ABSTRACT
Prior to establishing the ground for the (already realized) three-volume series titled A Choreographer’s Score, the initial idea for the project of setting Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreographies into scores was sparked by a question De Keersmaeker addressed to me. I’ll paraphrase: “I am reviving my four early works in which I myself will dance for the last time. Is this an occasion to write these choreographies down?” Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich (1982), Rosas danst Rosas (1983), Elena’s Aria (1984), and Bartók/Mikrokosmos (originally called Mikrokosmos, 1987) were to be performed in a row for the rst time, thus enabling a certain genealogical insight into four distinct strands in the substantial oeuvre of De Keersmaeker and her dance company Rosas, each of which stems from these four “early works.”1 Fase stands out as a programmatic manifesto of post-minimalist, post-Judson formal-abstract “concert of dance.”2 Apart from blending daily movements and gestures and putatively “pure” dancing into an idiom emblematic of Rosas in the 1980s, Rosas danst Rosas introduces a novel synthesis of rigorous formal-structural composition and dramaturgical development of an evening-long piece into European dance. Elena’s Aria points to the theatrical strain close to Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater, and the choreography to Bartók’s String Quartet no. 4 unravels De Keersmaeker’s most distinctive contribution to contemporary dance: a serious choreographic commitment to modern and contemporary music in times when the structural partnering between dance and music is no longer self-evident. Beyond the self-reective quest of coherence in a single oeuvre, the retrospective inquiry intended to explore De Keersmaeker’s legacy of advancing four seminal directions in European contemporary dance (rigorous choreographic formalism, structural relationship to music, a method of dramatization and theatrical expression). This would be my rationale for the choreographer’s primary motivation for initiating this project.
