Hans van Manen, the most famous Dutch choreographer and ballet master of his generation, who died on December 17 at the age of 93, leaves a legacy of more than 150 works that crossed the borders of the Netherlands. His death was announced this Wednesday by the National Opera and Ballet, and he leaves a deep mark on contemporary dance with a style of great expressive power and full of eroticism. With a career that spanned six decades, his works are part of the repertoire of more than a hundred global companies and are performed around the world. He also created for television and loved the dance films of American artists Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
Born in 1932 in what is now the municipality of Amstelveen, near Amsterdam-Schiphol airport, Van Manen studied with the dancer and choreographer of Lithuanian origin Sonia Gaskell. He later joined the Netherlands Opera Ballet, and the Ballets de Paris, led by maestro Roland Petit. In 1955, his first choreography was titled Olé Olé, the Margarita. With the third, called Party oriented, received the State Choreography Award. His style was simple and precise, but also classic and academic, and focused on human relationships without resorting to excess.
Van Manen was artistic director of the Nederlands Dans Theater, and later its resident choreographer. This last work was performed in the Het Nationale Ballet, two of the most prestigious ensembles in the Netherlands. Its dancers and those of a third, Introdans, are considered the guardians of its repertoire, performed in a hundred international companies. Among them, the Paris Opera Ballet, the San Francisco Ballet, the Stuttgart Ballet, the Vienna State Ballet, the Houston Ballet, or the National Ballet of Japan. Throughout his career he also worked with famous dancers, such as Rudolf Nureyev or Natalia Makarova, or the Spanish Sol Léon.
In 2021, the choreographer created the Hans van Manen Foundation, and granted custody of his work to Het Nationale Ballet. The copyright, however, is owned by her husband, Henk van Dijk. In addition to being a choreographer, Van Manen was a photographer who exhibited internationally. In 2024 he decided to donate his entire photographic archive to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. In 1988, he accepted an extraordinary professorship at the Dutch Radboud University in Nijmegen, saying this: “Dance expresses dance and nothing more.” But Ted Brandsen, director of the National Ballet, has now said that his art “will live on in the bodies of the dancers who perform his work and in the eyes of countless spectators.”