Hans van Manen at the SF Ballet

Hans van Manen is a 92-year-old Dutch choreographer who I had never heard of before. After seeing four of his dances at the SF Ballet on Wednesday, I am now a total fan.

Hans van Manen began choreographing in the late 1950s for the Netherlands' one television station, then joined the Nederlands Dans Theater and the Dutch National Ballet where he has created over 150 dances in a very long career. Pictured above is from the first work on the program, the 1971 Grosse Fugue to string quartet music by Beethoven, which still looks startlingly modern. (Pictured above are Dores André and Fernando Carratalá Coloma. All production photos are by Chris Hardy.)

The choreography is arrestingly earthbound, with lots of squats, twirls, and angular extensions but not so much flying in the air as is usual for classical ballet. The movement is often similar for both men and women, anticipating and possibly influencing Mark Morris.

The newest work on the program was the 2012 Variations for Two Couples, a short 15-minute dollop of elegance danced to a conglomeration of modern string music. The finale had the two couples finally joining each other, rather like the ending of Gross Fugue where all the disparate groupings eventually join together in an abstract ballet version of a group hug. (Pictured are Aaron Robison, Frances Chung Joseph Walsh, and Sasha Mukhamedov.)

This was followed by the wildest and funniest piece of the evening, the 8-minute Solo from 1997, set to a recorded performance of an insanely fast J.S. Bach Partita for Violin. The title could have been Tag Team, since it actually consists of a trio of male dancers who form a relay onstage, performing one virtuoso feat after another. Rachel Veaujean, who was staging these works for the SF Ballet, stated, "Solo is very virtuoso, very grounded, and super fast. At the very first rehearsal, nobody can do it, it's a mad little marathon." On Wednesday evening, it was danced spectacularly by Lleyton Ho, Luca Ferro, and Archie Sullivan. (Pictured is Cavan Conley from opening night.)

The final ballet was the 1977 5 Tango's set to a score by Astor Piazzola that was also danced to a recording rather than a live orchestra, which robbed the piece of a lot of its impact. The five-movement ballet is mostly amusing for not actually having a tango onstage, but instead approximations and variations on the Argentine national dance.

The fourth movement starts as an erotic duet for two male dancers before two women arrive on the scene. As there was no real biographical information about Hans van Manen in the program, on returning home I asked Google, "Is Hans van Manen gay?" and found a link to an article in the Holland Gay News entitled Hans van Manen, Streetwise Gay Icon. A biography in Dutch of van Manen was recently published and the article summarizes the wild life of a starving, post-World War Two teenager who made his way in Amsterdam's dance world while being publicly open about his abundant gay sex life during the 1960s and 1970s, before it was safe to do so. (Pictured are Fernando Carratalá Coloma and Victor Prigent.)

Although Hans van Manen is a venerable Queer Icon who I should have known about earlier, the real discovery is his marvelous choreography. There are four more performances of the program at the SF Ballet, including tonight (Friday, April 11), and you can get tickets by clicking here. (Pictured is a young Hans van Manen.)