When it comes to sex, the challenge to shyer sensibilities is not subtle: “Grosse Fuge” is a ritualized copulation for four men and four women, to Beethoven’s Great Fugue. What’s refreshing to this American eye, though, is how it brings us a healthier Dutch attitude towards sexuality. The women stand in the back for the first section of “Grosse Fuge,” dressed in white leotards that look a bit like lingerie; as the music delivers strident phrases driven by the double-bass, the men make fists and flex biceps and swish around long black skirts, like peacocks showing off in hopes of landing a mate. When at last the women join in, a gentler musical theme has launched, but the women are hardly passive little flits—they flex and stand tall and even slap a male partner on the ass. (Twice, in case you missed it the first time, as a friend pointed out.) It’s the men who have to disrobe in a most vulnerable fashion, stripping off their skirts to reveal tiny shorts. It’s the women who arch their backs over them, initiating the real intercourse, and pressing the men’s heads commandingly to their crotches. (How’s that for empowering a woman’s desires?) And when the women latch on to the men’s belts, and the men slide them around on the floor between their legs, it’s the women who are holding on with a death grip, as a lyrical movement from one of Beethoven’s late string quartet provides a striking tonal contrast.

As to musicality—the other element my fellow-critic friend found challenging—I’d argue that “Grosse Fuge” is more musical than the great majority of contemporary ballets. It depends, of course, on what you consider to be “musicality”: illustration of the music or conversation with the music. Like Balanchine, van Manen has here listened for the music’s strife-riven essence and created a structure that respects the music’s logic and yet stands independent from it. The motifs are carefully chosen, and limited enough to accrue meaning (domineering V arms, turned in retirés that feel like a gesture of “no!”). Van Manen’s mastery at giving you just enough pattern to then delight you with deviation is thrilling. Stretches of lightning fast, inventive partnering alternate regularly with passages of walking as a formation, shifting directions like a flock. Even the overall scheme of having just the men dance, then the women, then partnering incorporates just enough unexpected but still logical variation: after two passages of couples, instead of taking us predictably to a third couple, we get two men in side-by-side unison.