.
The music melds Mozart (the glass harmonica adagio) with the sheer swoosh of sharpening steel, a light and shade score for a stunning piece that explores both zones. Outstandingly well danced - of course.
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