NDT has a long history as a training ground for dancers interested in branching out into choreography. In 1983, two years after joining NDT as a dancer, Spanish-born Nacho Duato created his first ballet, Jardi Tancat, which won the first prize in the International Competition for Young Choreographers in Cologne in 1984. After being appointed artistic director of Madrid’s Compañía Nacional de Danza in 1990, he joined the Mikhailovsky Ballet in 2011 before moving on to the Berlin State Ballet in 2014.

And Duato is by no means NDT’s only success story: Frans Vervenne, Nils Christe and Johan Inger are other examples of dancers who grew into successful choreographers during their time with NDT, while dancers Sol León and Paul Lightfoot became both choreographers and artistic directors.

Ballet performances were a regular feature on Dutch television in the 1960s as part of efforts to raise the profile of both NDT and contemporary dance as a whole. Since there was only one TV channel in the Netherlands at the time, these broadcasts attracted a large audience.
In the 1970s, former dancer and artistic director Hans Knill began making video recordings of all ballets. In fact, NDT was the proud owner of one of the first-ever Philips recorders, meaning that footage exists of all the productions dating back to 1976. ¹

The company also began producing educational documentaries around this time – years before establishing an official education department – to introduce audiences to contemporary dance, largely unknown in the Netherlands at that time. This clip is taken from a 1961 documentary titled Jazz en danskunst (‘Jazz and the Art of Dance’), in which Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen uses his own ballets to explain jazz dance to the audience.

^{1   Versteeg, 1987 p.97}