DANCE : Aesthetic of Experience : In the dance world, where age is always an issue, the Netherlands’ over-40 troupe NDT 3 is on solid footing.

A funny thing happened to choreographer Jiri Kylian as he grew into his 40s--he started to notice that aging has some very positive aspects.

As a choreographer and sole artistic director of Nederlands Dans Theater since 1978, Kylian, 48, has been able to incorporate the insights that came with age into his work. Austerely breathtaking pieces like “Whereabouts Unknown” and “Kaguyahime,” which NDT performed at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in 1994, are evidence of a continually evolving, increasingly distilled synthesis of ballet and modern dance, with more than a little awareness of other cultures woven in. Clearly, Kylian is in his creative prime.

But what about the dancers upon whom the work depends? Many of them may experience the same creative flowering after years in the dance world. But ballet is resolutely youth-oriented, and--no matter how much you may be growing in creative terms--when your leaps get lower, early retirement looms.

“I started thinking that it was crazy,” Kylian says in a phone interview from The Hague, NDT’s home base. “What if actors had to stop acting when they are 40? We would be deprived of some of the best performances ever.”

So, Kylian choreographed the next logical step. Over one weekend in 1991, he created Nederlands Dans Theater 3, a company for dancers over 40. (In addition to the original NDT, sometimes called NDT 1, there is also NDT 2, a youth company.) Now, after earning critical respect and nicknames like “senior geniuses” on various tours in Europe and the U.S., NDT 3 makes its West Coast debut Friday and Saturday at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater, under the auspices of UCLA.

Since its inception, NDT 3 has been a very small, supremely successful affair. It has a somewhat flexible roster of four or five dancers, who tend to feel very blessed by this unexpected opportunity. For the current tour, the cast includes founding members Gerard Lemaitre, 58, and Sabine Kupferberg, 44, (Kylian’s wife), who both had danced with the main company of NDT, and Gary Chryst, Martine van Hamel and Jeanne Solan, all of whom joined the group a few years ago.

Before NDT 3, Kupferberg was coping with life-after-dance the way many classically trained dancers do: She was coaching a little and helping out with rehearsals. Mostly, she says now, she missed dancing. Lemaitre, too, had retired from the stage. He had approached the French government to fund a group of mature dancers, but they weren’t interested.

Gary Chryst, best known to the ballet world for his work with the Joffrey Ballet in the ‘70s, had left that company when he was 29--just under the line, evidently, since, “If you’re over 30, you’re over the hill,” he says. But he always considered himself an actor-dancer, and was performing in a Broadway musical when Kylian approached him to join NDT 3.

Martine van Hamel, after starring with American Ballet Theatre for years, had started to choreograph and formed a small company of her own, New Amsterdam Ballet (which still exists on a project-by-project basis). Otherwise, she says, “I thought I would play it by ear.”

Van Hamel says this a bit vaguely, perhaps remembering how few options there are for mature dancers. Recent high-profile examples have spelled out how not to age on the stage--Nureyev refusing to admit his decline or Alicia Alonso still getting through an altered “Giselle” at 75.

On the other hand, Baryshnikov thrives in his mid-40s with the White Oak Project by astutely choosing modern dance that exploits his exceptional talent without ruining his knees. In this same spirit, NDT 3 works with choreographers who can maximize the gifts of aging dancers. It’s not that technical strength disappears--NDT 3 reviews praise the troupe’s agility and physical power along with its expressive depth--it’s that the idea of what dance can be is expanded without relying on the more taxing athletic skills.

Or as Van Hamel puts it, with a laugh, “We don’t do knee work.”

Is it odd to be in a company where your age is so often a main topic? You get used to it, Van Hamel says, since age is always an issue in the dance world: “When I was 17, I remember they would say, ‘Look what she’s doing and she’s only 17!’ It would drive me nuts, because I didn’t want to be ‘only 17.’ I wanted to be respected for what I did, rather than at what age I did it. I suppose it’s a similar thing now.”

Some of what Van Hamel does in NDT 3 is not so different from the way audiences have always known her, she says. She is still on pointe in Hans van Manen’s “Different Partners,” a duet with Chryst to Stravinsky. But for Kylian’s “No Sleep Till Dawn of Day,” she says, “I feel I’ve added something to my way of moving, gone in other directions.”

A duet with Kupferberg, “Dawn of Day” is gently paced and danced to a lamenting lullaby recorded in the Solomon Islands. Kupferberg says the piece “has its very own world.” Critics have called it “a haunting mysterious meditation” and “an exercise in human polyphony.”

