In the early Eighties, when the artistic climate allowed dance to gain ever greater prominence, 20-year-old Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker presented her very first piece, Asch. A former pupil of MUDRA, the school founded by Maurice Béjart, she was to give an entirely new orientation to dance in Flanders. In 1981, she went to study at the New York Tisch School of the Arts, where she had first-hand contact with American post-modern dance.

That influence was obvious in her second work, Fase, four movements to the music of Steve Reich, from 1982, which was extremely well received. In 1983, as a logical result, De Keersmaeker founded her own dance company, Rosas, which presented Rosas danst Rosas. Once again, the music - by Thierry De Mey and Peter Vermeersch, composed in conjunction with the creation of the choreography - was the driving force behind the dance. That special relationship between dance and music was to become a constant in Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's work.

From Rosas danst Rosas on, De Keersmaeker's activity has been consistent, yet always unexpected. During the first years she could count on the support of Hugo De Greef, the director of Kaaitheater in Brussels. Several extremely varied productions followed one another in quick succession: elegant Elena's Aria in 1984; Bartók / Aantekeningen in 1986; the play Verkommenes Ufer / Medeamaterial / Landschaft mit Argonauten in 1987 and, the same year, Mikrokosmos-Monument Selbstporträt mit Reich und Riley (und Chopin ist auch dabei)/In zart fliessender Bewegung-Quatuor Nr. 4.

Ottone, Ottone, from 1988, was her first dance production for a large stage. The taut lines of the preceding pieces gave way to a new aesthetic concept with a distinctly baroque feel. In 1990 De Keersmaeker created Stella, a 'women's piece' in which her personal way of working with dancers reached a top. The same year Achterland was also presented. Its score, by Györgi Ligeti and Eugène Ysaÿe, was performed live on stage. The musicians were visually integrated in the scenography and the dancers took their presence into account.

A similar bond with the music was to be found in ERTS, from 1992, in which the use of videotapes was another important element. Moreover, because the music was played live, ERTS became a truly large-scale production. This can partly be explained by the fact that in 1992, on invitation of Bernard Foccroulle, Rosas was to start its residency at the Belgian national opera La Monnaie Theatre in Brussels. In this new setting, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker set herself three goals: to intensify even more the link between dance and music, to establish a repertoire, and to create a new dance school in Belgium, to fill the gap left by MUDRA's disappearance from Brussels in 1988.

By that time Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's work had received full recognition, nationally as well as internationally. In 1982 she was invited to premiere her Mozart / Concert Aria's - Un Moto di Gioia in the famed "Cour d'Honneur" of the Avignon Festival. The same year Peter Greenaway shot Rosa, a choreography specifically created for the screen, in the foyer of the Ghent Opera House. In 1993, the dance programme of the Holland Festival was entirely dedicated to De Keersmaeker, with several revivals and the premiere of Toccata.

Kinok, created in collaboration with Thierry De Mey and the Ictus ensemble, was presented at KunstenFESTIVALdesArts in 1994. It was the forerunner of Amor constante más allá de la muerte, a musically complex and virtuoso performed choreography that premiered the same year. Amor Constante is a performance that clearly marks the evolution in De Keersmaeker's dance. Out of a dance vocabulary entirely designed to suit her own body the choreographer developed an idiom closely linked to specific performers. The strength of this dance lay in the association of a very personal, impetuous vocabulary and a particularly powerful structure. As the company expanded the choreographic language acquired an ever more classically rooted and exceptionally homogeneous vocabulary.

In 1995 De Keersmaeker created Verklärte Nacht for the Schönberg programme Erwartung / Verklärte Nacht at La Monnaie. The following year, several elements from this production were further developed in Woud, three movements to the music of Berg, Schönberg and Wagner. Also in 1995 Rosas and La Monnaie set up the international educational project P.A.R.T.S., Performing Arts Research and Training Studios, directed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. In the course of its three-year curriculum the students are trained in all major dance techniques. But this is a dance school with a difference, as it also pays close attention to music and theatre, and aims to provide a sound intellectual background.

