Dancing on the glacier – Elke Van Campenhout

The new Rosas production, Zeitung, faces up to every challenge it encounters. The choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and pianist Alain Franco go in search of the unstable combination of music and dance, choreography and improvisation, romance and disillusion. In a broad historical gesture, Bach, Schoenberg and Webern traverse the geometrical principles and improvisational wild cards of the Rosas choreography. In harmony and difference, in unison or counterpoint.

In the interview with the makers, two seemingly different questions emerge. De Keersmaeker seeks simplicity, the essential building blocks of choreography and therefore emphatically opts for a considerable amount of improvisation in the performance. Franco’s questioning is more historical and takes as its medium the confrontation of Bach with Schoenberg and Webern in search of the evolution of harmony in Western thinking.

ATDK: In this performance I wanted to go back to the essence, to the simplicity of the body in dance: a body as two spirals revolving around a central, vertical axis. It is on this that the material is largely based. The body as materialised energy and as the manifestation of universal principles. I have always been greatly inspired by geometry, by the absolute abstraction of certain laws which are then contrasted with the highly concrete physical presence of the 9 dancers, each of whom has their own physicality. All these bodies are bearers of personal experience from which we then generate material, which is then again transformed into a document, a written choreography. Not only by me, but also by the dancers, and part of the dance vocabulary is supplied by David Hernandez.

AF: Ultimately the written material and the material used in the improvisations are very similar because they come from the same source. Only the energy, the intention of the dancers, differs. The writing nourishes the improvisation and vice versa. You often find this in serial music or in free jazz: for instance the difference between Cecil Taylor as the pioneer of free jazz, and Stockhausen, who wrote his music with great precision, is often very difficult to make. There is no definite line separating improvisation and writing.

ATDK: What is extremely important is that you keep the improvisational elements well articulated. In this respect it was also interesting to be able to work together with the choreographer Deborah Hay for two weeks during the rehearsal period, as her approach is completely out of square with mine. I have always been very much involved in the strategic organisation of energy and time and space, while she mainly concentrates on the perception of the movement. It is not making concrete, specific decisions that is so crucial, but the possible choices. The ego is also a point of reference, the ego that plays a central role on stage.
I am interested in the body as millions of cells which arrange themselves according to specific laws. And especially in the question: Which laws, which patterns are revealed? Are the eternal and unchangeable figures that emerge static, or do they undergo all sorts of changes (here I am quoting Patricia De Martelaere), a little like ‘a mathematical formula that determines the course of a function or like numerical relationships which reflect the vibration frequencies of musical instruments? With regard to the Pythagorean idea of the ‘harmony of the spheres’, or equally in current theories that the universe was created by a particular sound vibration (super-string), one could say that everything that exists, ranging from a chair to a planet, is a realisation of its ‘own frequency’ and can be reproduced by means of a numerical relationship which embeds its own way of moving in an ‘primal form’.’

AF: Musically speaking there is an historical line in the choice of Bach, Schoenberg and Webern. Our starting point is tonality and we contrast it to the historical response to it: we examine the perfection of this system and so reveal its structure. Webern follows a ‘Möbius path’ that leads him from the melodic tradition of romance to the pure form and thus back to ‘a certain’ Renaissance. This study of the structure, of the essence of the issue, does not ultimately bring us to the heart of the matter, but to the pure presence. In this respect one might see Schoenberg as the link between Bach and Webern, because he endeavours to make a future for harmony without letting go of its past. Webern also continued to work on many of Schoenberg’s principles. The interplay between these various periods makes the question of harmony and structure concrete.

ATDK: In romanticism the ego occupies a central position but in the case of Webern, and later Cage too, another question arises. If the ego exists what then does it comprise? Cage does not see the artist’s ego as the Self, but as everything that is available. For Webern the ego is what makes things visible (just as Klee said about the nature of art). While for Bach there is only an ego because it was part of God’s plan. This is important, because if you ask yourself what the heart of the matter is then you are seeking a finality, a goal. Webern lived in a period that was painful for the West, a time of disillusionment. At that time art did not depend on its exuberance or its colourful entrancement. This finality is therefore not a constant but an idea about art that is kept alive.
Over time there arose a pursuit of greater transparency. An important moment in this process was the Enlightenment, when analysis was used as an instrument. Another important moment was the point when it was concluded that this great secret of things, the hidden core of the ego, possibly did not exist. This is a painful discovery. And the historical line from Bach to Webern is one of the echoes of this story.

ATDK: In the performance we work with Bach’s fugues in six voices, which Webern orchestrated in 1936. He did not really change the fugues but in the orchestration his starting point was Schoenberg’s Klangfarben principle: he divides up the melodic line between several instruments and in this way creates a range of tones, each of which produces a specific intensity. In this way, strangely enough, you achieve greater unity through more fragmentation.

AF: In this way Webern created a feeling of perspective, as if you moved the camera from a broad view to a bust shot. This feeling of space, of distance, is essential to his work. He is not concerned with pure structural principles but on creating perspective, creating an imaginary image. This gives rise to a sense of the disruption of space in a world that is becoming increasingly technological. The building blocks of the world therefore become more visible, and in art they are actually shown, purely as a result of research and not on the basis of one or another subjective choice. At this moment the path of Western harmony comes to an end and we switch to the modern world, that of microscopy and digitalisation.

ATDK: This seeking, and at the same time letting go of harmony, was very important to me in creating this performance. The music and the choreography actually arose separately and were then very gradually attuned to one another. At times their combination throws the harmony off balance.

ATDK: In Zeitung the harmony between music and dance does not develop from similarity or parallelism but momentarily, where the two intersect. It is similar to a question you sometimes get at primary school: train A departs from station X at a certain time and at a certain speed and at the same time train B departs from station Y, and so on. Where will they meet? Dance and music depart from different stations and it is the run-up to the intersection that stimulates the conditions of harmony.

ATDK: In any case, this is a very different approach to that in Toccata, in which I already made use of Bach’s music. There the writing was geared to the score note by note. Here it is more about cross-pollination, a possible discrepancy. I find this crucial. I am someone who enjoys walking in the mountains in my boots, just like Webern, in fact. But this is more like walking on a glacier: you have no idea where the crevasses are. It is exciting but also dangerous: if you fall, you fall deep. But being up there on top is the most beautiful thing in the world.