The moving body, a celebration to humanity

In conversation with ANNE TERESA DE KEERSMAEKER, creator of Y in collaboration with Alain Franco, Museum Folkwang and Ruhrtriennale. Choreographer, dancer and founder of Rosas. The interview is conducted by Anita van Dolen, curator dance of the festival.

In the 45 years since you established Rosas, you’ve created 65 works for theatre spaces and museums. From the black box into the white cube, why is it important for you to create work for the museum? What does it mean for your artistic practice?

Over time, visual art became more important to me. This journey started with an invitation to perform Violin Phase at MoMA in New York in 2011, followed by the presentation of Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich at London’s Tate Modern in 2012. Subsequently, WIELS in Brussels invited me to reimagine the dance production Vortex Temporum for the museum space or white cube. 

When you approach choreography as organizing movement in time and space, you quickly discover that many aspects are different in the museum context:  the frontality of the theatre is replaced with a multifocal approach; details become more visible; it calls into question temporal notions such as duration, linearity, beginnings and endings; and the relationship between performers and spectators is different. It’s a different experience in terms of sound and visual perception. For me, as a choreographer, and for the dancers and the audience, this opens up many new perspectives. Museums offer a more liquid space for everybody involved. The presence of daylight and the absence of strict boundaries between the stage and the audience, creates a much freer exchange.

In response to the invitations I received from museums, I explored various approaches, from transforming a work created for the black box into a version for the white cube, to interacting with an existing exhibition or a specific collection, of sculptures (Fondation Beyeler, Basel) or (historical) paintings (Louvre, Paris). In collaboration with Museum Folkwang and Ruhrtriennale, we have, for the first time, curated an exhibition, which consists of paintings, sculptures, and photography. The project starts from Portrait de Faure dans le rôle d'Hamlet (Portrait of Faure as Hamlet, 1877) by Édouard Manet and moves on to the paintings Prometheus Bound (1952) by Barnett Newman, Woman in front of the Setting Sun (dated around 1818) by Caspar David Friedrich, and Untitled (White, Pink and Mustard) (1954) by Mark Rothko. We will bring these paintings together, and blend figuration and abstraction, in an exhibition spanning all nine rooms of the temporary exhibition hall at Museum Folkwang. This setup is incredibly inspiring, and we are currently developing a trajectory that combines paintings, sculptures, movement, dance, and sound. I work together with musician and composer Alain Franco, who also accompanied me at the Louvre. This partnership allows me to continue developing my own practice in relation to the art form that has been my most significant partner for many years: music.

Looking at the paintings and selecting, did the choreography come to mind directly? How did you start to work in the studio with the dancers?

After carrying out extensive research into the collection of Museum Folkwang and selecting key works, we transitioned into the dance studio, where we recreated the museum space with copies of the paintings. There, we work meticulously, step by step, thought by thought, to develop a framework based on energetic principles inspired by Eastern philosophy and geometrical patterns. We analyze artworks, music, movement, and text from these perspectives. Different elements that engage the eye and the ear are brought together. How do they interact and exchange qualities? This can seem obscure, but for me it is extremely concrete. 

Y is the title of your newest creation - what does it refer to?

Y primarily refers to the idea of questions. In these turbulent and complex times, I believe that asking questions is one of the few actions we can and must persist in. It is our moral and ethical duty to do so. That’s why we chose the play Hamlet as our starting point. It opens with the famous question ‘To be or not to be?’. Profound questions often lack clear, definitive answers. It’s imperative to keep asking them. This persistence is vital because it keeps us engaged with the complexities of our world. One concern we face today is the tendency to offer simplistic answers to deeply complex issues. As artists and citizens, it’s understandable that we often feel overwhelmed and powerless in the face of this complex reality. However, it’s in these moments that our responsibility becomes clear: to resist the urge to reduce complex realities to simple narratives.

Do you think the moving body can play an important role in this complexity of questions and answers?

Ultimately, I believe that dance is the most contemporary of all arts because what is more present and contemporary than the body?  It is the ‘house’ in which we wake up and the medium through which we experience the world in the most direct way. To a certain extent, the moving body is a celebration of humanity: it brings together the mechanical, social, ritual, emotional, and spiritual. In essence, it’s about organizing embodied energy along two fundamental axes, the vertical (control of the spine) and the horizontal (cf. Hamlet “To sleep, to die”)”.

What is the role of music in this creation?

Music has always been my first partner. In the realm of the visual arts, the use of sound and music is always a challenge. Museums, like churches, traditionally are silent places. However, the presence of sound can profoundly change our perception of things, and what we see can also transform our experience of what we hear. In that sense, movement and sound are intertwined. How do they influence each other? Sound is an organization of time, like our heartbeat and breathing are organizations of time, inside our bodies. Rhythm, pulse and cyclical patterns, in shorter and longer cycles or waves, are integral parts of the body and of our perception as human beings, because we are part of nature. Sound is also embodied energy.