Black and White Ballets (1996-1997) [Blu-ray]

Czech choreographer Jií Kylián is one of the most innovative and successful ballet masters on the contemporary dance scene. He always uses classical models as the foundation for his free and imaginative modern style, whose novel figures and sequences never fail to astonish. The vitality of his works is supported by an especially highly developed feeling for music, which makes it seem as if his dancers and the music they dance to both flow from a common inner impulse. His choreographies always investigate anew the meaning of dance in modern culture and society, and under his direction the Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT) has thus gained international respect and importance.

The series of plotless dance pieces titled Black and White offers six examples of the rich inventive gifts of Kylián's choreographic imagination. They not only span a remarkable spectrum of styles and moods, from metaphysics through black humour to a sensual, even voluptuous corporeality; they also explicitly indicate that the master of neo-classical dance also uses the more extreme techniques of contemporary Modern Dance as a projection screen for his existential questions. The selection of the six programmes, whose marked differences are still put together in a seamless unity, shows what Kylián can set in motion with only twenty dancers and an intelligent choice of music. Kylián's unusual technique always achieves a functioning connection between classical economy and a release of energy equally sudden and huge.