From 1990 to 1994 Vincent Dunoyer was frequently in the spotlight as a dancer with Rosas and later went his own way as a choreographer. Over the last ten years he has built up a remarkably consistent oeuvre. His solos and duets repeatedly raise the same questions. Firstly the question of whether dance is born on the stage or is only truly complete when the spectator watches it. Dunoyer also wonders whether the experience of dance is defined by the performance or rather by the choreography. And lastly he wonders about the significance and role of the pictures, such as photos, that remain once the dance is over. The good thing is that Dunoyer does not ask these questions theoretically, but lets them arise out of the practice itself, out of the creation of performances, as if in passing, poetically. The questions Dunoyer asks do not exist outside his work, but in his work they are insistent.

 

Rosas provided support for Dunoyer’s work from the start of his solo career. In fact they produced every aspect of his latest choreographic piece, Sister. This is no coincidence, since Dunoyer is here digging into Rosas’ past. He created a solo for Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker in which he quite remarkably brings her face to face with her own choreographic history. Sister reprises the structure of Fase: in that work De Keersmaeker imposed the strict structure of the dance, which was tailor-made for her, on Michèle Anne De Mey, who followed her in the dance virtually like a doppelgänger. In Sister, Vincent Dunoyer reverses the roles. He dances a piece of choreography, and De Keersmaeker follows. The material used in this solo is by no means random, however. Dunoyer asked Fumiyo Ikeda, who has experienced just about the whole of Rosas’ history, to act out scenes from past performances. Mirjam Devriendt then took photos of them. He then took thirty of these photos to 31 Rosas dancers and ex-dancers, asking them to devise a new piece of choreography linking the poses in two of the photos. He them stuck these short dance sequences back together like a game of consequences (cadavre exquis in French, and this was the title of his previous piece, in which he did something similar, but with pictures from his own work). This gave rise to a singular new work. One extremely long and complex phrase of movement summarises the experiences of 30 dancers, the history of the company and that of Dunoyer himself. This also makes the work highly emotionally charged. The contribution the dancers made to the Rosas "idiom" in their performances and choreographic inventions shines through at every point. Sister is the story of the complex relationship between a choreographer who is committed to each work, and the dancers who participated in their creation. This makes it both a tribute to and a reflection on the oeuvre.

 

Sister shows this quite clearly. First we see the photos of Ikeda, which form the backbone of the dance. This is followed by a film in which Pere Pladevall demonstrates his dance episode. When the film fades out, Dunoyer performs this same passage against brilliant backlighting, as a silhouette. This is followed immediately by the other dancers’ pieces, interpreted by Dunoyer. Two of them did not stick to the assignment. Nicole Balm’s contribution is a pertinent text recorded on tape about bygone memories which not even photos can bring back to life. In a film, Kitty Kortes Lynch sings a song about the jealousy between sisters. Dunoyer presents this choreography in a precise and restrained manner: he allows the material to speak for itself. But not De Keersmaeker. When she enters the stage the lights go up. All this material, which once originated from her and now returns to her via a long round trip, she now draws entirely towards herself. By placing a stronger accent here, and adding a yearning facial expression there, out of this whimsical choreography she nevertheless creates a sort of dance character, and displays her dancing pleasure. Until the point when this is all followed by a "coup de théâtre" that reminds us once again how many layers of memory are accumulated here.