![]() ![]() As the dancers' hair swings around their heads, their arms reach out and retract like pistons, and their faces take on a frazzled cast. This is as eventful as it's going to get.Īt once half-hynotised and hyper-receptive, we move into part two, which seems to be an allegory of industrial process, and of the social and domestic activities imposed on women. ![]() To begin with you expect some kind of development, but then you realise that this is it. Occasionally, like starlings on a wire, the dancers gaze intently before them. Arms are raised, hands touched to hair, rises initiated and abandoned with a soft collapse of limbs. Bodies roll from side to side like bolts of cloth, drawing the loose drapery of their costumes with them. For at least 20 minutes, there is no music, just the breathing of the performers as they execute a series of quotidian gestures. Behind them are stacked the chairs without which no 1980s contemporary dance work is complete. They are serious-looking women with civilian haircuts, wearing loose grey tops and skirts and hideous, brown, utilitarian shoes. The piece starts with four female dancers, one of them De Keersmaeker, lying on the stage. De Keersmaeker and her company have revived both pieces many times in the quarter century since their creation, but Rosas Danst Rosas remains the more confrontational of the two, retaining its considerable power to baffle, frustrate and intrigue. Fase was followed the same year by Rosas Danst Rosas, which applied the same repetitive, minimalist style to music by Thierry de May and Peter Vermeersch. Fase, her first piece, used repetition to almost hallucinatory effect, as she and another female dancer whirled and spun in interlocking patterns to a shimmering score by Steve Reich. T he Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker launched her company, Rosas, in 1983, and won immediate attention for her musicality and her austere, pure dance minimalism. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |