Like Pina Bausch, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker has an affinity for the dramatic and overwrought -- Mark Morris even dubbed her "Anne Teresa de Tearjerker." However, we cannot overlook the rigor with which she approaches form. Her pattern-making has been compared...
[more]Like Pina Bausch, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker has an affinity for the dramatic and overwrought -- Mark Morris even dubbed her "Anne Teresa de Tearjerker." However, we cannot overlook the rigor with which she approaches form. Her pattern-making has been compared to that of such Minimalists as Laura Dean and Lucinda Childs -- her style is always tight, and often fast.
De Keersmaeker attended MUDRA, Maurice Bajart's school in Brussels, where she created "Asch," her first piece, in 1980. She went on to attend New York University's Tisch School of the Arts for a year, an experience that steeped her in the American Postmodern dance tradition.
It was in New York that she unveiled "Fase," a series of four movements that were set, like so many dance pieces to come, to the austere music of Steve Reich. When it premiered in Belgium, it received praise for the expressiveness it captured within its hypnotizing, syncopated structure. Riding the wave of good reviews, de Keersmaeker assembled an all-female company, Rosas, which was officially inaugurated into the dance world with the piece, "Rosas danst Rosas," in 1983.
Of her formalist approach she once stated, "Of all the arts, music is for me the most important thing in life." That music takes precedence over choreography or theater is surprising, but music is both a grounding force for de Keersmaeker's dances and the springboard from which they ascend. Pieces such as 1988's "Achterland" exemplify this musical centrality, as the work incorporates live musicians into the scenery.
Heterosexual love, in all its thwarted, destructive, and powerful glory, is a favorite topic of de Keersmaeker's. She tackled gender issues from the very start by choosing an all-female company; later, men in suits joined her high-heeled women onstage, in a vision again reminiscent of Pina Bausch.
But while her gender plays follow Bausch's model, de Keersmaeker is more explicit. Where Bausch has inscribed Busby Berkeley-inspired fantasias of gender relations, de Keersmaeker has composed treatises; in "Elena's Aria," dancers read passages from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Brecht about the woes of love. These dances definitely influenced the proliferation of the "relationship pieces" (the modern dance version of ballet's pas de deux) that would follow in the 1990s.
On the whole, de Keersmaeker's synthesis of athleticism, drama, and formal abstraction in her early dances, coupled with her later use of film and spoken text, has grown into a style that has impacted dance companies such as London's DV8 Physical Theatre, Montreal's LaLaLa Humansteps and O Vertigo Danse, and San Francisco's Kneejerk Dance Company. As a "Cultural Ambassador of Flanders," de Keersmaeker will keep growing as an artist of international influence.
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