Y

Invited by the Ruhrtriennale, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker will create a new choreography for Museum Folkwang in Essen.

Since 2015, De Keersmaeker has been moving dance from the black box into the white cube. This resulted in highly-acclaimed projects including Work/Travail/Arbeid (2015, Wiels, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, MoMA), Dark Red (2020-2022, Kolumba, Fondation Beyeler, Neue Nationalgalerie), and Forêt (2022, Louvre).

In Y, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker continues her research into how to embody abstraction, a question that informs all of her choreographic work. This time, she engages with works in the Folkwang Collection by artists including Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Caspar David Friedrich to explore the tension between figuration and abstraction through the lens of the human (dancing) body.

Inspired by Edouard Manet’s Portrait of Faure as Hamlet (1877), a painting acquired by the Folkwang museum in 1927, Y starts from Hamlet's question 'To be or not to be?' and the theme of doubt as it unfolds in Shakespeare’s tragedy.

Considering the numerous crises we face today, what can we do other than ask questions? Y (Why? Pourquoi? Warum?) addresses the state of uncertainty we currently find ourselves in by celebrating the power of questions. Asking questions allows us to become more aware, to change our perspective, and to challenge the status quo. In this sense, Y is an attempt to shake things up.

Y is a choreography for four dancers. This dialogue between dance, music, literature, and visual arts is realized together with De Keersmaeker’s long-time musical collaborator Alain Franco and Folkwang curator Antonina Krezdorn.