A cornerstone of the dance heritage, Krisztina de Châtel's Typhoon is reuniting with the audience through the Introdans production

Waiting for Typhoon 

(Theatre Rotterdam - 23 April 2025)

© Mehmet Kerem Özel

Introdans 

The seeds of Introdans, which takes its name from the acronym for 'Introduction to Dance', were planted in 1971 with Studio L.P., a private ballet workshop founded by choreographer Ton Wiggers and theatre director Hans Focking in Arnhem, in the east of the Netherlands. By 1979, Introdans had developed into a dance company that received project-based grants from the municipality, the regional government and the Dutch state. Today, Introdans, which has grown to become one of the three largest dance companies in the Netherlands with more than twenty dancers, is supported by many sponsors and donors, as well as the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, the regional governments of Gelderland and Overijssel, and the Municipality of Arnhem. In addition, Princess Margriet of the Kingdom of the Netherlands has been the patron of Introdans since 2003.

In addition to performing in many theatres in the Netherlands and attracting an audience of some 85,000 people each year in the Netherlands alone, the company tours internationally and regularly performs in London and New York, the world's major dance centres. Introdans' latest international tour will be to Osaka for the recently opened World Expo 2025. There the company will present the world premiere of UNUM by Dutch choreographer Adriaan Luteijn and Japanese Butoh artist Dai Matsuoka in collaboration with the LAND FES Theatre Festival, the Sadamatsu-Hamada Ballet Company (Kobe) and the Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam) at the Dutch Pavilion on 21 May 2025.

Introdans is one of the leading dance companies in the Netherlands, not only in terms of the number of audiences it reaches, but also in terms of the artistic quality of its programmes. The vision of Roel Voorintholt, artistic director of Introdans since 2005, is to intensify the company's collaboration with internationally acclaimed choreographers such as Lucinda Childs and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, while also giving regular opportunities to young choreographers. One of the sections that Voorintholt has added to its repertoire in recent years is the restaging of pieces that form a cornerstone of the dance heritage. In this way, these pieces live on in the bodies of young dancers and have a chance to be received by a new generation of audiences; in other words, they do not fall into oblivion, either for the performers or for the audience. One of these pieces is Typhoon from 1986, one of Krisztina de Châtel's masterpieces, which Voorintholt has included in the programme for the 2024-2025 season.

Krisztina de Châtel

Krisztina de Châtel (1943), born in Hungary and living in the Netherlands since 1964, has been choreographing since 1977 and has created more than 70 works and three dance films. For more than thirty years, she directed her own company, Dansgroep Krisztina de Châtel, and from 2009 to 2013, together with Itzik Galili, she directed Dansgroep Amsterdam, a modern dance company funded by the City of Amsterdam. In 2013, she founded the De Châtel sur Place Foundation to create mostly site-specific and large-scale projects with skaters, scavengers, people with mental illness, and sexually abused men, as well as firefighters in museums, on the North Sea coast, in a rose greenhouse, in an industrial building, and in a church.

Contradiction, confrontation, space and environment are prominent elements in her work. By juxtaposing fragile human bodies with natural elements such as wind, earth and water, or the imposing space of a church or industrial building, she reveals the struggle between passion and control, individual freedom and collective anonymity and security within the human body.

Typhoon

Krisztina de Châtel often collaborates with artists from other disciplines, working on striking and exciting combinations such as the conflicts between human and nature, human and machine, art and society, dance and visual arts. Typhoon was one of these works. For Typhoon, she collaborated with visual artist Peter Vermeulen and composer Simeon ten Holt.

The main theme of Peter Vermeulen's work is the transformation of energy into images that move and produce sound. For Typhoon, he installed three giant machines on stage that generate winds of varying strength throughout the piece, from light breezes to violent storms. And de Châtel had her dancers directly confront the different strengths of wind produced by these machines. On stage, human and machine literally face each other: Five bodies lined up side by side on the left, three gigantic wind machines lined up side by side on the right. The dance space between them is defined by a light grid suspended from the ceiling in a five-by-eight, low enough to compress the volume of the space.

At the very beginning of Typhoon, long before the confrontation of human bodies and movements with machines imitating a natural phenomenon, five dancers, men and women, resembling soldiers (or more precisely paratroopers) with their uniform clothing, black overalls and black boots to protect them from the wind, and large pilot's goggles on their heads to protect their eyes in the later parts of the performance, move in parallel lines from the left side of the stage to the right side (where the wind machines are located), repeating the same movements with a slight time shift. Meanwhile, the lights suspended from the ceiling come on in rows, illuminating and defining the entire dance space. When the first dancer to reach the right side turns and goes back the same way, the others follow, again with a slight time delay. In fact, the dancers will be moving back and forth along this line throughout the piece.

