Almost nine years ago, the Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen declared that he would no longer choreograph new ballets.

In a conversation now printed in the Zurich Opera program, he says that it was simply enough for him;

he feels "delightfully" relieved of the pressure of delivering three ballets a year.

He didn't want the ballet world to say, "Oh, he's ninety and he's still doing ballets." The opposite is true.

He turns 91 this year and everyone regrets that he no longer choreographs.

However, van Manen takes great care in preserving and rehearsing the 150 ballets he has created since the late 1950s.

So he has now also sent the assistant Ken Ossola to Zurich, where the new three-part ballet evening "On the Move" is titled after the opening piece of the same name by Hans van Manen, for rehearsals and even the last rehearsals before the premiere last Saturday observed.

In his ballets, too, Hans van Manen attaches particular importance to the beginning and the end.

In "On the Move" for seven couples, which he created in 1992 based on Sergei Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, the woman steps measuredly from the left out of the alley onto the middle of the empty stage, the man from the right.

We need this stepping to understand that the appearance of a second body changes everything, that the moment they perceive each other like planets orbiting each other, they draw closer to each other as if they couldn't help themselves.

Full of passion, but never romantic

Even when they let go, they hold each other's eyes.

Even when they turn their backs on each other and put distance between them, it seems to cost them willpower.

And even at the end, when the man pauses for a moment hesitatingly and looks around at the group of other couples, that attraction eventually wins out over everything else and makes him follow after her, leaving us with the others uncertain as to how the story will continue , with a regret that these moments of beauty-focused experience have passed.

Van Manen's mastery is not only evident in the classical structure of his works.

And yet: They are full of passion, but that never makes them romantic or sentimental.

In some places they are funny, silly, cheeky, cocky or sexy, but never exuberant or pathetic.

Her wit is dry, screwball comedy-y too.

In unspoken shared intention

At the moment of experiencing van Manen's choreographies as art, a feeling of realization and clarity arises.

They are works of art that create order where there was chaos, that celebrate the attainment of sovereignty.

Again and again he seems to ask himself which human experiences are the basic ones and what they do to us: when we experience happy, successful love, when we leave or are abandoned, when we stand apart from others.

He shows loneliness and its resolution in love in a deeply serious, very simple way – just as the classic is often very simply designed.

Like the couple who first meet in their matching burgundy velvet one-piece suits on the black stage enclosed by violet curtains.