Every time NDT2 (Netherlands Dance Theatre2) hits our stages, the usual superlatives fall flat in speechless admiration at 16 dancers – age 17 to 23 – who can handle anything the world's top-ranking choreographers care to task them with.
For this programme that meant works by LightfootLeon, Jiri Kylian and Alexandfer Ekman and a demanding shift of moods, humours and movement vocabularies.
Company policy at NDT2 means that, after three years, even the most covetable talent has to move on. It's a dictat that makes the ensemble prowess on-stage even more remarkable, not least in Ekman's closing tour de force, Cacti. A drolly deadpan voiceover spoofs various aesthetic theories that reference dance and ritual. Cue the massed ranks of uniformly clad dancers, each poised on a white plinth, who deliver synchronous formations, complete with orchestrated slaps and stomps, before fragmenting into solo motifs that lead to the hilarious arrival of the cacti. Seriously clever, delightfully bizarre and surprisingly funny, it showcases the dancers' discipline, panache and stamina – following on from the dark angst and wrenching drama of Kylian's Gods and Dogs, where humankind seems menaced by the beast within and the hound-like forces of fate.
LightfootLeon's opening piece Studio2, with its upstage incline and overhead mirror, hinted at the dancer's daily confrontation with their own reflected self while the exits and entrances exquisitely echoed the transience that is ours, as well as theirs.
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