The Estación Alta festival has managed to turn Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's visit to Barcelona and her two-hour solo on Bach's Goldberg Variations into an event. What a priori was a show for connoisseurs of the Belgian choreographer and the recent history of contemporary dance ended up being a magnet that, on the day of its Catalan premiere, drew a very heterogeneous audience to the Mercat de les Flors, lovers of the culture that they trust by default in what the Girona performing arts competition programs.
What, for example, brought the actor Jordi Bosch to the Barcelona dance house? Was it Bach? Was it De Keersmaeker? "What does it bring me? Well, it's a High Season show and you have to go see them!", responded jubilantly the recent Butaca de Teatro winner for his role in Tots eren fills meus. They made more than one accidental tourist want to warn about the self-absorbed nature that the piece could possibly have... and how infallible the Goldberg Variations are for entering into daydreams, since they would have precisely been commissioned by Count Kaiserling to Bach to entertain his dreams. sleepless nights.
However, with the exception of a dozen desertions throughout the almost two hours of the show, the work satisfied everyone and everyone. De Keersmaeker saw her wish fulfilled by dancing at the Mercat with this solo created for her sixtieth birthday, in 2020, as a vital journey. He wanted to return with it to a square that has been faithful to him since the Barcelona public fell in love with his Rosas danst Rosas (1983), although more for its choreographic vision than for its quality as a performer. What could be expected from his subtle improvisation to the tune of Bach?
It could be a poetic game that emanated from mathematics, in tune with his research of yesteryear. Or a reflection that led to a mantra in the heat of the masterpiece of the Leipzig genius. The Belgian Alain Franco, also an extraordinary piano musician, would link the initial aria with the thirty subsequent variations in a very personal way, in a recital that alone would earn warm applause.
De Keersmaeker, however, would play at tracing concentric geometric figures on the floor of the stage, just as he did in Mitten wir im Leben sind (2017), a previous adventure with Bach and the Cello Suites, these performed by Jean-Guihen Queyras on stage. But now he has no intention of following them in his footsteps, on the contrary, ignoring them, laying the foundations of a free relationship with respect to the musical piece and its solid structure. He was not going to have anything to do with what so many other choreographers, starting with Steve Paxton, had done with the Goldberg Variations. It would be more of an intuitive wandering around the process of creation/reaction to music itself.
The most capricious De Keersmaeker, perhaps the most honest, would spin, roll, play, love... in a kind of artistic statement: "guys, that's what the body wants to do"; or "that's what my body wanted to do at other times in life", as Travolta winks, dressed in a champagne-colored tracksuit. If she begins dressed in transparent black, evoking aesthetics of youth, she ends up in sequined shorts that mock the passing of the years and also that seriousness that often permeates the rituals of this artist.
Alone on the stage, with a window reflecting all the light, it seems at times that hers is an exploratory baroque dance, in spontaneous connection with the dances that Bach composes. A simple journey towards the collective memory contained in the music of the European past. And that she names from Brussels, without going any further, since in 1983 she founded her company there.
And have more years.
