The Netherlands Dance Theater—seen in New York for the first time since 1982 during a week-long engagement at the Metropolitan Opera House in June—is a peculiarly European phenomenon. Though Jiri Kylián, its Czech-born artistic director, is not quite so naïvely pretentious as Maurice Béjart (who no longer even attempts to perform in New York), he shares with the high priest of Eurotrash an unabashed reliance on extra-choreographical elements as inspiration for his dances and a concomitant propensity toward copious, earnest, and vague program notes of dubious syntax and punctuation. (Vide the following, from Kylián’s apologia for Heart’s Labyrinth: “The limitless range of human feelings, in their fine nuances and their infinite combinations, create the inexplicable labyrinth of the heart with its endless corridors. Through these corridors I somehow want to get closer to questions, to which I know there are no answers.”) Yet Kylián also revealed on this visit a hitherto unsuspected talent for the staging of narrative works, in his productions of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges and Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat.

The Netherlanders, we are informed in the Stagebill, are “trained daily in classical technique and equally at home on pointe or barefoot”; but no evidence of classical training was offered on the stage of the Met, and the only pointe work was from a spindly-legged Louis XV side chair in L’Enfant et les sortilèges. In fact, the unbroken flow of movement that is the most salient feature of Kylián’s style is