Jean-Marc Adolphe - August 1998

Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s past suggests several sources of motivation: childhood and its mysteries, games with dolls, games of hopscotch, games of growing up, learning dance at MUDRA (Brussels 1978 - 1980). Dance, but which dance?- Asch, a first performance produced almost through spontaneous combustion, was the story of mutual fascination between an obstinate little girl and a great, wounded pilot.

 

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker was already obstinate, and her obstination had to be gratified somewhere other than rain soaked Brussels.

Terra incognita - for Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, like for many other artists of her generation, it was New York. A whole year when, looking back, the effect of arriving from a provincial background into cosmopolitan effervescence can now be imagined. There are a few traces from this journey. One is an article on Valeska Gert, the sorceress of the century, the grotesque dancer, written in the Drama Review on her return from New York.

 

A year, fifteen minutes; what was in Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s luggage when she came back from New York? Undetectable at customs control, in her muscles was a quarter-of-an-hour solo, constructed on the music of Steve Reich.

 

Violin Phase. The first step was an outline of a beginning. Free of predictable influences it was to open a door. It was a centrifugal force at the heart of a delineated form that spun the promise of a space to be constructed - an infinite beginning.

 

With the collaboration and reciprocal energy of Michèle Anne de Mey, the initial solo was duplicated into meticulously structured movement schemes. This was to become Fase, four movements to the music of Steve Reich, created at the Brussels Beursschouwburg, March 18, 1982. Choreographed in four sequences based on the early (and genesis) works of the American minimalist composer Steve Reich: Piano Phase, Come Out, Violin Phase and Clapping Music. Using different instrumental registers, Reich begins with a rhythmical structure that he repeats whilst adjusting it by progressive shifts. The repetition of a pattern is thus subject to a game of variations that seem to ‘work’ at the very interior of the initial structure. In Fase the choreography is modulated on the ‘phases’ of the music, and some believe they can discern a response to the art of Lucinda Childs. The proximity to minimalism is patent. However, over and beyond, Fase doesn’t aim for the spellbinding quality of pure visual geometry so much as for a volatile tension between bodies and energies. The constant dialogue between structure and emotion that nourished her subsequent pieces is already legible.

 

Piano phase. It begins with infinity - loops and more musical loops. After a first wave comes the first gesture. The right arm that lifts and brings the body with it in a spin on itself, the left foot serving as pivot. Uniformly dressed in frocks, shoes and white socks, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Michèle Anne De Mey are poised on a lateral line, the nape of the neck in perfect alignment with the shoulders. Without apparent emotion, they plunge into the perpetual repetition of a phrase. A minimal time-piece of movement, the right arm as a pendulum swings on its axis. They turn but do not swirl. Unlike the whirling of the dervishes of Islam, the cyclical repetition of movement in Piano Phase does not have a spiritual purpose. The dervishes revolve between sky and earth with inverted palms, one up one down. They are mechanical dolls whose mechanism is made of flesh. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Michèle Anne De Mey are the physical reality of autonomous bodily effort. Their arms are the prolongation of their bodies, rooted in them. The light changes and changes them. Faraway figures, duplicated by the play of shadows on the white backdrop, they glide on close lateral lines silhouetted by the lighting. Through the unbroken vigilance of the rhythm and the cycle of movement, small, nervous gestures emerge. A snatch of the forearm that betrays suppressed determination, hands that close as fists. The flow is fleetingly checked, the turns become sharper, the smoothness more cutting, the repetition gives way to a delight in digression. But ultimately the form always wins. Escape is halted by the light, the music marks its last notes.

Come Out. Fourteen minutes that begin with a litany of words ("Come out to show them") and finishes in the deaf echo of an obsessive vibration and a humming movement where the progressively muffled voice evokes a confused nightmare. The body is a capricious mechanism. In Fase, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is, for the most part, still exploring the mechanism and its workings. The capricious part comes later, although some distilled signs already indicate its potentiality.

 

Sitting on black stools in grey trousers, beige shirts and black boots, isolated in a square of light, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Michèle Anne De Mey launch themselves into a composition for arms (similar material is to be found later in the second movement of Rosas danst Rosas and in another register in Thierry De Mey’s Musiques de table ). The epicentre of the movement is a triangle between the neck and the shoulder-blades, there where the dry tension of toughness knots itself (demonstrated in their strained faces) and from where that same tension is released (in the relaxing of an arm). A rhythm of panic, meticulously structured, energetically contained within a corporal clock-face.

Violin Phase. THE solo. The music glides over the body like a bow over a violin. Cyclical sliding inscribed within a circle of light. The arms in a helicoid spiral pull the body into a pivot. The flow is interrupted by suspensions and retentions. The dress that envelopes Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker amplifies the circle and the spiral that returns into the body.

Concentration or eccentricity? Slipping/catching, looking for the rough patches that will stop the form being too smooth? Up against the vain risk of going round in circles, she dares mutiny. A mischievous gesture of the hand that lifts the dress up over the hips allowing a little bit of childhood into this (too) serious game of dance. And rage - on the last draw of the bow, suddenly the whole body is tension. Arms bent, fists closed, neck muscles taught and face resolute. The eyes are shut, seized by a deaf determination. A quickening that lasts few seconds before the circle closes in shadow. The body is exposed, left to the night.

 

Clapping music. A diversion, a warming up: the art of finishing a performance on a note that refutes austerity. It is a touch of humour dabbed on the palette, the winding down of a spring. Clapping hands in a percussive rhythm, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Michèle Anne De Mey lightly rebound from the ground, from feet flat on the floor to demi-point. The bend of their legs is reflected in their arms. Silhouetted in profile they play a game of measured elasticity that says that dance, from the point of view of two young women growing up, is a game of the most serious kind, but a game nevertheless.

 

Curiously, Fase, the first performance that ‘propelled’ Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker towards notoriety, cannot be encompassed by the cliché ‘energy to the limits of possibility’ that was ascribed to the new Flemish dance scene. It seems more to be articulating, with the minimum of affection, the art of physical expenditure. Fase, without a doubt is ‘in phase’ with the expectation of a dance that modestly (but with determination) knows how to assert itself, how to expose the body within the erratic mechanisms of modern times. Far from ethereal or theatrical beauty, far from the ‘high masses’ of dance, officiated by corps de ballets, albeit from the XX century, it is dance that has no narration to offer other than the energy that moves it, musicality and lines of flux.

 

Fase is a piece where each sequence, through the cyclical repetition that animates it, states the importance of the pivot. At the beginning of the eighties, the axis of dance was in the process of pivoting. In its rigorous simplicity Fase affirmed the evidence of the new rules of play for an art form where imbalance would cease to be improvised. A form for the future, in its infinite beginning.

 

(translation by Oonagh Duckworth)