Cynthia Loemij and Tale Dolven in Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's Piano Phase. Photo by Jack Vartoogian.
Stuff you probably know about the celebrated Belgian choreographer, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker: Born 1960. Studies with Maurice Béjart at Mudra. Presents first professional piece at age 20. Takes off for New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts to explore American post-modernism. In 1982, her second piece, Fase, four movements to the music of Steve Reich, proves her well embarked upon radical work that’s dazzlingly intelligent and complex in structure, but leaves the dancers looking like ordinary folks making moves your energetic, able-bodied pedestrian assumes he or she could bring off. Fase confirms she’s possessed by the idea that a simple phrase, infinitely repeated with slight permutations, is a clear path to ecstasy, both emotional and spiritual. Hence a quarter-century alliance with Reich, recognized with the Steve Reich Evening, given at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House October 22-27 as part of the New Wave Festival.
The stepping stones between De Keersmaeker’s early success and her current international recognition are almost trite in their inevitability. Her company, Rosas, founded in 1983, became the resident dance group at the prestigious Brussels opera house, De Munt/La Monnaie, a decade later. A school directed by De Keersmaeker followed. Awards and honorary titles rained down upon her, from New York’s Bessies to being awarded the title Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French. Seemingly undistracted by fame, De Keersmaeker went steadily down her singular investigative path, sometimes combining imagery from the visual arts and spoken text with her choreography but regularly returning to Reich’s music, with which her dance impulses have the closest affinity.
Stuff you might not know about De Keersmaeker: (1) At least from her mouth, anything personal. She insists upon all the anonymity she can muster, an egolessness apparent in her work. (2) She is not much given to smiling. (3) She’s a baroness. But don’t get too excited about her radically pared-down means coming from the mind of an aristocrat, a member of the class so often allied with high-end artifice. The title was granted for her art, not her ancestors.
The dance hit of the Steve Reich Evening was Piano Phase, an excerpt from the work that made De Keersmaeker famous in 1982.
Two pianists are placed at opposite edges of the stage while the dancers, Cynthia Loemij (brunette) and Tale Dolven (blonde), operate side by side between them, locomoting horizontally in uncannily flawless unison. The lighting gives them each two pale shadows on the backdrop; any overlap between the two middle shadows that occurs as they move brings a fifth, inkier ghost-shadow into being. The dancers sternly conform to the entire absence of “attitude” that shadows possess. In other words, they allow the dramatic impact of the piece to rest entirely with motion in space to the music that is their partner.
Just when you relax into the hypnotic quality of the set-up—the arms indicating pathways for the briskly traveling legs, the feet striding boldly, sheathed in cream-colored bobby socks and white 40s-style laced oxfords—the women work briefly in mirror image, go out of phase like a pair of damaged windshield wipers, then return to their original unison. The seemingly magical process is exhilarating in itself. And since you can rarely catch the women making the shifts, you’re left marveling, “How do they do it?” (The same might be asked of their ability to memorize the 19 minutes of repetitious but trickily varied activity.)
But wait. Their legs continue to stride, their arms swing more freely, and every once in a while the women halt briefly, holding the arms—now emphatically flexed at the elbows and wrists—before them as if to say “This far and no further,” then revert to the familiar pattern. Gradually the arms, torso, and pelvis are permitted to curve just slightly. The shadows disappear and the dancers move downstage, to be bathed in golden light. Now their basic phrases take on more curves, as well as crossing and turnings in and out of phase. At times, you think you’re imagining the whole series of minute permutations, that the women are really just performing the original phrase again and again and you’ve imagined the rest, that there’s just one thing in the world to say and that they’re saying it.
Despite the glory of this dance, the Steve Reich Evening was disappointing in part because of the two 2007 pieces new to our shores. Presumably tracking De Keersmaeker’s inevitable moving on after her triumphs with uncompromising minimalism, they seemed to hover uncertainly in an uncertain middle ground between Then and Now.
Members of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's company, Rosas, in De Keersmaeker's Eight Lines. Photo by Jack Vartoogian.
Eight Lines, for as many women dressed in pale or black shifts, works hard at enlarging the choreographer’s early range of motion. These women jump, they swirl, they bend their bodies lithely to the floor, their unbound hair brushing its surface; every so often they’re positively bouncy. The problem is that De Keersmaeker, who launched her career by manipulating a very few moves into brilliant dances, hasn’t yet developed an extensive movement vocabulary that’s compelling in itself. Eight Lines adheres to the choreographer’s faith in architectural structure, but weakly, as if the sharp configurations had been blurred. The old codes of behavior are still in place: Each woman operates as a discrete entity, even when the whole octet is in motion at once. (Anyone who’s inactive for a moment remains on stage—a presence—standing quietly in one of its corners.) The dancing figures don’t touch one another or group meaningfully into tiny clusters, though you perceive them as a team with a common vision. They might be carrying out the traditional spring ritual of a select women’s college of long ago. They even smile.
Four Organs is peopled by the instruments’ players (four on small electronic organs with a fifth keeping up a maddeningly insistent beat with multiple maracas) and five male dancers. De Keersmaeker’s choreographing for men was news to the local audience and they do lend the work a weighted quality that a flock of women often lacks. The men move in disjunctive phrases, occasionally tumbling to the floor and rolling on it, bodies askew, each occupying a separate, shifting capsule of space. Their action and their individual isolation exude an air of madness.
Then, awkwardly and roughly, they begin to bond. One suddenly lifts another. Next, they all start to touch, to roughhouse, and then to fight. The music cuts off, their interaction grows gentler, more brotherly, the crimson stage curtain falls, leaving them in front of it, becoming ever more normally human until even the fiercest one among them, the convincing Bostjan Antoncic, is tamed and they can depart. I couldn’t help thinking of soldiers returning from Iraq with traumatic stress disorder. I’m almost certain De Keersmaeker doesn’t want her audience to slather story onto abstract choreography and I apologize to her for doing so, but it was the only way I could make any sense out of this dance.
The evening’s live music was played with keenly focused energy by the Belgian percussion group Ictus, with which De Keersmaeker regularly collaborates. The dances to Reich scores were sveltely complemented by music-only numbers by Reich and the late György Ligeti (an experimental work for 100 metronomes). Remon Fromont’s expert lighting designs proved that austerity can be vividly dramatic. All told, the program had the deep civility of work made for an audience expected to think as well as to look and to listen.
