Sobre Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

In 1980, after studying dance at Mudra School in Brussels and Tisch School of the Arts in New York, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (b. 1960) created Asch, her first choreographic work. Two years later came the premiere of Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich. De Keersmaeker established the dance company Rosas in Brussels in 1983, while creating the work Rosas danst Rosas. Since these breakthrough pieces, her choreography has been grounded in a rigorous and prolific exploration of the relationship between dance and music. She has created with Rosas a wide-ranging body of work engaging the musical structures and scores of several periods, from early music to contemporary and popular idioms. Her choreographic practice also draws formal principles from geometry, numerical patterns, the natural world, and social structures to offer a unique perspective on the body’s articulation in space and time.

From 1992 until 2007, Rosas was in residence in the Brussels opera house De Munt/La Monnaie. During this period, De Keersmaeker directed a number of operas and large ensemble pieces that have since been performed by repertoire companies worldwide. In Drumming (1998) and Rain (2001), both with Ictus contemporary music ensemble, complex geometric structures in point and counterpoint, together with the minimal motivic music of Steve Reich, created compelling group choreographies that remain iconic and definitive of Rosas as a dance company. Also during her time at La Monnaie, De Keersmaeker created Toccata (1993) to fugues and sonatas of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose music has continued to be a recurring thread in her work. Verklärte Nacht (both the 1995 version for fourteen dancers and the 2014 version for three) unfolded De Keersmaeker’s expressionist side, bringing the stormy narrative of Arnold Schönberg’s late romantic string sextet to life. She ventured into theater, text, and interdisciplinary performance with I said I (1999), In real time (2000), Kassandra – speaking in twelve voices (2004), and D’un soir un jour (2006). She highlighted the use of improvisation within choreography in tandem with jazz and Indian music in such pieces as Bitches Brew / Tacoma Narrows (2003, to the music of Miles Davis), and Raga for the Rainy Season / A Love Supreme (2005).

In 1995 De Keersmaeker established the school P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) in Brussels in association with De Munt/La Monnaie.

De Keersmaeker’s latest pieces mark a visible “stripping down” of her choreography to essential principles: spatial constraints of geometric pattern; bodily parameters of movement generation, from the utmost simplicity of walking to the fullest complexity of dancing; and close adherence to a score (musical or otherwise) for the choreographic writing. In 2013, De Keersmaeker returned to the music of Bach (performed live) in Partita 2, a duet between herself and Boris Charmatz. Also in 2013, she created Vortex Temporum to the spectral music piece of the same name written in 1996 by Gérard Grisey. Taking her penchant for writing movements from musical scores to an extreme level of sophistication, Vortex Temporum had a one-to-one ratio between the Rosas dancers and the live Ictus musicians, bringing the choreography and the music into meticulous dialogue. In 2015 this piece was adapted to a durational exhibition format at WIELS in Brussels under the title Work/Travail/Arbeid. Also in 2015, Rosas premiered Golden Hours (As you like it), using for the first time a body of text (Shakespeare’s As You Like It) as the score for movement, thus allowing the music (Brian Eno’s 1975 album Another Green World) to recede from strict framework to soft environment. Later that year, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker continued her research into the relationship between text and movement in Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke, a creation based on the eponymous text by Rainer Maria Rilke. At the beginning of 2017 she was invited by the Paris Opera to direct Mozart’s Così fan tutte. In August of the same year she creates Mitten wir im Leben sind / Bach 6 Cellosuiten with the cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras.

In A Choreographer’s Score, a three-volume monograph published by Rosas and Mercatorfonds, De Keersmaeker offers the performance theorist and musicologist Bojana Cvejić wide-ranging insights into the making of four early works as well as Drumming, Rain, En Atendant (2010) and Cesena (2011).

Digressão de Os Seis Concertos Brandeburgueses

12–15 SET 2018
Volksbühne Berlim

01–07 OUT 2018
Park Avenue Armory Nova Iorque

12–13 OUT 2018
Culturgest Lisboa

05–09 JAN 2019
De Munt / La Monnaie, with Kaaitheater Bruxelas

27–28 FEV 2019
Concertgebouw Bruges

08–14 MAR 2019
Palais Garnier, Opéra de Paris Paris

20–21 MAR 2019
Kunsthuis (Opera Gent), presented by Vooruit and Bijloke Gante

3–6 ABR 2019
deSingel Antuérpia

24–26 MAI 2019
Opéra de Lille Lille

12 JUN 2019
Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg Luxemburgo

25 Anos Culturgest

A Culturgest abre esta temporada no início de outubro, 25 anos depois da sua inauguração. Ao longo deste período, a Culturgest teve um papel significativo no desenvolvimento do tecido artístico que carateriza a cidade de Lisboa. Acompanhou o trabalho de encenadores e coreógrafos, produzindo novas criações e apresentando-as a um público crescente, encomendou obras a artistas visuais, organizando exposições individuais e coletivas, realizou concertos de música, do fado ao jazz, das músicas do mundo à música erudita, sempre com um olhar atento aos desenvolvimentos nacionais e internacionais. Ao longo dos anos, este programa artístico tem sido acompanhado por uma programação de conferências e debates e uma oferta diversificada de oficinas, visitas guiadas, encontros e espetáculos para escolas e famílias.

Para celebrar o seu 25.º aniversário, a Culturgest apresenta um programa com alguns dos nomes de maior destaque na criação e no pensamento contemporâneos. As festividades abrem com a estreia europeia do concerto Konoyo do músico canadiano Tim Hecker, acompanhado por um ensemble de música Gagaku do Japão, e continuam com o delicioso Bal Moderne, que regressa à Culturgest passados dez anos. Para um Mundo sem Fronteiras é o título da palestra que o pensador camaronês Achille Mbembe apresenta, numa das análises mais lúcidas e influentes do atual mundo pós-colonial e multicêntrico. As suas teses encontram ressonâncias no trabalho do artista plástico franco-argelino Kader Attia, que se apresenta na Culturgest com a sua primeira exposição individual em Portugal. Em simultâneo, apresenta-se o trabalho do artista venezuelano, residente em Lisboa, Juan Araujo. Um dos pontos altos do programa 25 anos Culturgest é, sem dúvida, a peça Os Seis Concertos Brandeburgueses, a maior coreografia de sempre de Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, executada por dezoito bailarinos da companhia Rosas e pelo ensemble de música barroca B’Rock, que interpreta a obra-prima de J.S. Bach ao vivo. Para finalizar, dois projetos participativos: Coletivo de Curadores, um grupo de colaboradores da Caixa Geral de Depósitos vai conceber e montar uma exposição a partir da coleção de arte contemporânea da CGD, com a ajuda da curadora Filipa Oliveira; de seguida a Culturgest convida organizações, escolas e associações locais para criar e manter 25 espaços verdes na zona envolvente do edifício-sede da CGD.