Drei Meis­ter – Drei Wer­ke

George Balanchine's choreography "Rubies" embodies the essence of this blood-red gem: sharp-edged, energetic and full of fire, the dancers whirl across the stage to Stravinsky's Capriccio for piano and orchestra. Balanchine skilfully combines a firework of complex jumps and pointe dancing with jazz dance steps as seen on the stages of New York's Broadway. Kaleidoscope images in scarlet celebrating the energetic power of dance.

"In each fleeting appearance I see worlds, full of the interplay of rainbow colours." This line of poetry inspired Sergei Prokofiev's Visiones Fugitives, op. 22, which Hans van Manen used as the starting point for his choreography of the same name in 1990. Full of harmony and dynamics, surprising and captivating, movements and music merge in the fleeting and thus so attractive art of dance. A choreography that touches and inspires, that makes no distinction between the sexes, that makes us forget the world around us for a moment.

Alternating between frenetic and calm, dark and mysterious, to the pulsating rhythm of the music, the three-part evening comes to a brilliant end with William Forsythe's work "Enemy in the Figure". The light, as much a part of the choreography as the dance steps themselves, makes the space explode or shrink, makes dancers burst out of the darkness and develops an inescapable pull. The individual is at the centre of this confrontation of light and dark, a work that has lost none of its modernity in its urgency and radical aesthetics.