dance video of the day - Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker

Submitted by Susan Miller on Sat, 03/29/2008 - 18:08.

Grosse Fuge excerpt from Kinok

Beethoven's  Grosse Fugue  will never be the same for me after I saw this entire work perfomed live at Mershon Auditorium back in the 1990s.

This woman gets the architecture of music and dance. Her dancers get it, too. The stage at Mershon was raked. This is an old theatrical architecture. Now audience's sit in a raked auditorium rather than having the dancers and actors work on a slanted surface. This, by the way, is the explanation for upstage and downstage - they literally were up and down.  So in this bit in the film, when you see the dancers roll downstage, they were literaly rolling downstage toward the audience.

Rosas: choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker

more work by de Keersmaeker

Rain

Ottone, Ottone

FASE, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich

And a longer work for film Rosas danst Rosas

Oh if we could only see these European choreographers here...

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phase patterns

Submitted by Jeff Schuler on Sun, 03/30/2008 - 13:49.

I'm a big Steve Reich fan, so I went straight to de Keersmaeker's FASE.

The music is from Reich's Piano Phase composition ~ when he transitioned from playing tape recordings out of phase with each other to have live musicians perform the same function, changing speed to bring an identical melodic line in and out of phase.

You know if anyone's replicated that in dance?

When I saw the dancers' shadows, I started thinking it might be fun to play with back-projected video of their silhouettes, appearing first as their shadows, then having dancer and shadow come out of phase, or changing the movement entirely, (shadow becoming a partner or playing another dancer role...)

Then I saw how de Keersmaeker did that just with lighting to overlay the pair's shadows and show difference in phase between the two. Very nice! I'd like to see more of the piece...