NACHO DUATO AND THE COMPANIA NACIONAL DE DANZA: CONTEMPORARY DANCE WITH A SPANISH ACCENT.

For choreographer Nacho Duato, the invitation extended to Spain's Compania Nacional de Danza to perform at the 2001 Lincoln Center Festival couldn't be more opportune. Fresh from performing at the Spoleto USA Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, the company will present Duato's second full-length ballet, Multiplicity: Forms of Silence and Emptiness, just in time to celebrate his eleventh anniversary as company director. The New York engagement is a special source of satisfaction: As a 20-year-old dance student at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center, Duato lived around the corner from the prestigious Lincoln Center venue.

"I used to walk by the theater daily," says the tall, blond choreographer with a smile. "I can't wait to see the banners flying with the company's name on them."

It is a tribute to Duato's talent and tenacity that the Compania Nacional de Danza is internationally recognized as one of Europe's finest contemporary ballet companies. Founded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture in 1979, the Ballet Nacional de Espana Clasico recruited dancers with an extremely wide range of training and styles from all over Spain. Molding such a heterogeneous group into a company was the greatest challenge facing founding director Victor Ullate (now the director of Victor Ullate Ballet), as well as subsequent directors, distinguished pedagogue Mafia de Avila and Russian prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya. The repertoire eventually included contemporary, neoclassical, and classical ballets, but the lack of stable artistic direction undermined the company's search for a unified stylistic voice.

When Nacho Duato, still at the peak of his career as a performer, arrived in Madrid in June 1990 to take over the direction of the Ballet del Teatro Lirico de Espana-as it was then called--ballet aficionados were up in arms. Duato's ten-year stint with the Netherlands Dance Theater had left its mark; he clearly identified more with contemporary dance than with works like Swan Lake.

After a complex and controversial period of transition, the profile of the newly named Compania Nacional de Danza emerged--sleek, modern, and cosmopolitan. Today only about 50 percent of the national company's thirty-one performers are Spanish born; the remainder are carefully selected from contemporary dancers around the world.

At 44, Duato is soft-spoken and expresses himself with the clarity of someone who knows exactly what he wants. At CND's headquarters, a former municipal slaughterhouse, Duato expressed his satisfaction at the fruits of his first decade as company director. "What's most important is that the company has developed its own identity. This is because I have set new works on them. Having an in-house choreographer nurtures the dancers. I've just come out of a rehearsal and--" Duato pauses, searching for words, "--they are so good," he says appreciatively. Audiences worldwide, who have admired the performers' impassioned intensity and technical prowess, share his opinion.

The ability to connect to today's audiences is one of the director's principal concerns. "When people come to see us at the theater, they should see themselves reflected on the stage," affirms Duato. "I want them to find a way to connect our dancing to their daily lives, to the clothes they wear, to the music they listen to. I try to find a balance between what happens onstage and what happens outside the theater.

"I can do a period piece, such as Por Vos Muero, inspired by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spanish music, but when you look at it, it is a contemporary work because I listen with my ears from today. We try to explain that music with our feelings as people of the twenty-first century." This approach has radically changed the company's image, and the Compania Nacional now plays to sold-out houses.

Duato's choreographic style exhibits the impeccable balance of classical and contemporary technique characteristic of contemporary European ballet, especially the work of Jiri Kylian. It combines the choreographer's love for Spanish folk and period music. Using the traditional music of Spain helps lend the increasingly international company a profoundly Mediterranean character.

Since his debut as a choreographer with Jardi Tancat [Closed Garden], created for Netherlands Dance Theater II in 1983, Duato has retained his spontaneous responses and fluidity of movement while exploring sophisticated and subtle choreographic structures. In demand as a guest choreographer, his works are now performed by companies throughout the world, among them American Ballet Theatre, the San Francisco Ballet, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal, Netherlands Dance Theater, Stuttgart Ballet, and Lyon Opera Ballet. His first full-length ballet, Romeo and Juliet, to the Prokofiev score, premiered in 1998 at Santander, Spain. The quality of connecting to the contemporary lives of his audience that Duato refers to is the key to its great success: "My goal was to tell the story through dance, without mime and theater or special effects."

