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. 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 in 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.

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