ABSTRACT
In 1990, Rosas, the Belgian dance company led by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, created Stella: A Woman's Piece, a dance theatre piece which initiated a sequence of closely related works, Achterland (1990) and Erts (1992), as well as drew on the earlier Ottone, Ottone (1988), based on Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea. It may be argued that more mixed or hybridized forms like this act as a bid to undo the power that comes with exclusiveness, whether that of authorial origins or gender categories and identities. This chapter focuses on dramaturgical conception than on choreographical execution, inflects this notion of exclusiveness, by exploring the interpretative ramifications of the recycled source material and by treating the debate over Beyonce's appropriation of Achterland as well as Rosas's inaugural production, Rosas danst Rosas (1983). Alastair Macaulay seems to question the art value of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's appropriation of everyday actions, as well as Beyonce Knowles's reappropriation of those same actions.
