When Dutch National Ballet last presented a major season in New York City, “E.T.” was in theaters, “Thriller” was blowing up MTV and George Balanchine was still alive. The year was 1982.
Now at New York City Center, the company seemed eager to make up for lost time. The first of two programs, on Thursday night, was not merely overstuffed — it felt as if it still were 1982. The repertory, no matter how old or new, felt stale, dated. Even Jerome Robbins’s “Other Dances” suffered. An unhurried tempo is one thing. But how slow can you go?
Under the artistic direction of Ted Brandsen, Dutch National brought sweetly eager to please dancers and a couple of stars: the Russian ballerina Olga Smirnova and the Italian Jacopo Tissi, both of whom left the Bolshoi Ballet after the invasion of Ukraine. They paired up for “Other Dances” (1976), which Robbins created for Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov, Russians who famously defected in the 1970s.
Set to Chopin, the ballet is an intimate braiding of classical and character dance that, while plotless, imparts an air of romance through its music, performed by an onstage pianist (Ryoko Kondo). Smirnova, a guest artist with American Ballet Theater last summer, is tall yet delicate; her sweep is so smooth and subdued that when she moves it’s like she’s cutting through water without making a ripple.
That was apparent in “Other Dances” — but not always in the best way. Tissi is an attentive partner, and the couple grasped that they needed to tune into each other rather than to the audience, as is the Robbins way. But the lugubrious tempo made them look like they were performing understatement instead of inhabiting it. Their steadiness was jarring. These weren’t free spirits; they were so controlled, so exacting that any playful flow eluded them.
Veering into comedy — I think? — was “Trio Kagel” (2017), by Alexei Ratmansky, an associate artist with the company, for Lore Zonderman, Kira Hilli and Giorgi Potskhishvili. The dancing was robust, with sharp shapes and assertive changes of direction, but the onstage musician, Vincent van Amsterdam on accordion, was the ringleader of this odd little circus act.
To music by Mauricio Kagel, the work was peppered with scenarios spoofing the competitive nature of ballet. The women fluttered stiffly around Potskhishvili as if trying to claim him as a partner before settling for each other. The finest moment came when Potskhishvili, with sinewy strength, tore into a solo as high pitches of sound blasted him into the air. In this ballet, the accordion was the driving motor, propelling the dancers with force or wilting them into repose, as they indicated in the final moments when they slumped to the floor.
Ratmansky humor is usually sharper than this, but “Trio Kagel,” a U.S. premiere, was strangely stilted and got stuck in silly. It was still probably the highlight of the evening. In “Two and Only,” the choreographer Wubkje Kuindersma created a misguided miniature of a relationship for Timothy van Poucke and Conor Walmsley, dancing alongside the singer-songwriter Michael Benjamin. He played a guitar before moving onto the piano.
The yearning was next level. It went a little like this: Two guys walk into a coffee shop, see that there is a folk singer and decide to take off their shirts and dance out their own private telenovela.
Bad dance can give you the chills.
The evening was book-ended by two works of disheartening mediocrity — though one, clearly, was worse than the other. Brandsen’s offering, “The Chairman Dances” (2023) to John Adams’s score, featured the cast of men and women wearing flowing white dresses by François-Noël Cherpin and a couple of second-rate references to George Balanchine’s masterpiece “Serenade.”
As ballets go, it wasn’t so much offensive as bland — packed with sweet smiles, grapevine steps and unison pairings with snippets of ballroom dancing. It started and ended with a solo dancer. But if “Chairman Dances” was predictable, it wasn’t nearly as ponderous as Hans van Manen’s “Frank Bridge Variations” (2005).
Set to music by Benjamin Britten, this dance for two couples and six ensemble members cast the stage in murky shades of browns and blues. A common posture, also seen in “Chairman,” had the dancers pressing their hands into the sides of their hips with slightly rounded elbows — a budget version of a Martha Graham walk. At one point the dancers moved as a pack with downcast eyes while traversing the stage in careful steps that were mired in self-important melancholy.
Ensemble members swished their arms back and forth or parted them overhead in an emphatic V, while the couples, on their own, drifted into melodramatic stints of partnering that hinted at surreptitious meetings in graveyards. Slow lifts from behind with splaying legs, supported turns and traveling bourrée steps — the choreography droned on. When does eerie lose its mystery? When the man holds a woman by the back of her neck. In a night of questionable moves, it was a harsh one to end with.
Dutch National Ballet
Through Saturday at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org.
Gia Kourlas is the dance critic for The Times. She writes reviews, essays and feature articles and works on a range of stories.
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