Rosas

The exhibition Sub Rosa was realized in the context of the 164VANVOLXEM Festival, celebrating the restaging of Rosas danst Rosas by an entirely new cast at Rosas Performance Space in February 2026. It was on view at Rosas Studio 4 from January 30 to February 22, 2026.

The term ‘sub rosa’ refers to what is hidden, remains under the radar. The exhibition brings together a unique selection of photographs, notes, drawings, documents, film and video kept in the Rosas archive. It aims to situate Rosas danst Rosas within the context of Brussels in the 1980s, and to provide insight into the structure of the work, its movement vocabulary, what inspired the dance and the music, and how they came into being.

Rosas danst Rosas was not only a seminal work for Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and the dance company Rosas, which was established around the same time, but also for the field of dance in Belgium and internationally. Since its premiere at Kaaitheater festival in 1983, it was danced by more than thirty performers, part of five generations of Rosas dancers. The choreographic work was presented almost five hundred times in thirty-five countries. As a result, multiple generations of spectators were able to experience it live, all across the world.

In addition, in its forty-year history, the choreography has been adapted and transmitted in various other forms and formats. In 1997, the film adaptation of Rosas danst Rosas by Thierry De Mey was immediately picked up by international film festivals, received multiple prestigious awards, and became a benchmark for the field of dance film. In 2012, A Choreographer’s Score opened up some of the inner workings of Fase, Rosas danst Rosas, Elena’s Aria and Bartók. This publication made De Keersmaeker’s poetics and choreographic strategies available for the first time, to dancers, scholars, and the general public alike. The Re:Rosas! The fABULEUS Rosas Remix Project (2013) was equally innovative for how it democratized access to the methodology behind the creation of the movement vocabulary of the second movement of Rosas danst Rosas in an open-source, participatory format, accessible to all across the internet. To this day, dancers from around the world contribute to the online platform dedicated to this project, which includes nearly 700 clips. It is safe to say that there was not only a real urgency to Rosas danst Rosas when it was first danced by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Adriana Borriello, Michèle Anne De Mey and Fumiyo Ikeda in the early 1980s, but that the work manages to maintain its ground-breaking role to this day.