GO AHEAD AND GET CAUGHT IN RAIN
Rosas back in town at Place des Arts with piece that premièred in 2001
Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is squarely among those members of Europe’s avant-garde dance world capable of attracting large audiences to big houses. Her famous Brussels-based company Rosas is back at Place des Arts next month in a 70-minute work called Rain that had its première in 2001. Ten years later, Rain entered the repertory of that great tutu company, the Paris Opera Ballet, where it had both popular and critical success.
“I think that for the performers and spectators, it’s a very life-affirming piece, very energetic,” Rosas member Jakub Truszkowski said in a phone interview from Paris, where he was teaching another De Keersmaeker work at the Paris Opera Ballet. “The music takes you on a kind of trans journey. I have great memories of performing this piece.”
Indeed, Truszkowski, who also taught Rain to the Paris company, was among Rain’s original cast and to some extent contributed to its creation.
“Rain was created extremely quickly, in about eight weeks. Some of the sections already existed in a previous (De Keersmaeker) piece, In Real Time. That piece was about three hours long with dance, jazz music, theatre and text altogether,” he said.
Rain borrowed some movement sections from In Real Time, which were then subjected to De Keersmaeker’s method of creation at the time.
“She would come with a twominute movement phrase based on her favourite special pattern, the Fibonacci spiral,” Truszkowski said, referring to a circular configuration that follows a ratio known as the golden mean.
“She would teach the phrase to
the dancers, who were all given tasks of creating transformations of that phrase.
“In Rain, she wanted two different phrases. One was a women’s phrase. Then she asked me to create a counter-phrase, which would become the men’s phrase.”
Truszkowski’s answer was to look for the opposite of the given movement, changing either its direction in space or its scale or the part of the body.
All of the choreography evolved out of the women’s and men’s initial phrases. The moves were co-ordinated to a soundscape called Music for 18 Musicians, by American minimalist composer Steve Reich, who characteristically starts with a simple musical phrase that grows more and more elaborate harmonically and rhythmically.
“Anne Teresa often starts from very geometric, mathematical (material) — one might even say cold and lifeless (material),” Truszkowski said.
Some Montrealers might have applied that description to De Keersmaeker’s groundbreaking 1981 work Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, which she herself performed at Usine C in 2008. At times, Fase was almost obsessive in its minimalist use of repetitive gestures, but its novelty made De Keersmaeker an avant-garde choreographer to watch at 21. In May, De Keersmaeker is performing Fase with Tale Dolven during a tour of Japan, China and Taiwan.
Two years after Fase’s première, she founded Rosas. Then in 1995, she opened her contemporary dance school PARTS, which Truszkowski entered two years later following an audition in his native Poland where he had chanced upon a typewritten notice at his ballet school that spoke about auditions at a littleknown Brussels school.
Truszkowski performed with Rosas off and on until last year, when he began concentrating on staging De Keersmaeker’s works for other companies. He said that watching De Keersmaeker’s performances over the years, he never thought they were dry.
“I find that she uses those structures and repetitions as a tool for bringing something very human. The moment of exhaustion, of dealing with complex physical material … something very human happens,” he said. “There’s also a kind of group support, of being connected to everyone. It’s a struggle individually and as a group.”
De Keersmaeker showed indisputable humanity in two other works seen in Montreal. In 2006, she performed Once, a solo full of wit, personality and seduction — it was virtually one long, slow striptease. In 2012, Rosas came with a masterwork called En attendant, a group piece that unfolded while the stage lights slowly and continuously dimmed to a dark gloom. (The world première had taken place outdoors so the setting sun could act as a natural lighting engineer.) The struggle between light and dark was a moving metaphor for life edging relentlessly toward death.
In quite a different way, Rain also relies on lighting to change and enliven the mood as the six female and four male dancers form lines and run in circles, walking, running, leaping as the work progresses. Far from gloomy, Rain’s lighting effects are pastel colourful to complement the exuberance of the dancers’ moves.
“Physically, it’s very demanding,” Truszkowski said. “You reach the limits of your physicality — it’s challenging, but also very enjoyable. You enter a state of different perception.”
Although the movements in pieces like Fase and Rain have as little narrative quality as the music that accompanies them, De Keersmaeker is fully capable of dance narration — all she needs is the right material. In 2015, she created Golden Hours, a three-hour dance adaptation — without music — of Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It. Performed that year at the Montpellier Dance Festival in France, Golden Hours presented a large cast of Shakespearean characters criss-crossing an immense outdoor stage. De Keersmaeker had created an entire special movement vocabulary to translate Shakespeare’s words into gestures. The work was long, difficult to follow and something of a trial toward the end, but as sheer achievement, it was a marvel.
Montreal choreographer Ginette Laurin has teamed with Belgian choreographer Jens van Daele to create Tierra, a contemporary work for five dancers that deals with our planet. Perhaps to emphasize the dire environmental problems facing us, two live drummers, Alexandra Bellon and Richard van Kruysdijk, will beat the message home. Video photographer Jessica van Rueschen adds her visual punch. Tuesday to April 29 at 8 p.m. at Cinquième Salle of Place des Arts. Tickets cost $25.65. Call 514-842-2112 or visit placedesarts.com.
Another veteran Montreal contemporary choreographer, Paul-André Fortier, is presenting the latest in his series of outdoor solos, this time performed by dancer Naishi Wang. The 30-minute work, called 15 X La Nuit, is staged in the evening amid the urban lights of downtown Montreal as a way of emphasizing our relation to our habitat. It runs until May 6 at 9 p.m., rain or shine, at Place des Festivals, on the corner of Jeanne-Mance and Ste-Catherine streets. Spectators find their own vantage point. This is a free show.