In EXIT ABOVE, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker returns once again to the simplest of movements, so familiar that we hardly stop to think about it: walking. Then she goes on to add complexity, using precise geometrical patterns. The starting point for the performance is the song Walking Blues by blues legend Robert Johnson. The journey then leads back to Der Wanderer by Schubert, the best-known singer-songwriter of the 19th century. Meskerem Mees, an upcoming Flemish songwriter with Ethiopian roots, performs other variations of ‘walking songs’, composed together with Jean-Marie Aerts, sound architect of TC Matic, and with dancer and guitarist Carlos Garbin. 

EXIT ABOVE explores the tension between marching together and stepping out, between romantic solitary ‘wandering’, and the political potential of a group of unarmed people walking together, the individual and the collective, the line and the circle. The act of walking runs counter to the hegemony of functionality and efficiency. It is an effort that produces nothing aside from the passing of time and the crossing of space.