Anne Theresa de Keersmaeker

She's...you know....kind of a big deal.  I've seen a handful of her work now:

Rosas Danzt Rosas
Once
Fase: Violin Phase (video)
Fase: 4 movements to the music of Steve Reich

Tonight I saw the entirety of Fase.   I often worry about classics and seminal works; no less with this one.  I've liked her work in the past but never come away breathless or tearful or anything.  I doze off (sorry!) occasionally--the repetitive movement and music not quite keeping my blood pressure up.

Fase was ... I don't know.  I am having a hard time talking about it.  It is sticking in my brain.  The music is repeating, the movement is repeating.  It's not common that I want to write about a show I've just seen.

Two dancers stand.  They lift their chins.  They look at each other.  They nod.  In the beginning you have a magical moment, when you realize the shadow in the middle is in fact two shadows, from two people, overlapping.  And there I had the "in" I needed.  On the wall I could watch the rhythmic variants, the similarity and difference.  There was something confounding and magical about the way they would phase in and out of sync with each other.  One moment they are in perfect unison....moments later, they are mirror images, one swinging out, the other in, and all the while nothing has changed.   They are still pivoting.

"Come Out." Sitting down under lamps, they look vaguely militaristic.  And the movements seem bloody, like the music.  They seem fleshy and wounded.  And as always, they repeat, they vary, they coalesce, they diverge.  Occasionally they hold it--and somehow these moments are the strongest.  Anne Theresa is riveting--she licks her lips, hesitates (on her face only), breathes, sighs.  You see the decision as it is being made.  The dance is happening here and now; I don't care how often she has rehearsed and performed it.  It is happening here, now, for me, for the first time.

Those swirling dresses--the humans didn't swirl, but the dresses did.  I think my favorite was Violin Phase, despite being unimpressed with it on video.  The whole show is tight, contained work.  It manages.  It knows what to do.  It knows where to go.  It makes form from chaos.  And periodically in Violin Phase these glimpses of Ms. de Keersmaeker show.  You see her looking to hit her mark.  You see her dress fly up.  The choreography pauses after a turn just long enough to let the dress wrap itself around her body and start to unwind as she flies in the reverse direction.  Tension and rhythm.  Her outward self is all calm composure and it becomes a delight to see her smile or catch her breath.  Never losing control, just showing a bit more.  The flip of her skirt over her hips.  The casual cigarette gesture.  The unending circle pattern, static...but you never know which spoke she will choose.  The fouettes, casual, student-like...so loose in the hip and tight in the direction.  Towards the end she starts to get bigger and bigger and suddenly you start to wonder if she's going to lose it, but instead she stops, perfectly with the music, fists clenched and shoulders hunched.  [Aggravatingly enough, I can't find video of this one.]

In Clapping Music, I wondered...is she tired?  She looks sloppier, bouncier, the precision I've found so fulfilling is missing.  And as they come closer, moving inexorably downstage right, I realize she is not tired, she's playing.  Her partner is rigid, still perfect, but Anne Theresa is playing.  She is bouncing up and down like a kid, not a dancer.  Her arms are recoiling from the landings, flailing effortlessly.  She reaches out, almost to put her hands on the other dancer's shoulders. 

This one isn't in the show I saw, but I like it, so here it is anyway....check out the extremely long single shots: