Choreographer Jiří Kylián on bringing his work to the UK and facing his fiercest critics

“I’ve been really busy recently with closing circles,” Jiří Kylián says calmly. We have just sat down at the choreographer’s art-filled home in The Hague, and I wait a beat, unsure where he wants to go with this. He picks up his tablet to show me a video of a black ink circle drawn in a single brushstroke — a Zen Buddhist practice known as ensō.

“Somebody who taught me how to make ensō just died,” he says as we watch the video in the peaceful sunroom he added to the house after acquiring it more than four decades ago. “The circles are just closing one after the next, but I am someone who believes you should close them properly.”

A lot of things have come full circle for Kylián lately. At 75, the Czech-born choreographer, whose fluidly sculptural style remains one of the most imitated in dance, has returned after an six-year break to the company he made into a worldwide phenomenon, Nederlands Dans Theater. Meanwhile, the UK, which gave him his big break as a gifted 20-year-old from Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, may be ready to embrace his work at last. This month, Birmingham Royal Ballet is dancing its first Kylián work, 1981’s Forgotten Land.

A painterly piece made for Stuttgart Ballet, it unfolds before a seascape designed by John Macfarlane, whose drawings adorn the wall next to us in The Hague. The leading couples — one in white, one in red, one in black — are on a circular path of their own; they were inspired by Edvard Munch’s painting “The Dance of Life”, which depicts three stages of a woman’s existence. “It’s all about time, speed and ageing,” Kylián says.

I need to say something, and I need the music to support me in what I want to say

He let a trusted team of stagers take that message to Birmingham. Kylián rarely travels to rehearse his works these days, due to crippling claustrophobia. “If it really spirals, you feel that your body is too small for you, that you don’t fit into it,” he says. “Trains have also become a problem because they are like aeroplanes nowadays, you can’t open the windows.”

Even without the choreographer himself present, the time seems right for a detente between Kylián and British critics. There has been a change of the guard among UK dance writers in recent years. Among the choreographer’s fiercest detractor for decades was the FT’s own Clement Crisp, who died earlier this year. “Here are all the portentous signs of Euro-dance,” Crisp wrote of Kylián’s work in 2007. “Why the good Dutch do not rise up against it, as they did against the Spaniards, I cannot fathom.”

Kylián grew so exasperated that in 2012, he took aim at “the London critics” in a lengthy essay published on his website. With a mischievous look, he lets slip that he also once sent Crisp a letter. “I wrote: ‘if you really hate my work so much, why don’t you write a good review? Because that would be a definite indication for me to stop choreographing.’”

Why does he think the UK had such an adverse reaction to his repertoire, widely considered a pillar of modern ballet elsewhere? “I have no clue whatsoever,” Kylián says. “It really is a shame, because I had so many English friends and I lived in London for a year.” In 1967, after Jennie Lee, UK minister for the arts, saw his youthful choreographic efforts at the Prague Conservatory, Kylián was awarded a grant from the British Council to finish his studies at the Royal Ballet School.

Since only UK or Commonwealth-born dancers could join the Royal Ballet at the time, Kylián was hired sight unseen — a teacher recommended him — by Stuttgart Ballet, where John Cranko had a knack for nurturing choreographers. A few years later, Nederlands Dans Theater, a creation-oriented company looking for a new vision, came knocking.

Under his direction, NDT honed a highly influential aesthetic, by turns sleek and angular, combining balletic lines with a grounded sense of articulation. Its vocabulary initially came about, Kylián says, “by listening to the music”. Forgotten Land is a prime example of what he calls “musical choreography” — movement that doesn’t just respond to a score, but derives its structure and themes from it, in this case Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem Op. 20.

“But then this was not enough for me,” Kylián says. Why not? “Because you are a secondary creator. The primary creator is Mozart,” says the man who made Petite Mort, one of the most famous dance works set to Mozart. Kylián started devising new scores, sometimes asking composers to extrapolate on specific themes. “I need to say something, and I need the music to support me in what I want to say.”

A sense of disquiet and existential dread became more apparent in his later works, such as 2008’s Gods and Dogs, whose theme Kylián characterises as “sanity and insanity”. By then, he had left the directorship of NDT, and in 2014, he made the bold decision to take his repertoire away from the company, ostensibly to make space for more experimentation. “I thought they should start doing their own stuff,” he says. “They were quite terrified, but it was very good for them.”

His works are now back at the behest of a new director, Emily Molnar (NDT will perform his Gods and Dogs at Sadler’s Wells in the spring), but in an unfamiliar setting. NDT’s longtime home in The Hague, the Lucent Danstheater, purpose-built for the company by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas in 1987, was demolished recently to make way for a new “cultural palace,” as Kylián puts it derisively. “They claimed that it was irreparable. Rem said it was absolute nonsense. I stayed out of it because I knew it was a lost case.”

Lately, to find creative closure, Kylián has turned to photography and film. In addition to a recently completed documentary, Stages of a Theatre, about the Lucent Danstheater, Kylián is working on a video portrait of himself and his life partner of half a century, the dancer Sabine Kupferberg.

Over the past decade, he has almost entirely stopped making work for the stage. “I’m not a spring chicken anymore,” he says. “The age difference is so enormous between the young dancers and me. If I start working with somebody who is 18, I would have to start explaining things really from the beginning. Maybe I don’t have the energy anymore.”

He returns to his tablet, and pulls up beautiful photos of the Dutch island where he and Kupferberg have been filming. The film, he says, will be about another completed circle; he points to Kupferberg, pictured in a liminal space between the earth and the sea, with reverence. “We are the two passengers on this planet, Sabine and myself, and we slowly disappear.”

‘Forgotten Land’ is part of the triple bill ‘Into the Music’, October 21-November 5 in Birmingham and London, brb.org.uk

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ftweekend on Twitter