An empty stage. In the middle, two women, sitting next to one another on two stools. Fingers grasping at hair, a movement of the arms, hands slapping legs. That’s all that happens in the twelve minutes that follow. Yet an enormous tension builds through the repetition of these small acts. By turns in and out of sync, faster, slower, the two dancers perform their movements in such a way that the interaction between them continually creates new and different impressions for the viewers.
Fase is the name of this piece with which the barely 22-year-old Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker managed to attract the attention of the dance world in 1982. The two women dance four scenes with four different sequences of movements to the music of Steve Reich. It is no coincidence that De Keersmaeker chose precisely this music as accompaniment. For Reich’s compositions are built on the same principle as De Keersmaeker’s choreographies: the restriction to a few tones, or, in her case, movements, which are repeated and varied. This type of music is known as Minimal Music. Very soon the young Belgian began to be considered as a minimalist among choreographers. For her, she who received music and not dance lessons as an adolescent, for this reason the structure of a musical composition, the score, was of particular importance in developing choreographies. This approach was not at all self-evident in contemporary dance. While other choreographers were fighting to liberate dance from any dependency on music or even from a supposed subjugation to music, such hierarchies simply do not exist for De Keersmaeker. In some cultures, according to De Keersmaeker, there are not even separate words for music and dance.
Since Reich’s music is so close to the choreographer’s own way of thinking and working, she would go on to bring his compositions to the stage repeatedly throughout the following decades. With her initially all-female company Rosas, founded a year after Fase, De Keersmaeker continued the search for new forms, experimenting in the process. She analysed every movement precisely in order to recognize its fundamental structure and potential. This movement analysis can also be seen for instance in the geometric figures that De Keersmaeker lays out on the stage floor with tape. Inscribed in this way in the dance floor, the turns and paths of the dancers become circles, spirals and other forms. Work on Paper was the name of the 2015 exhibition presented in Lausanne and Brussels, among other places, which featured these patterns affixed to the floor for the public to contemplate as drawings.
Just as music lends structure to time, for De Keersmaeker dance lends structure to space. The amazing thing in this regard, as she says, it that this intense preoccupation with structure manages to give rise to emotion in the end. Her works – from the intimate solos all the way to her large-scale opera productions – prove this in an impressive manner. For, as systematic or mathematic as De Keersmaeker’s approach to dance may sound, her choreographies are remarkable for their grace, astonishing levity and infectious emotionality.
As a co-founder and director of P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, one of the most important European educational centres for dance and performance, the Belgian choreographer has also been successfully passing down her ideas and experience to younger generations of dancers and choreographers since 1995.