among the dancers who founded the Netherlands Dance Theater in 1959, but in 1960 he returned to Gaskell's company, by then named Nederlands Ballet. After this company and the Amsterdam Ballet merged to become Het Nationale Ballet (Dutch National Ballet), van Dantzig filled a number of important positions. He became resident choreographer in 1961, a member of the artistic council in 1965, co-director in 1968, and sole artistic director in 1971. He remained in that post for two decades, until 1991. He had a talent for administration and a keen eye for importing and commissioning ballets that expanded the company's repertory and developed its dancers. From the 1960s onward, van Dantzig choreographed more than fifty ballets, most of them on contemporary themes and most of them for his home company. Combining both classical and modern dance techniques, his ballets are expressionistic and fraught with symbolism, usually displaying psychological conflicts within a principal character. Basic themes are acceptance of life's imperfections and acceptance of death as the inevitable outcome of life's struggles. The former is central to his best-known work, Monument for a Dead Boy (1965), a portrait of an adolescent destroyed by his unacceptable sexuality. The latter is demonstrated in Four Last Songs (1977), an ensemble piece that is generally considered his best work. In it "he transformed Strauss's meditation on death into an understated love poem [in which] four couples are parted in duets by a sympathetic messenger of death." Van Dantzig's unusual combination of classical ballet and modern dance technique in his choreography attracted the interest of Rudolf Nureyev, famous Russian dancer with the Royal Ballet in London. He asked to be taught the principal role in Monument for a Dead Boy, which he eventually performed to acclaim for audiences in England and the United States, proving himself an accomplished modern dancer as well as a classicist. He and van Dantzig forged a strong friendship, and he subsequently returned to Amsterdam with commissions for two new ballets, Blown in a Gentle Wind (1975) and About a Dark House (1976). Van Dantzig's book Remembering Nureyev: The Trail of a Comet lovingly details their twenty-five years as friends and colleagues. In 1991, van Dantzig left the Dutch National Ballet to concentrate on writing and mounting works for other companies. As a choreographer, he was in demand internationally as he mounted works for Ballet Rambert, Harkness Ballet, the Royal Ballet, the