Everyone who loves Hans van Manen and his works has always understood this statement from him as a promise: "Ballet is my profession and I never stop doing it, it's the only thing I can do".
In the phrasing lies a person's total devotion to an art, the craft of which he has mastered like no other and whose magic he can soak up and flow into the invention of movement time and time again, effortlessly, as if his dance were singing the music.
There is no other way to describe how it is that one can understand his works, which are so plausibly constructed, so well, so instinctively - regardless of whether one has never seen dance or one has seen it all one's life - that one always says to oneself, this is how it has to be and no different, and every time he thinks about his works again he asks himself: how does he do it, so much beauty,
Musicality, emotionality, reduction?
The older he gets, the more serious there is in Hans van Manen's voice and expression in this sentence and the less of the charming coquetry that makes conversations with him so entertaining.
He can't do anything else?
He can dance like no other!
And it's also not true that he can't do anything else.
He is also famous for his photographs of dancers.
His dance, however, is famous for the signature gestures – the shaking of his fists, the arms stretched out defensively or gloriously, the walking that takes on a hundred different meanings, the deep plié in second position with which the dancers ground themselves, with which the couple sink into it lets into the physicality of a four-legged being.
And then the men's grabs at the women, the heart pounding, the greedy nervous burn that precedes them, and then they grab their necks or their forearms just above their wrists to support them, twist them, sink them to the ground leave with a breathtaking tenderness.
Or love?
A good half of his dances, most created for the Nederlands Dans Theater and Het Nationale Ballet, are also famous for their fabulous set designer, Keso Dekker.
She films and captures van Manen's love of life, the director Henk van Dijk.
You are not alone, his works say
Hans van Manen speaks in a clever German that makes the little grammatical errors only prettier, and with his uniquely homely Dutch accent.
It resonates with the tender love for his German mother.
He talks for hours about the secrets of his art and about the great and the depressing events of the dance world and without a sign of tiredness, with irony, with melancholy, with emphasis, with almost childlike enthusiasm.
The occasional vanity of the van Manen genius is staggeringly disarming.
Can you talk like that about a ninety-year-old?
You have to, because you don't have to pay boring homage to the world-famous choreographer.