Jiří Kylián - biography | THE NATIONAL MORAVIAN

Jiří Kylián (Czechoslovakia, 1947) started his dance career at the age of nine, at the School of the National Ballet in Prague. He left Prague when he received a scholarship for the Royal Ballet School in London in 1967. Afterwards, he joined the Stuttgart Ballet led by John Cranko. In 1975, Kylián became artistic director of the Nederlands Dans Theater in The Hague (NL). In 1978, he put NDT on the international map with Sinfonietta. That same year, he founded Nederlands Dans Theater 2, which was intended to function as a breeding ground for young talent. In 1991, he started the Nederlands Dans Theater 3, a company of older dancers from forty till ‘death’. This three-dimensional structure was unique in the world of dance. In 1999, after an extraordinary prolific tenure, with an oeuvre of almost 100 ballets, Kylián handed over the artistic leadership. He remained associated with NDT as house choreographer until December 2009. In the last fifteen years, Kylián has directed four films, the award-winning Car-Men (2006) and Between Entrance and Exit (2013) both co-directed by Boris Paval Conen followed by Schwarzfahrer (2014) and Scalamare (2017). Kylián has created different art installations: Free Fall, Moving Still and Ensō.
In the course of his career, Kylián received many international awards, including: ‘’Officer of the Orange Order’’ – the Netherlands, ‘’Honorary Doctorate’’ – Juilliard School, New York, in 2008 he was distinguished with one of the highest royal honors, the ‘’Medal of the Order for Arts and Science of the House of Orange’’, given to him by Her Majesty Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. In 2019 Kylián become a member of the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris. This highly prestigious recognition was complimented with the creation of a new section for “Choreography’’ in the statutes. In 2024, Petr Pavel, President of the Czech Republic, decorated Kylián with the ‘’Order of the White Lion’’, the country’s highest honor recognizing Kylián’s outstanding contribution to the global dance scene and his role in promoting Czech culture internationally.