Four decades ago, a young dancer trained at Maurice Béjart's Mudra school and the Tisch School of the Arts in New York shook the international dance scene with a research exercise on the seemingly obvious relationship between movement and music. It was Phase. Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich (1982), a classic of the contemporary repertoire that marked the beginning of the solid career as a choreographer of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker (Mechelen, 1960), inspired by geometric and numerical patterns but also by nature and in social structures.
The following year Keersmaeker founded his company Rosas and created his iconic Rosas danst Rosas. Now, at 63 years old and already celebrating his golden anniversary with dance, he premieres in Catalonia, with the support of the Montaña Alta festival, his last tango with Bach, the seventh of his career: a solo of almost two hours to the sound of the Goldberg Variations... of the thirty, like that, at a stretch.
The Mercat de les Flors, a stage to which the Belgian artist has returned cyclically – “with Barcelona that continuity has been maintained” – tomorrow and Friday hosts this show created in 2020 that features a careful lighting design as a sculpting element of the space and which features pianist Alain Franco performing Bach's work on stage: a way of bringing together the historical approach to this music and a very contemporary approach to dance.
For forty years, Keersmaeker has worked with more than sixty pieces and his relationship with music has always been going to the heart of the work. “Bach was very present in me from the beginning – says the choreographer –, since I did Fase listening to the Brandenburg Concertos, although it later took me decades to choreograph them. The Goldbeg Variations, written at the end of her life, are based on simple songs where she structurally displays all of his knowledge, his ability on a technical and spiritual, almost cosmological level. And with a canon structure. In them he brings together his sense of movement, counterpoint, structure without being systematic... with that sense of being absolutely embedded in human existence. I even think going beyond the human experience,” she adds.
At 63 years old, the founder of the P.A.R.S. school. that has so influenced younger generations of dancers and choreographers, she continues to go on stage – “I have always considered myself a dancer before a choreographer” – and in this case, for two hours! “Yes, well, there are certain things that you better not do, you have to find a balance,” she warns.
“I thank God that I can still dance, although of course it requires a lot of daily discipline. It's not always easy to have it. The body – he indicates – is a place where one experiences the passage of time in the most direct way. And also the desire to dance, something that I have cultivated since I was a child: I carry it in my genes. I originated my relationship with the world through non-verbal communication and dance. Because dance has this festive aspect of celebrating. When people are happy they sing and dance. Do the stars dance? And the animals? Do the waves and clouds dance? Don't know..."
In any case, the Goldberg Variations are what they are and last as long as they last, and he chose them precisely to have a global structure and not compilations of small Bach pieces, as he already did with Partita 2, a duet with Boris Charmatz, or with the six Brandenburg Concertos.
“In Bach there is always movement, an invitation to move with classical forms of dance, the German, the Zarabande... the decision to do a solo was quite particular because I wanted to be intuitive, to dance with this music. Then there was the theme of counterpoint... it was like looking back, at the celebration of 50 years dedicated to dance and all those pieces that I have choreographed and danced myself.” The Goldberg Variations was a way to bring it all together, since there are many memories and quotes from her career, not only as a choreographer but as a dancer.
“Bach's music always has to do with harmony, with modeling space and time, that is, betting on beauty, with this desire to constantly seek beauty and harmony,” he warns. And I think that in the complicated world we live in and the challenges we have to face as humanity, it is more relevant than ever. That's why I think that dancing and singing Bach's music can be a modest attempt to try to heal, share and do things better, in a somewhat more harmonious way. We are facing problems of immense scale, and one often wonders what is the role of art and the performing arts, of dance and dance... This piece is a modest way of creating harmony and spending time together, of returning to our roots, an attempt to create a much more harmonious future.”
As for counterpoint, in this case she does not approach it in a way that forces her to follow a strategy that translates it literally. The viewer will find the counterpoint with his images of the past, "a visual counterpoint with the pianist, the lighting, my career as a dancer, memory... and working on underlying frameworks and strategies that are not literally contrapuntal."
Bach wrote more than two thousand pieces glorifying God, the unnameable. It's like a piece of infinity, Keersmaeker points out. It was music permeated by a great feeling of mortality, with the deaths that surrounded him (his wife, half of his children...). "With his music Bach celebrated life to celebrate death and the fact that we come from infinity and will return to it."
How does Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker organize herself to keep her spirit in shape?
"Being spiritually fit has a lot to do with clarity, it has to do with nature. Nature is at its core very spiritual. And dancing is potentially also part of that natural, spiritual expression. You keep observing nature, trying to live with it." it even though we are surrounded by technology and artificiality. In the way we eat, live, consume... you try to develop a certain intuition, which is something very important. The body develops a sense of openness, so that you feel receptive to this food. Being fit, yes, although I don't know if in Darwinian terms the most spiritual survive. But I like this idea of the survival of the spiritually strongest."