Speaking to Van Hamel, Kupferberg and Chryst in separate phone interviews from the Netherlands while they prepared for their current tour, the impression was that each piece they perform is especially close to them. With only five dancers in the company, the process of collaboration with choreographers is particularly intimate. “When there are so few people in the room,” Kupferberg says, “there is no place to hide, no way to pretend.”

And, at this age, she continues, you don’t want to. “You can go all the way--we are not afraid to be ugly or hysterical, ridiculous, funny, beautiful. At this time, you want to give everything.”

At this age, adds Chryst, you are able to give more than before. “We’re not as defensive as we were when we were younger,” he says. “I guess we have more respect for each other, too. I think I enjoy it more now. Not all the time--when it hurts, it hurts, and you get tired. But with all your experience, you try to chip away at the extra baggage you have, you try to get to the basic truth of how it is to perform.”

Chryst calls “Double You,” his Kylian solo to Bach, a part of both their lives. Elsewhere it has been called “ready-made for Mr. Chryst’s powerful projection.” Other pieces on the current tour are “Moonshine,” by Christopher Bruce, “Off White”, by Ohad Naharin, and Paul Lightfoot’s “Susto,” during which the (literal) sands of time fall on the entire company.

Did Kylian have doubts about marketing a dance company that had words like “older” and “diminished physicality” mentioned in its mandate? “I had no worries, really,” Kylian says, “because I was like a maniac. The moment I had the idea, I started calling my choreographer friends--who are Hans van Manen, William Forsythe, Mats Ek--to convince them this is the thing to be done. When I asked Mats Ek later why he said yes so quickly, he said, ‘Because I thought you sounded like a madman, I was afraid to say no.’ ”

Asked it he thinks NDT 3 is an aberration or a trend-setting concept, Kylian says there are already signs of imitation. “I tell you, the whole thing carries a bit of a danger,” he says with a sigh, “and that is that it might encourage old dancers to carry on the wrong way--you know, still pretending to be teen-agers.

“This is not the message I would like to carry into the dance world. The message I want to send is that there is wonderful use for older dancers, mature dancers who have something very specific to say.

“It’s not enough just to have the idea, you need the choreographers as a driving force. It’s the task for us to enable the dancers to stand on the stage in their own right, in their own age, not pretending anything else.”

Ironically, the result of this acceptance, says Kupferberg, is that she feels younger. “You feel yourself getting a little more free, because you are more used to yourself, you accept yourself better. You’re not fighting for things anymore.

“If you are a young dancer, you are very eager and full of ambition to reach certain things very quickly. Now we accept ourselves and even our mistakes, our limits. And with this acceptance, we reach another level. And that other level goes very deep as an artist. The process is very rejuvenating.”

For dancers who are still chronologically young, this “other level” has to look like hope. “It’s wonderful that all three companies take class together,” says Chryst. “I can see them looking at us sometimes, and what they see is longevity.”

Kylian has seen this look before, having spent some time with aboriginal communities in Australia (later incorporating some of their dance movement into his own work). “You could see the generations together there,” he says. “All ages dance, absolutely everybody slightly mobile will get up and dance. Obviously that rubbed off on me when it came to creating this company.”

Kylian was much quoted in the press when he first jokingly said NDT 3 was for dancers “between 40 and death.” Now, when he’s asked if there is actually an age limit, he pauses. “There is a rumor in the dance world that I’m starting a new company--NDT 4,” he says as he starts to laugh. “That will be for the really dead ones.”

Meanwhile, Kylian is content with the three companies he has. Would he have formed the senior group when he was an ambitious 30-year-old choreographer, asking his dancers--as he once admitted--to do physical tasks that were “far too difficult”?

“No, I don’t think it was possible then,” he says, “‘because you don’t know what age means then. You can use your fantasy to imagine, but when you experience it on your own bones, it’s quite a different matter.”

And it’s a matter Kylian has turned to his advantage. He sometimes feels his excitement about NDT 3 goes over the top. “I feel a little bit silly sometimes. It sounds like I’m selling something I shouldn’t.”

But Van Hamel has a better way of putting it.

“This situation, this company, is a wonderful thing--it’s right. It’s not that it should be or shouldn’t be, it just feels right.”

* Nederlands Dans Theater performs at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater, Veterans Administration grounds, Brentwood. $28.50-$31.50 ($9 for UCLA students with I.D.). (310) 825-2101.