Netherlands Dance Theater.

MAY 31--JUNE 5, 1996 REVIEWED BY HELMA KLOOSS

According to tradition, Netherlands Dance Theater opens the annual Holland Festival. This year NDT included two premieres, artistic director Jiri Kylian's Anna and Ostriches and company member Paul Lightfoot's Start to Finish. Lightfoot has grown from a young, talented choreographer into a true companion to Kylian, producing work that possesses its own distinctive fantasy and wit.

When the two dancemakers have been paired in the past, Lightfoot has usually presented a lighthearted work and Kylian a more serious one. This time, it was the reverse. For Anna and Ostriches Kylian chose five fast polkas by the Strauss brothers interspersed with taped music by Zbigniew Preisner from the film score for Damage. Composed in the late nineteenth century, these polkas were originally danced by a Viennese public abandoning itself to a whirlwind of excitement as the Austro-Hungarian empire was collapsing. With the subtitle "a true story," Kylian sarcastically refers to the financial difficulties NDT is currently experiencing and to the fact that, in difficult times, some people bury their heads in the sand. It's hilarious to see the dancers act this out under Kylian's direction.

Anna and Ostriches begins with a gunshot, as dancing couples and trios twirl madly Kylian frames the stage picture as though working with a wide-angle lens, the movement of the dancers from right to left intensified by light coming from a small opening in the backdrop. Johan Inger and Sebastien Mari dance stunningly, like birds flying from the nest as they jump oh Catherine Riesi and Karine Guizzo. A duet for Fiona Lummis and Jean Emile is fiercer, its angular movements sharp as a beak. These are alternated with slow, sensual passages for Lummis obscured in twilight. Inger, in a pink tutu, concludes with a number of fouettes.

In contrast, Lightfoot creates a serene, strict structure in Start to Finish. Four drummers play marches as they walk in a stately manner across the stage. A shaft of light creates a path down the center, where eight dancers enact a ritual. Sol Leon and Jorma Elo break out to dance a tender and amusing duet, until he suddenly disappears into the pit and she wobbles away. A little later, they sit in front of a television from which comes the announcement, "There is no need to argue anymore." More solos and duets follow until the melancholic mood is summed up by one final act: all the dancers reassemble, undress, and, naked, leave the stage.