MARCOS MORAU AND JAN MARTENS

SURVIVING IN A SURREAL WORLD

With its double bill WILDSONG, NDT 1 delivered another highlight of the schrit_tmacher justdance! Festival 2026, playing to a completely sold-out Parkstad Limburg Theatre in Heerlen.

By Klaus Dilger

There is little doubt that the two companies of the Nederlands Dans Theater rank among the finest the international dance world has to offer.

They have long been regular guests at the schrit_tmacher Festival, and their appearances have consistently counted among the most memorable moments of each edition.

One particularly unforgettable chapter came in 2018, when the festival’s collaboration with NDT made it possible to present Ohad Naharin’s masterpiece THE HOLE to audiences for the first time outside the Suzanne Dellal Center in Tel Aviv. Last year’s highlight was the trilogy FIGURES IN EXTINCTION by Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney.

HORSES-©Rahi-Rezvani

DYSTOPIAN LANDSCAPES

The second part of the evening now celebrated in Heerlen, WILDSONG, inevitably recalled that production—especially through the surrealist work HORSES by Spanish associate choreographer Marcos Morau, which premiered in 2024.

At the same time, the piece could hardly feel more topical. It evokes an absurd world of the lost and the searching: again and again a dancer drags a broken yet glowing streetlamp through a dystopian cityscape, as if trying to illuminate the correct path—while arms and hands instinctively gesture in entirely different directions. It is a world in which people appear to live underground, or at least not far from it.

Morau described the work in an interview:

“In the midst of grief we search for points of reference.
We try to remain unique within the crowd crossing the world.
We look for a focus that illuminates us. Yet that light not only tells us that there are many possible paths—it also reveals the fragility of what we are today: lost.
Awkward, lost, and trained to survive in an increasingly complex world, our steps trace paths for others.
Our feet carry us from here to there—alone, in packs, at a gallop or in hurried steps.
Because being lost is also a direction.

Among many things, we share one trait with horses:
a resilient skin that needs strong contact.
Perhaps that is all.”

In lighting designer Tom Visser, Morau has found an ideal artistic partner. Visser sculpts the stage space with precise contrasts of light and shadow, while sound designers Niels Mudde and Thijs Scheele create a shifting acoustic landscape from compositions by Andrzej Panufnik and Caroline Shaw, repeatedly blending them with distorted voices. The spaces seem constantly to mutate—as though they themselves were fleeing.

The stage world resembles a kind of choreographic film noir. Within it, eleven outstanding members of the company assert their presence through technical brilliance and striking physical intensity. Morau has developed a movement language that allows each performer to appear unmistakably individual—yet, if we remain with the metaphor of the herd suggested by the title HORSES, they are also unmistakably part of a collective: a world-class company moving as one organism.

Morau does not resolve the metaphors that spectators may begin to decipher. At one moment lampposts are assembled and set spinning by the dancers, accelerating like the rotor blades of a helicopter—figures falling from them after attempting to cling on.

There is no idyll in Morau’s HORSES. The figures who populate this world may be in flight, yet they are not creatures of flight in the way horses are. War and destruction are never explicitly depicted—but neither does anything resembling “home” exist here. Nowhere. For no one.

KID-IN-A-CANDY-SHOP-©Rahi-Rezvani-2026

KID IN A CANDY SHOP

For the first time, Belgian choreographer Jan Martens was also invited to create a work for the company. Faced with so many exceptional dancers, he must have felt like the proverbial kid in a candy shop.

Indeed, KID IN A CANDY SHOP is the title of his premiere, first presented in February this year at Amare in The Hague.

Almost the entire company appears on stage. Martens guides them through a dense web of ballet quotations, fragments of contemporary movement, and intricate rhythmic patterns.

The musical foundation is formed by works from composers Julia Wolfe and Hanna Kulenty, and Martens structures the piece in two parts, each dedicated to one of them.

For forty minutes the choreography flickers across the stage, oscillating between attempts to fragment neoclassical virtuosity, to deconstruct the vocabulary of ballet, and to recombine it as a deliberate stylistic collage.

Especially in its first section, the piece sometimes resembles a stop-motion film—an effect strongly supported by the excellent lighting design of Jan Fedinger, who explores the visual possibilities with evident delight.

MARTENS WANTS TOO MUCH

At moments the choreography is accompanied by projected footage from the British naturalist and early nature filmmaker F. Percy Smith. Time-lapse images reveal blossoming flowers, plant growth, and organic unfolding in ever-changing colours.

Yet the choreography quickly moves beyond the imagery of spring. Instead it develops a movement language that ultimately seems to want too much, and therefore occasionally feels strained.

The most compelling images arise in passages of radical deceleration. Dancers appear to hover weightlessly on one leg, their bodies rising and falling almost imperceptibly. Time stretches; movement becomes a study in equilibrium and control.

In the second section, set to Kulenty’s music, the movement grows more nervous and fragmented. Martens seems determined to try everything: ballet technique, minimalist structures, ironic quotation. At times the result resembles a choreographic toolbox emptied out all at once. Energy certainly emerges—but it spreads diffusely, and some ideas remain only sketches.

In earlier works, Martens has repeatedly explored the dancing body in situations of physical and conceptual extremity—including the possibility of failure. Such a breakdown does not occur here.

Nevertheless, this is a work that will likely continue to evolve. With time, much will sharpen or settle into greater coherence—elements that at the premiere still displayed unintended rough edges.

The audience in Heerlen responded with standing ovations.