In The Dutch Mountains is Marco Goecke’s new world premiere for NDT, a title some may recognize from the song by the Dutch band Nits, and others from Cees Nooteboom’s novel of the same name. Goecke moved to the Netherlands when he was 17, where he lived for two years. He has created at least one choreography here every year since 2006. In that sense, you could almost call him a Dutch choreographer. In the Dutch Mountains is both a tribute to this country and a retrospective of his previous work.

“The choice of the title has little bit to do with the song I used to listen to,” Goecke says, when asked about the reason for the title of this work. “When I was young, I used to get heart palpitations when I heard a phrase I didn’t quite understand.” And really, there is something enigmatic about the combination of ‘the Netherlands’ with the idea of ‘mountains.’ The expression comes close to being an oxymoron, its components in stark contrast. What does a country, as Willem Frederik Hermans writes in his novel Beyond Sleep, that “actually belongs to the fish” have to do with mountains? And “where is the natural familiarity with the great questions and their deep penetration when someone is educated in a flat little country of mud and clay, without a single mountain?”