From the very first moment, the movements are accompanied by the cult work Canto Ostinato, composed by the Dutch contemporary composer Simeon ten Holt in 1976. Like ten Holt's composition, which hypnotises the listener with its minimal and meditative effect and its structure of repetition, de Châtel's choreographic structure is based on the repetition of the minimal movements that are transformed after a certain period of time and through a temporal shift. Her subtle play with the speed of the dancers' movements, which are slightly out of sync with each other, results in the movements of two, three or sometimes all of them overlapping at certain moments in the piece. In the same way as the richness of repetition in variety in music, a similar richness is created in choreography by the variations created by changes in the speed of movement. The fact that some bodies face to the right while others face to the left during the overlap also multiplies the variations.

The movements are robotic; fists clenched, arms tensed, steps emphasised. Arms forward, slicing the air. The body leans back like an arrow, arms out to the sides. The legs lunge forward, but the uneven emphasis in one of the movement words causes the body to stumble. The head is sometimes thrown back, sometimes tilted forward. All the movement words are performed intermittently. It is as if snapshots have been taken from a fast movement and their frozen states are shown one after the other. There are real machine bodies in front of the human bodies, but the movements reveal the machine in the human body itself. Although one of the movement words consists of two steps forward and one step back, the whole phrase shows the audience that the body, despite everything, resists an invisible force and moves forward. Meanwhile, the wind machines are still silent. However, their presence on one side of the stage can evoke a sense of threat in the audience.

The first half hour or so of the work takes place without wind, but as can be seen from the movement phrases described above, the wind is inherent in the choreography of the moving bodies even in its absence. When the wind begins to blow, the goggles that have been on the heads until then are put on the eyes, the movements speed up, the arms, which are open and tense, begin to make cyclical movements similar to propellers. The hands are no longer clenched into fists, but spread forward, fingers together, as if to minimise the aerodynamic effect of the wind.

In the last quarter of the piece, the music suddenly stops and is replaced by the sounds of physical movement of the human bodies and wind machines. As time passes, the speed of the wind slows down and, in the dim light, the five dancers return to their original positions. Their movements continue; with their backs to the machines, their arms mimic the gradually rotating propellers (perhaps, for clarity, the blades of windmills).

As the wind machines accelerate for the last time and the music begins to play again with all its power, the dancers begin a new struggle, showing great resistance. On the stage, they don't just move parallel to their own lines, but also diagonally, and then in a circular path that sweeps like a cyclone across the dance floor. Meanwhile, they rotate not only their open arms but also their bodies. From this point on, a new word is added to the choreography: The arms, which have been moving vertically, now swing and rotate horizontally with the body. It's as if the dancers can only deal with the music and the wind by becoming one with it. As the performance draws to a close, first the lights slowly fade, the dancers continue to move and struggle, then we hear the fading sound of the wind, and finally we notice the breathing of some of the dancers.

The bodies have resisted, they have not been defeated in their struggle; they have not been blown about in the violent storm, they have survived and continue to survive. It is not for nothing that 82-year-old Krisztina de Châtel referring to the political climate in the world, said in a recent interview: "More than ever, we are living in a violent storm. With Typhoon, I want to say that we must continue to fight for harmony, beauty and coherence, in everything that happens to us."

Applauding for Typhoon 

(Theatre Rotterdam - 23 April 2025)

© Mehmet Kerem Özel

Introdans premiered the revival of Typhoon on 22 February 2025 at the ITA (International Theatre Amsterdam, formerly Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam). I had the opportunity to see the show, which is still touring various cities in the Netherlands this season until 18 May, at the Theatre Rotterdam on the evening of 23 April 2025. I would have preferred to see Typhoon, whose scenographic atmosphere seems to have deliberately been created to make the volume of the dance area seem flat because of the low light grid, and to give the impression that there was no exit because one side of the dance area was covered with huge wind machines, in a smaller space, like a chamber theatre, rather than at the Theatre Rotterdam, which has a high and spacious stage and auditorium. I think the effect on me would have been much more intense, concentrated and therefore stronger. Nevertheless, I was very satisfied with the show as it was. However, most of all I was most impressed by the meticulousness, precision, endurance, perseverance and concentration of the dancers in performing de Châtel's piece, which she conceived as a kind of physical challenge of the human body against a natural force, in a non-stop flow for about 50 minutes. So I'd be remiss if I didn't mention each and every one of them: Daniel Chambers, Mark van Drunick, Gabriel Parra Guisado, Juliette Jean and Angelica Villalon.

I would like to say a final word of appreciation and thanks to Roel Voorintholt, the company's artistic director, for bringing Typhoon, last performed by the Dansgroep Krisztina de Châtel in 2003, into the Introdans' repertoire, making the wind blow again and reminding us how resilient humans can be against a violent force.