Meditations on the cycle of life

Dance and life, a life in dance: Jiri Kylian’s “Click-Pause-Silence” made choreographic abstraction teem with deep thematic resonances in its local premiere on a three-part Nederlands Dans Theater program Friday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Created four years ago to music that composer Dirk Haubrich embedded with fragments of Bach, Kylian’s one-act quartet could be interpreted as a life cycle, with individuals growing from self-absorbed isolation to increasingly intense relationships and even community before walking off, one by one, into the dark.

However, the presence of a television monitor showing a rehearsal tape of the piece encouraged one to also think of “Click-Pause-Silence” as a meditation on dance collaboration -- and the very short careers of dancers. The TV rotated throughout the piece; a large mirror-wall behind it also revolved, sometimes in sync with rotation patterns in the group choreography.

Issues of responsibility and trust were embodied in challenging supported balances that most often occurred suddenly, arbitrarily -- like the bursts of light and sound that seemed to represent the large-scale violence in our world. Mostly, however, the work depended on intricate, passionate, individualized dancing by Nancy Euverink, Vaclav Kunes, Patrick Martin and Stefan Zeromski that took what initially seemed a brilliant experiment in anarchy into profound personal expression.

Kylian’s now-classic 1978 “Symphony of Psalms” (to Stravinsky) also ended with the dancers walking away into the dark -- but en masse and to a hymn of praise that made the work convey a greater sense of optimism.

Against a rich array of carpets designed or assembled by William Katz, Kylian often deployed 16 dancers in two groups: one lined up front-to-back on the right, one across the stage. And when these groups began performing the same steps -- each facing in a different direction -- the result gave the eerie illusion of seeing the dancing from the auditorium and the wings at the same time.

Only God, of course, can see from multiple viewpoints, but Kylian gave us a glimpse of his glory in this humane ensemble masterwork full of questionings of faith, and even a moment of total devastation, but also the triumphant reiteration of muscular cruciform poses and statements of communal solidarity.

The program ended with “Walking Mad” (2001), in which Swedish choreographer Johan Inger (the new artistic director of Stockholm’s groundbreaking Cullberg Ballet) deliberately roughed up Ravel’s “Bolero” with broad comedy and a punchy, proletarian dance style that depended on Nederlands’ prowess but avoided any suggestion of finesse.

He similarly savaged -- and freshened -- the first half of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” in his “Dream Play” for Nederlands II, the youth company. It’s great to find such over-used dance scores purged of false reverence and taken in bold new directions.

Like Kylian’s “Claude Pascal” (2002), “Walking Mad” featured characters emerging from doorways in a panoramic wall -- Inger even introduced his own click, pause and silence midway through, putting Ravel temporarily on hold. Fast, loose and often literally off-that-wall, the work unleashed plenty of Feydeau- and Marx brothers-style farce as well as provided fabulous solo opportunities for Euverink, Rei Watanabe and Africa Lopez-Guzman.