✦ Who He Is ✦
Jiří Kylián was born in Prague in 1947 and trained at the Prague Conservatory before winning a scholarship to the Royal Ballet School in London in 1967. There he met choreographer John Cranko, who invited him to join the Stuttgart Ballet. Kylián left Czechoslovakia for Stuttgart in 1968, the same year Soviet tanks entered Prague to crush the Prague Spring, and it was under Cranko's direction that he began choreographing his own work.
After creating three pieces for Nederlands Dans Theater as a guest choreographer, Kylián was appointed the company's artistic director in 1975 at the age of twenty-eight. He held that position for twenty-four years, until 1999, and continued creating new work for the company afterward as its house choreographer until 2009 - a working relationship with a single institution that shaped nearly the entire arc of his career and, in turn, defined the identity of Nederlands Dans Theater itself.
Signature Works
Petite Mort (1991)
Created for the Salzburg Festival to mark the bicentennial of Mozart's death, this fencing-foil duet cycle for twelve dancers became NDT's single most frequently licensed work. Read the full profile →
Sinfonietta (1978)
Set to Leoš Janáček's brass-heavy score by his fellow Czech composer, this large-ensemble work was Kylián's international breakthrough, opening doors for NDT that had previously stayed closed to the young company.
Symphony of Psalms (1978)
Made the same year as Sinfonietta, this piece for sixteen dancers set to Stravinsky's 1930 choral score built what Kylián described as a kind of spiritual architecture out of shared stage space.
Bella Figura (1995)
A Baroque-scored work for nine dancers, staged under Caravaggio-style lighting with a moving curtain that reshapes the stage around the dancers as it goes, asking when a performance actually begins.
Style & Method
Kylián's choreography sits deliberately between two traditions: it keeps ballet's precision and its pointed extension of line, but adds a much wider vocabulary of weight, fall, and floor-based movement drawn from modern dance, along with an unabashedly theatrical use of lighting, costume, and set. The result reads as neither purely classical nor purely experimental - a "third way" that became NDT's house style and a reference point for contemporary ballet more broadly.
He also treated the company itself as part of the choreographic project. In 1978 he co-founded NDT2, a junior company for dancers transitioning out of training, and in 1991 he established NDT3, made up of dancers over forty - an unusual structure built on the belief that experience and physical maturity had their own choreographic value, not just youth and virtuosity.
Legacy
Over roughly a hundred works, Kylián built a repertory that companies well beyond NDT now perform regularly, and his tenure established a model - a choreographer given decades to develop a singular institutional voice - that later shaped how companies like Nederlands Dans Theater itself thought about succession, handing creative leadership on to choreographers including Sol León and Paul Lightfoot.
His insistence on treating classical technique as a starting point rather than a fixed endpoint, and on giving equal weight to lighting, design, and theatrical structure, remains visible in the work of companies and choreographers who never danced for him directly but inherited the vocabulary he spent a quarter century developing in The Hague.
See Also
Read the full profile of Nederlands Dans Theater, the company Kylián led for twenty-four years.