Review Less is More - Het Parool
Review Less is More - Het Parool
Play with geometric shapes leads to gently meditative dance in Less Is More by Introdans
20 September 2025 in Theater Amphion, Doetinchem
by Wendy Lubberding
With a choreography that focuses on lines and square shapes, Introdans creates a beautiful space for the calm unfolding of dance patterns in three classics and two new works.
Less is More is a low-stimulus dance programme. That’s not only welcoming for audiences with a neurodivergent mind – with whom artistic director Roel Voorintholt has had a special connection ever since a brain haemorrhage in 2013, from which he has since recovered. Sometimes it’s simply good for anyone to step away from the constant bombardment of daily stimuli. All five parts of the programme carry a meditative character, and this time there are no behind-the-scenes films during scene changes, as Introdans often presents.
And that calm works very well. After Hans van Manen’s Squares there is nothing to see except the red stage curtains. Time to linger a little longer with that piece, with the square stage in the centre of the floor and the square light object above it. With that group of dancers who, with Van Manen’s signature playfulness, have to step on and off that spatial volume, often in the middle of a dance move. They remain graceful, even though the master makes it challenging for them.
Plenty of headspace then remains for Lucinda Childs’ Canto Ostinato, in which the proudly upright spines of the four dancers strikingly echo the vertical white lines of light gliding across the back wall.
Rolling platform
In the first new work that follows, Fernando Melo’s Traces, those white lines also appear, but now horizontally, suspended at chest height in the middle of the space. Where Childs’ space was white, this one is completely black.
Melo fixes his dancers’ feet onto a small rolling platform. At first there is only one, pulled back and forth by others along the white bar. His body ripples from ankles to crown like seaweed swaying in the tide, and where his graceful arms place his hands on the line, it lights up and musical buzzing tones are heard. Tension builds as one, two and then four more dancers join in, gliding together along the bars. Their music, on the digital stage piece created by Filip Studios, resembles a kind of sound bath.
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, in the short Fractus V, has the dancers effectively illustrate with their hands how the brain sometimes gets stuck in loops. Finally, Igor Bacovich and Iratxe Ansa created the visually striking Promises. The opening image shows three dancers in a white space, standing behind translucent square screens in the colours yellow, magenta and cyan. Though it begins somewhat predictably, the piece develops positively into a poetic group work in which the individual gradually emerges, while the ensemble collaborates to form kinetic sculptures of bodies and colourful squares.
Igor Bacovich and Iratxe Ansa created the visually striking Promises, one of the works in the five-part programme Less is More.
Still to be seen: nationwide tour including 25 and 26 September at Stadsschouwburg Haarlem, 30 September and 1 October at ITA, 25 October at Zaantheater Zaandam, 26 November at Schouwburg Amstelveen.