National Ballet performs enchanting Tempest

To make it 450^e birth anniversary of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Krzysztof Pastor created a full-length choreography for the National Ballet, loosely based on The Tempest (1611). The performance is part of the Holland Festival. Dramaturge Willem Bruls adapted Shakespeare's last play about the island exiled prince Prospero and his daughter Miranda into a script in which the story is told four times, from as many perspectives. The result is enchanting.

In this production, Pastor collaborates with Iranian-American video artist Shirin Neshat, who draws for hushed, poetic film images with her regular partner Shoja Azari. These are completely organically integrated with the beautiful stage and lighting plan by Jean Kalman and Elsa Ejchenrad. The opening image is breathtaking: a man (Abbas Bakhtiari) sits on the ground against a bare tree, with waves rolling in the background: his loneliness is almost tangible.

Then the man stands up, takes a daf (Persian frame drum) in hand and gives a dazzling overture - Holland Symfonia sits silently in the orchestra pit. It is incredible what a range of sounds Bakhtiari manages to elicit from the ancient instrument: earth-shaking thuds announce the impending doom; dirty hissing sounds depict the hypocrisy of the characters who, out of pure self-interest, alternately attract or repel each other; lyrical drip runs refer to the burgeoning love between Miranda and Ferdinand.

The islanders wear dashing, dervish skirts - blue in the first part, red in the second, black in the third and white in the last. Sometimes they are a belligerent army attacking the invaders with menacing strides, at other times they lovingly surround the rapprochements between Miranda and her various lovers like ghosts - unlike in the original, she is quite promiscuous.

Those who have not read the script beforehand will sometimes struggle to distinguish who is who, but the dance is particularly expressive and the costumes are beautiful. The film images sometimes show raging waves, sometimes sand dunes overgrown with tussocks of grass, which makes the spectator seem to have landed on the lonely island himself. Strong are the figures looming out of the sea, which seem to refer to the refugee problem: after all, Prospero and Miranda were also exiled from Milan and had to seek refuge in this inhospitable place in the ocean.

The integration of traditional Persian music (daf), early music (Purcell, Tallis, Johnson, Locke) and contemporary composed music by Michel van der Aa runs extremely smoothly. Holland Symfonia, under the direction of conductor Matthew Rowe, shows itself at home in all markets. At times, you wonder whether the brass, with their muffled sound, might have taken authentic instruments in hand after all. Van der Aa's sometimes fiercely dissonant music is deployed ingeniously by Pastor in passages full of struggle and incomprehension.

Only downsides are the somewhat shrill voice of countertenor Dave ten Kate, and the sometimes too explicit video images. For instance, during a ferocious war dance we see close-ups of barking dogs, and during a love duet, a nude loving couple is zoomed in on. In these moments, the dance is reduced to a footnote to the image and the magic disappears. Azari told me afterwards that the footage would still be polished. If these passages at tonight's premiere still give way to more photography leaving our imagination, only one word remains for this production: perfect.

The Tempest premieres tonight at Muziektheater Amsterdam and runs until 29 June.