Kylian Pares His View of Dance to the Essentials

Choreographer Jiri Kylian fled his native Czechoslovakia in 1968, literally on the last train out after the collapse of the “Prague Spring” of Alexander Dubcek.

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The then-21-year-old dancer found sanctuary in Germany with John Cranko’s Stuttgart Ballet. He began choreographing there and later moved to Holland, where he became director of the Nederlands Dans Theater in 1978.

Since then, he has become one of Europe’s most influential choreographers. Ironically, he is known in this country mostly through other companies’ dancing his work. The costs of bringing his NDT are often prohibitive, but the flame has been kept alive as American Ballet Theatre, Joffrey Ballet, Australian Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada regularly dance “Forgotten Land,” “Return to a Strange Land” and “Sinfonietta,” among other works.

NDT itself last appeared in the United States in 1987, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. The last time the company came to Los Angeles was in 1980. Now NDT makes an exclusive West Coast appearance in Kylian’s full-length “Kaguyahime” and shorter repertory today through Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

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With Kylian’s emigre background, it is not surprising that concern for the human situation often surfaces in his work. But don’t be misled.

“I am not a political choreographer,” he insisted in an interview from his home in The Hague. “I don’t believe politics should be conveyed through dance. Other media in art convey that much clearer and better. Dance should remain dance. Music is about music. Dance is about dance.”

Still, when the opportunity presents itself, the choreographer does allow his pessimism about the human race to surface. “Kaguyahime,” a classic Japanese folk tale, tells the story of a beautiful moon child who comes to Earth and through her matchless beauty unintentionally wreaks havoc here.

“It is a fascinating story of someone who wants to give love and peace and instead seeds hatred and wars. That’s what (human beings) are about. We keep doing this over and over again--Yugoslavia, Haiti, all over the place. We will repeat that way. Human beings don’t have an ability to improve.”

Similarly, “No More Play,” one of his repertory pieces on the mixed-bill program, was inspired by “a tiny sculpture by Giacometti that looks like a little board game (that) no one knows how to play.”

“Like life. That’s what it means to me. We come to life. We only assume as we make our moves that we understand the rules. We finish our life. By the last sigh, maybe we have understood something. It is a very abstract work. This is what it means to me.

“My work has changed very drastically (since the Met appearance),” he continued. “I used to use music that was mostly written by people who could have been my grandfather, people who had their roots in the Romantic era and who did everything possible to break that, but still had their roots there--Janacek, Ravel, Schoenberg. I have changed that. I use a lot of contemporary music (now), but also baroque music because I feel we really are the children of the baroque. Our real roots are in the baroque time.”

He also has very drastically changed his movement vocabulary.

“I cannot begin to describe what it is. It would sound ridiculous. I think I have freed my vocabulary. It has become much more eclectic. It’s much more difficult for the dancers! It’s a vocabulary that engages the body and the emotional side and the rational side really.”

The new pieces are “very Spartan--stark, very little costuming, very little color. In fact, I went back to the essentials: music, dance, light and space, which is very complicated. All (of the essentials) are very complicated.

“But it’s actually only dealing with the essential things you need. All the unnecessary things were chucked out. I refer to those works as like those children’s drawings which give you the outlines and you fill in the coloring. I call my (new) ballets ‘coloring books.’ I expect the public to put in their own colors. I give them basically the outlines.

“I’m talking about their understanding, their emotional coloring. In that way, I expect a lot of active participation of the audience. The audience here is used to that, (but) I really wonder how the Orange County audience will react. I should be very curious. I’m very optimistic.”

The choreographer, too, participates, saying he always revises his ballets.

“I fundamentally don’t understand my work. You can quote that. I start understanding what my work is about maybe a year after the premiere, and I revise whenever or at anytime I am not satisfied with it.”

* Nederlands Dans Theater will dance Jiri Kylian’s “Kaguyahime” today, Wednesday and Thursday at 8 p.m. and shorter repertory (“No More Play,” “Sarabande,” “Petite Mort,” “Whereabouts Unknown” and “Falling Angels”) on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $18 to $55. (714) 556-2787.