Choreography by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
A choreographic extract remodelled by the company De l’air dans l’art-SUAPS-université Paris-Sud-Orsay (Longjumeau-Orsay), coordinators and coaches Ghislaine Tétier, Philippe Chevalier, as part of the “Danse en amateur et repertoire” programme (2014) (a programme created to assist and promote amateur dancing).

The group
The company De l’air dans l’art is active within the Université Paris-Sud-Orsay, around the teacher and choreographer Ghislaine Tétier (in collaboration with Philippe Chevalier). It has also devoted time to revivals of works by Odile Duboc and Dominique Bagouet. It gives performances eight times a year. Its seventeen members involved in the current project are aged between eighteen and forty-three, and are of various levels, ranging from beginners to amateurs of a very advanced standard. The group shows great intellectual curiosity, in no way discouraged by an introduction to dance notation systems or by the study of compositional structures. It is also eager to learn about the cultural and historical context of works. 

The choreographer
Born in1960 in Belgium, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker dominates the European contemporary choreographic landscape. Her compositions with their heightened sense of energy are based on a very thorough analysis of the structures of musical writing. In 1983, the work Rosas danst Rosas was her first group composition (for four female dancers), taking to its limits the principles of repetitiveness. A landmark in the history of 20th century dance, this work is currently enjoying a marked upsurge of curiosity, in the wake of its revival by the choreographer herself, but also due to its easier access by amateurs, through the 30th anniversary of the company – fittingly called Rosas – of which it was, in its time, the first work. 

The artist
Exceptionally, an academic and Laban notator is leading the revival of the 2nd movement of Rosas danst Rosas. Laetitia Doat danced this work during her training period and has already transmitted it in a teaching context. In this instance, notation and interpretation work forms a dynamic ensemble, for a group that also has an academic vein. The increase in number of interpreters to more than the original quartet provides an opportunity to explore fascinating combinations, on the basis of six movements only, relentlessly renewed. The attention focuses on a work of breathing and anchoring of movement in depth, beyond the rhetorical externalisation of gesture. Hence the use of balls, sticks or flexible bars and somatic methods. 

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 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.

Source: The company Rosas 's website

More information : rosas.be

From live stage images to life in images, the  director and video artist Karim Zeriahen seems to have found the  shortest way. Since the beginning of the 90s, when he worked in close  relationship with choreographer Philippe Decouflé, he learned how to put  the art of stage in motion, contemporary dance most of the time. Karim  Zeriahen then starts a fruitful collaboration with Montpellier based  choreographer Mathilde Monnier. Stop, Videlilah, day of night, short  films adapted from her stage creations. Each time, Karim Zeriahen's   camera takes over the place with movement, the body language is not  frozen but magnified. Choreographer Herman Diephuis also joins this  gallery of dancing portraits. Documentaries on figures such like Albert  Maysles or Hubert de Givenchy and from Joe Dalessandro to Paul  Morrissey, he sets a signature, a camera always in action with  confidence.

Today the director goes further with a new  project and tracks the subtle movements of the body language beyond the  physical appearance. A collection of living portraits as unique pièces  reminding us of the master portraitists of renaissance. These living  natures consists in filming the subject in a certain amount of time,  almost still, with signs of respiration, eye blinks, as if it were  posing for a painting. They are then displayed on a flat screen with a  memory card. With this collection starting, Karim Zeriahen, with his  documentary and artist vision, interrogates himself about the virtual  world filled with images. By taking a pause, and his models with him, he  questions the way we look at things, the way we look at life.

Source: Philippe Noisette 

En savoir plus: www.karimzeriahen.com

Amateur Dance and Repertory is a companion program to amateur practice beyond the dance class and the technical learning phase. Intended for groups of amateur dancers, it opens a space of sharing for those who wish to deepen a practice and a knowledge of the dance in relation to its history.

Laurent Barré
Head of Research and Choreographic Directories
Anne-Christine Waibel
Research Assistant and Choreographic Directories
+33 (0)1 41 83 43 96
danse-amateur-repertoire@cnd.fr

Source: CN D

More information: https://www.cnd.fr/en/page/323-danse-en-amateur-et-repertoire-grant-programme