✦ Origins ✦
Alexander Ekman created Cacti in 2010 for Nederlands Dans Theater 2, the company's junior ensemble of dancers in their late teens and early twenties, where Ekman himself had danced earlier in his career. The work premiered in The Hague on February 25, 2010, and was, by his own account, his first piece built around a full string quartet rather than recorded or electronic sound - a formal, chamber-music setup he then deliberately undercut with sixteen dancers, a field of oversized floor tiles resembling giant Scrabble pieces, and, eventually, a potted cactus for every performer on stage.
The piece is a direct response to the language of dance criticism itself. An onstage string quartet - playing selections from Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert, including the driving fourth movement of Schubert's Death and the Maiden - periodically breaks from the score to voice lines in the overheated, self-serious register of a critic composing a review in real time: fragments like "what do we see?" and "the trained eye can see" puncture the choreography just as the audience starts to read meaning into it. Ekman has described the piece as being about the impulse to analyze and "understand" art rather than simply experience it, and about resisting the idea that a critic's interpretation should have the final word on what a work means.
What Makes It Distinct
Cacti runs under thirty minutes but packs in an unusual density of stage business: dancers appear boxed in by their own floor tiles, scrambling, freezing, and rearranging themselves with a unison precision that plays as both impressive technique and deadpan visual joke. The cacti themselves - handled, cradled, and eventually arranged around the stage - never resolve into a fixed symbol, which is very much the point: the piece keeps offering images that invite interpretation while refusing to confirm any single reading, dramatizing exactly the interpretive reflex it is satirizing. The effect is a work that is simultaneously a genuine showcase of ensemble virtuosity and a running gag at the expense of how that virtuosity typically gets written about.
Reception & Legacy
Cacti was nominated for a VSCD Zwaan Award (the Dutch dance prize) in 2010 and went on to collect nominations including a UK National Dance Award and an Olivier Award, unusually broad recognition for a work made for a junior company rather than a flagship main stage. Critics responded to its double-edged appeal: the Daily Express called it "subversive and highly original," praising a piece that "satirises pretentious contemporary dance while delivering movement of unparalleled synchronicity," while other reviewers singled out its rare feat of being genuinely, broadly funny without sacrificing choreographic rigor.
The work has since traveled far beyond its NDT 2 origins, entering the repertories of companies including Pacific Northwest Ballet, Boston Ballet, Sydney Dance Company, and Royal Swedish Ballet, making it Ekman's most widely staged piece and, for many audiences, their introduction to his work generally. Its success helped establish satire and outright comedy as a viable, prestigious register within contemporary ballet programming, a lane that was largely underused before Cacti demonstrated how much appetite audiences had for concert dance willing to laugh at itself.
See Also
Read the full profile of choreographer Alexander Ekman, and learn more about the company that commissioned Cacti, Nederlands Dans Theater.