Toer van Schayk

Toer van Schayk (born 28 September 1936) is a Dutch ballet dancer, choreographer, scenic and costume designer, painter, and sculptor.

Along with Rudi van Dantzig and Hans Van Manen, he is one of the creative triumvirate that brought the Dutch National Ballet to international prominence in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Born in Amsterdam, Toer van Schayk (or Schaijk) began his ballet studies as a teenager, first with Irail Gadeskov and then with Sonia Gaskell, a former Ballets Russes dancer who ran a school and a small classical company in the city.

Toer van Schayk met Rudi van Dantzig when both were young men in Sonia Gaskell's company in the late 1950s.

She invited him to join her company, the Nederlands Ballet, in 1955, when he was 19 years old.

A handsome young man and an expressive dancer, he remained with her troupe until 1959, when he interrupted his dancing career to study painting and sculpture at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.

In 1965, van Schayk returned to dance and joined Het National Ballet (Dutch National Ballet), which had been formed by the merger of the Nederlands Ballet and the Amsterdam Ballet, There, from 1965 to 1976, his eloquent and powerful interpretations led him to become one of the company's best-loved soloists.

Among his most admired roles was the Young Boy in Monument voor een Gestorven Jongen (Monument for a Dead Boy), a ballet by Rudi van Dantzig set to music by Jan Boerman that concerned a homosexual youth who suffered prejudice because of his unorthodox sexuality.

Van Schayk choreographed his own first work, Onvoltooid Verleden Tijd (Imperfect Past Tense), set to music by György Ligeti, in 1971.

A few years later, in 1976, he joined van Dantzig and van Manen as a resident choreographer of the Dutch National Ballet and won an international reputation through some thirty works that he created for the company.

He also became known as one of the foremost Dutch stage designers, particularly for his own ballets and those of van Dantzig.

As a painter and sculptor, he has had exhibitions in Amsterdam, Athens, London, and New York.

Van Schayk's choreographic approach is very plastic, often combining dance and mime and using his dancers as moving sculptures.

His ballets exhibit an affinity with those of van Dantzig, particularly in their use of both classical ballet and modern dance techniques.

His emphasis on the expression of emotions is also similar to van Dantzig's, often enigmatic and anxious but less tormented and more elegiac, sometimes with an air of melancholy.

Further, his dance images are more impressionistic, with a fluid, ethereal aspect and a distilled, linear movement of arms and legs that imbues his work with a certain quality suggestive of a sketchbook.

In short, his choreographies are more sculptural and painterly than those of his colleague.

He designed a new production of Sir Frederick Ashton's Cinderella for the Royal Ballet in London in 2003; he created the remarkable sets and costumes for the Dutch National's much-admired production of Giselle in 2009; and he designed the fairytale costumes for Wayne Eagling's production of The Sleeping Beauty for the National Ballet of Japan in 2014.

He has since supervised the sets, costumes, and lighting in various ballet productions in the Netherlands, England, Poland, and Canada.

Although van Schayk retired in 2011, he continues to be active within Dutch National Ballet.

He still rehearses his own ballets with the company and supervises his designs.

They formed a strong romantic union that lasted more than fifty years, until van Dantzig's death in 2012.

As professionals, they were an extraordinary couple in the dance world, both talented and prolific choreographers and creative colleagues in mounting new works.

Van Schayk designed sets and costumes for most of van Dantzig's many works as well as his own.