At the end of 1997 De Keersmaeker once again gave her love of music free rein in Just Before, comprising works of Magnus Lindberg, John Cage, Yannis Xenakis, Steve Reich, Pierre Bartholomée, and Thierry De Mey. In 1998 she built further on this musical trend in two different ways. She directed her first opera, Bartók's Blue-Beard's Castle, and in Drumming she once again used Steve Reich's music as the foundation of a powerful, highly energetic and vigorously danced choreography.

A more important aspect of Just Before was the association of dance and text. Tippeke, the shortfilm with which Woud opened, was perhaps a first step in this direction. In this film De Keersmaeker wanders through the woods while reciting a nursery rhyme. As is often done in such poems she links specific movements to key words in the text. Just Before was a first major stage in the exploration of the joining of text and dance, sense and movement, language and the body. In this study Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker was assisted by her sister, Jolente, a member of the theatre company STAN.

Three more stages are planned for the future. In March 1999 a female dancer from Rosas and an actor from STAN perform together in Heiner Müller's Quartett, followed in May 1999 by I said I, a choreography studying in more depth the relationship between text and movement through Peter Handke's text Selbstbezichtigung (Self-Accusation). In the year 2000 the work culminates in In Real Time, a large-scale project in which all Rosas dancers, all STAN actors and the musicians of the jazz band Aka Moon are gathered on stage.

2001 saw the return to pure dance, with Rain, set to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 musicians. Later that year, Small hands (out of the lie of no) meant the return to intimacy. It’s an choreography danced by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Cynthia Loemij, on an oval stage surrounded by the audience.

In 2001-2002 Rosas celebrated its 20th birthday, and its 10 years as company in residence at the Monnaie theatre, the Belgian national opera in Brussels. Many events took place: the “text pieces” were revived, there was a festive Repertory Evening, repeat performances with live music of Drumming and Rain, and a big new creation: (but if a look should) April me. In November 2002, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker danced her second solo after Violin Phase, part of Fase: Once, set to Joan Baez’ In Concert Part 2 from 1963. The festivities around twenty years of Rosas were conluded by the publication of a 336 page book about Rosas and a big retrospective exhibition in the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts.
2003 introduced a new evolution in the Rosas repertoire with the piece Bitches Brew / Tacoma Narrows which introduced improvisation on scene in the Rosas repertoire. Later that same year, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker created Desh with Marion Ballester.

2004 marked a new stage in the cooperation between Anne Teresa and her sister Jolente in the theatre piece Kassandra. In 2005 Desh was expanded into a full evening performance with Salva Sanchis, and just as in Raga for the Rainy Season / A Love Supreme, it confronted and united Indian and jazz music.
The 2006 creation, D’un soir un jour, introduced Claude Debussy in the already long list of musical inspiration sources and also featured a new composition commisioned for Rosas: Dance Figures by George Benjamin.
Later on that year a second repertory evening is created: Bartok / Beethoven / Schoenberg- Repertory Evening revives 3 key pieces of De Keersmaekers oeuvre. In 2006 the Brooklyn Acadamy of Music (BAM), the prestigious New York arts centre celebrates Steve Reichs 70th birthday. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is invited to open the fesival. 

In 2006 a first collaboration is set up with visual artist Ann Veronica Janssens: Keeping Still  is a ‘solo with partner’ for De Keersmaeker, a dialogue with Janssens’ sensory and spatial light sculptures. In 2008 De Keersmaeker and pianist / composer Alain Franco choose to work with the music of J.S. Bach, A. Webern and A. Schönberg and they create Zeitung, In this work music and dance do not meet on the basis of any similarity or parallel, but on the intersection of the two. The Song (2009) is a close collaboration with Ann Veronica Janssens and Michel François. Ten dancers – nine men and one woman – stand on a stage stripped to the elementary constituents of theatre: light, sound and movement. Although The Beatles’ White Album is an underlying framework for this performance, The Song is performed mostly in silence.

In February 2010 she creates 3Abschied with Jérôme Bel. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is currently working on a new creation for nine Rosas dancers that will premiere in July 2010.