Nils Christe Choreographer

Nils Christe was born in 1949 in Rotterdam, in The Netherlands. He studied dance in his native city’s Conservatory, then with Hannie Bouman. In 1966, he entered at 17 the Nederlands Dans Theater, where he performed ballets by Hans van Manen, John Butler, Anna Sokolow, Jerome Robbins, Glen Tetley, Jennifer Muller, Louis Falco and Jiří Kylián. He choreographed his first piece for the Company in 1974. Until 1982, year he left the NDT, he created for the Company twelve ballets, including Quartet (NDT2), set to Shostakovich’s Strings Concerto, for which he won the First Prize in the 1979 Choreography Competition in Cologne. The Paris Opera invited him in 1983 to set the entering Symphony in Three Movements, and then in 1985 to create Before Nightfall. He was appointed artistic director at the Rotterdam Scapino Ballet from 1986 to 1993, where he staged seven pieces, including Pulcinella. He then became an independent choreographer and is now a regular guest in 66 dance companies across 25 different countries, including the Royal Ballet of Flanders, the Wiener Staatsoper, the English National Ballet, the Deutsche Oper and the Berlin Komische Oper, the Grands Ballets Canadiens, the Washington Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet and the Hong Kong Ballet. He also set the choreographies for the operas Dido and Aeneas (Dutch National Ballet, 1994), Aïda (Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, 1996) and Akhnaten by Philip Glass (Muziektheater Hollands Diep, 2001). In 2005, he was awarded, in Holland, the Dansersfonds Merit Award. In total, he has created no less than 68 ballets.