The Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen, who has died aged 93, was a pioneering and prolific figure in European dance, and created more than 150 ballets across seven decades.

As a child, Van Manen would dance to the radio in his living room but he came late to formal training, which left him unconfined by tradition and free to pull ballet into the modern era as a founder member and choreographer of Nederlands Dans Theater. “Pure classical and pure modern dance will shortly no longer exist,” he told the Guardian in 1969. “There’s little hope for either style. But there is a third way ... and this is where the future of ballet lies – the marriage of classical and modern dance.”

Van Manen was hugely influenced by American choreographers: George Balanchine, Martha Graham, Jerome Robbins, but also movie musicals – he called Fred Astaire “the master of clarity” – and music, nightclubs and life at large (he was once a jive champion; his brother Guus was a jazz pianist). There was humour in Van Manen’s work, but there were no stories. This was pure dance that was stripped back with laser focus on form and the precision movement of the body.

He resisted attempts at interpreting or psychologising his works, which were often stark in design as well as choreography. But they could not be described as entirely abstract: there were always charged – often erotically charged – relationships between the dancers. The writer Ian Woodward called Van Manen “that rarity, a theorist of vision capable of transmuting his thoughts into successful practice”. Others called him the “Mondrian of ballet”. Van Manen said: “In my ballets, I strive for less and less movement. Every superfluous step has to be chucked out.”

British audiences saw less of Van Manen’s work than those in continental Europe. He did, however, have an early supporter in the shape of Peter Wright, who led the Royal Ballet’s touring company in the 1970s and programmed the strong and sensual Grosse Fuge, as well as Twilight, with its female dancer in high heels to John Cage’s prepared piano music; Tilt, performed to a Stravinsky concerto played twice, with the dancers switching roles the second time; and Five Tangos, a crowd pleaser set to Astor Piazzolla. In 1975, Van Manen created Four Schumann Pieces as a showcase for the Royal Ballet star Anthony Dowell, and it was later danced by Rudolf Nureyev.

Elsewhere, the ever-curious Van Manen experimented, making dances with no music (Essay in Silence), no clothes (Mutations), and no preparation (Readymade, begun in the morning and performed the same evening). Live (1979) was the first video ballet, and featured a live stream of a solo dancer projected on stage. Reassessing gender roles, Van Manen made classical duets for two male dancers, a rarity, especially in 1965, when his piece Metaforen caused controversy, although the dance was not sexual in nature. (“I’m as gay as they come,” Van Manen said in an interview marking Pride in 2024, “but I’ve never made ‘homosexual’ art.”)

His work was immensely musical (“Hans is looking for the moving body hidden inside the music,” said a commentator in the 2024 documentary Just Dance the Steps), with eclectic soundtracks ranging from Bach to Alban Berg and David Byrne. The masterwork Adagio Hammerklavier from 1973 is performed to the slow movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 29. Not just “performed” to it, but fused with it, the dancers moving at glacial pace with exquisite control, of both limbs and tangibly suppressed emotions. You could see something intensely human in it, or otherworldly, “a dreamlike strangeness, as if [the dancers] were ghosts in a garden where time did not exist,” according to the critic Richard Buckle in 1974.

Van Manen was born in Nieuwer-Amstel (now Amstelveen) on the outskirts of Amsterdam. His father, Gustav, and German mother, Marga (nee Lilienthal), already had an older son, Guus. The young couple were hard up, moving often, with Gustav making a living selling scrap metal and later as a cosmetics salesman. Gustav died of tuberculosis when Hans was seven, and Marga and her sons moved to an apartment in central Amsterdam near the Stadsschouwburg theatre. Hans rarely went to school after the age of 11 and hung out on the streets, looking for wood to fuel the stove at home, or selling things he had made (from crocheted dolls to new bikes made from stolen parts). At 13, he became an apprentice hair and makeup artist at the theatre, and won first prize in a makeup competition aged 16.

But since childhood he had always loved to dance. He began lessons at the late age of 18, but was on stage within three months – as much because of a lack of dancers as his precocious talent (although he was a natural turner and could reel off multiple pirouettes). He quickly made up for lost time, dancing with Sonia Gaskell’s Ballet Recital and the Dutch Opera Ballet, and created his first choreography, Olé, Olé, la Margarita, in 1955. Only two years later Van Manen won the Dutch state award for choreography for Feestgericht, his only narrative ballet.

In 1959, Van Manen joined Roland Petit’s Les Ballets de Paris in France, but the following year returned home to be part of the new Hague-based Nederlands Dans Theater, as a dancer and choreographer, then co-artistic director. He spent the rest of his career moving between NDT and Dutch National Ballet, including a particularly fertile period at NDT in the 1990s. He made his last work for Dutch National Ballet in 2014. From the 1980s, Van Manen also successfully pursued photography, encouraged by his friend Robert Mapplethorpe, focusing on portraits of dancers and male nudes, which were exhibited internationally.

Van Manen received numerous awards across his career, including the highest honours from the Dutch and French governments, but he refused others, such as the Grand Austrian state prize in 2000, in protest against Austria’s extreme right leader Jörg Haider.

On the occasion of his 80th birthday, friends wrote tributes, including this from his fellow choreographer William Forsythe: “Hans van Manen is the most kind, helpful, critical, funny, wicked, brilliant, enthusiastic, remarkable, loyal, sexy, ironic, respectful, talented, expert and unpredictable friend and colleague that anyone could want.”

Van Manen is survived by his partner, Henk van Dijk, whom he met in the early 70s and entered into a civil partnership with in 1998.

• Hans van Manen, dancer, choreographer and photographer, born 11 July 1932; died 17 December 2025