It's standard Dutch fare: creating and seeing dance anew

January 11, 2004|Christine Temin, Globe Staff

THE HAGUE -- Legendary Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova died in this city in 1931, in an elegant mansion that had by then been converted into the Hotel des Indes. The first time I stayed at the hotel, I asked to be billeted in her quarters, but the receptionist politely explained that they had been converted into the Pavlova Conference Suite. I offered to sleep on the boardroom table. The receptionist was having none of it. I at least got to sleep in the room directly above the suite, convincing myself that the right vibes were making their way through her ceiling to my floor, although I couldn't swear that my arabesque had improved overnight.

One does not think of The Hague as a dance capital. The city is best known as the home of the World Court (the judicial arm of the United Nations) where international villains are tried, and the Mauritshuis Museum, with its peerless Vermeers, including the most beautiful painting the enigmatic 17th-century artist ever made, "View of Delft."

Cultural tourism brings loads of American visitors to foreign museums, which are dependably open five to seven days a week, like their US counterparts. But with the exception of New York, you can't travel to just any US city and rely on being able to attend a good professional dance performance almost any night of the year.

In the Netherlands, you can. Heavy subsidies to Dutch dance companies mean they get to perform a lot, so there are even theaters dedicated to dance. And, because the country is so compact and the public transportation so efficient, if you're staying in The Hague or Amsterdam and there's a performance you want to see in another Dutch city, it's likely to be easily accessible by train. And it's likely to cost less than attending a dance performance in America. I didn't pay more than $20 for any of the five dance performances I recently sawhere.

I found out about the performances back home, on the Internet, which makes it easy to create a dance tour that is city- or country-specific, or one that tracks a particular company. Tourist boards, theaters, festivals, and opera houses all have websites, and so do most dance troupes, even the small ones that still perform in church basements.

Still, says Samuel Wuerstein, the director of the Holland Dance Festival in The Hague, audiences, at least those from the United States, haven't quite caught up with this reality. "Unless they're passing through here anyway," he says, "they wouldn't be likely to come to our performances. The core of our audience is from this region. Then it's from the rest of the Netherlands, then from Europe."