Duato has often affirmed that the richness of Spanish culture and folklore constitutes a never-ending source of inspiration for his work. "I still feel that way. The piece that I'm making for our next season at Madrid's Teatro Real opera house uses Basque music by the acordeonist Kepa Junquera. (The Basque diatonic accordion is called the trikitixa.) They sing and improvise in Euskera, the Basque language. It's amazing. It sometimes sounds like music from Senegal or Peru or Japan. I want to do something against terrorism, destruction, and violence. ETA [the Basque separatist terrorist organization] should listen to this and realize how universal their culture is...."

Ruggedly handsome and casually elegant, the Valencia native started his professional ballet training with the Rambert School in London at age 18, expanded to Bejart's Mudra School in Brussels, and furthered his dance education in New York. He danced professionally first with the Cullberg Ballet in Stockholm and then moved to Nederlands Dans Theater in Holland. He has been widely honored as a dancer and for his work as a choreographer and in the arts. Duato has become an international dance celebrity and a glamorous figure within the Spanish social scene. He has participated in film and television projects during his occasional breaks from the company's heavy schedule. Last March he flew to Machu Picchu, the ruined Inca city in the Peruvian Andes, to make a film.

"I played an extraterrestrial. It's great to get away, do something crazy, and then come back to work. It keeps me sane," he explains with a laugh.

The pragmatic artistic director has no qualms about using his popularity to promote the company: "I think I have made people more aware of dance through my television interviews and public appearances. Maybe they haven't all seen dance, but they know that the company exists, they know what a dancer is, and what a choreographer does."

The Compania Nacional de Danza performs works by choreographers Jiri Kylian, Mats Ek, William Forsythe, Ramon Oller, and Ohad Naharin, among others, although Duato's own work for the company represents almost half of its repertoire. This year Forsythe set Enemy in the Figure on the company and Duato revived Kylian's Petite Mort. There were five premieres in the CND's April 2001 season in Madrid, and tours in Europe in addition to the United States engagements. "I'm planning to do another full-length ballet for our next season in October, although I don't know what it will be yet, and Jacopo Godani will set a piece for us in November."

Duato's current work, Multiplicity: Forms of Silence and Emptiness, was commissioned in 1999 by the German city of Weimar, designated Europe's Cultural Capital that year. "It was clear to me that the ballet should be about Bach," explains the choreographer. "The composer was the court organist in Weimar for many years and composed some of his finest works for organ there."

Multiplicity is a choreographic reflection of the enormous variety of Bach's prodigious musical output and commemorates the 250th anniversary of his death. Architect Jaffar Chalabi's striking set uses scaffolding, ramps, and black gauze to illustrate the Baroque period and Bach's music through the metaphor of the fold: It organizes space into interior and exterior, and it hides and reveals. Duato has designed costumes to wear over basic black tank tops and bicycle pants. Duato himself opens the ballet with a brief solo. More than a dozen choreographic vignettes, solos, duets, and group works follow, with biographical elements and occasional references to period dances. The second half, Forms of Silence and Emptiness, is more introspective and draws mostly on Bach's The Art of the Fugue. Emmanuelle Broncin portrays the figure of death that follows the composer, played by Thomas Klein, and is present throughout the entire ballet. The skillful blending of compositional elements resolves the issue of simultaneous representation of past and present, creating an impressionistic portrait of Bach. The recapitulation of Duato's solo after the composer's death brings the ballet to a moving close.

Balletomanes continue to insist that Spain should have its own classical ballet company, and Duato is criticized by those who feel that his works have monopolized a national company whose mandate should include ballets by other Spanish choreographers. Duato has commented that he did not feel that Spanish choreographers were prepared to work with the CND, an attitude that has distanced the company from the country's dance community. "I don't really know Spanish choreographers that well," he admits, "but I think that it's more interesting to try to find choreographers within the company. We have a company choreography workshop, although this year our touring and production schedule is so intense that we have had to cancel it."

Duato learned the benefits of a junior company having spent several years performing with and choreographing for Netherlands Dance Theater II. In 1999 he founded the CND 2, a project that had been five years in the making. Last winter CND members Patrick de Bana and Yoko Taira and former company member Nicolo Fonte set works on the juniors.

"This is how a company should develop," asserts Duato. "I think that the company now is in a perfect position to demand a theater of its own. Every time I go to the Ministry, they tell me to be patient," reflects the choreographer, "that it will come."

Knowing Duato, it's just a matter of time.

Laura Kumin is an American writer and dancer living and working in Spain.