The Six Brandenburg Concertos

For almost forty years Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has been fascinated by Bach. In 1980, when she made her debut and was working on her solo dance piece Violin Phase, the music that could

be heard in her rehearsal studio wasn’t only Steve Reich’s. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos were also playing. ‘His music carries movement within it,’ De Keersmaeker says, speaking about her long love for Bach. She was captivated by the way he combines immense abstraction with a concrete, corporeal and transcendent dimension. ‘Architecture in movement’ is her term for Bach’s works. ‘A kind of ordered chaos or chaotic order is what rules Bach’s music,’ she says. ‘His music never sounds forced, of course, but always natural and immensely human. It seems as if this cosmic order is part of the genetic code of Bach’s mind.’

Just as in previous productions, such as Vortex Temporum (Holland Festival 2014) and Mitten wir im Lebensind/Bach6Cellosuiten (2017), Keersmaeker uses the musical score as a blueprint for the dance. In this production, also, the choreography is tied, measure by measure and with the greatest precision, to The Six Brandenburg Concertos. The foundation of the choreography is a geometric floor plan, composed of spirals and pentagrams, straight lines, interwoven zigzag movements and circles, along which the dancers move. The choreography serves as a physical counterpoint to the sounds of the instruments – the dance is no slave-like follower, but an autonomous partner of the music. As in previous works the choreographic credo ‘My walking is my dancing’ is the guiding principle for the dance movements. The most basic rhythms of the body are put centre-stage: heartbeat, breathing and the purposeful movement of walking.

De Keersmaeker found further inspiration for the dancers’ phrasing and gestures in L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze (1988-9), a French television programme featuring the philosopher Gilles Deleuze improvising on a selection of alphabetically ordered words, from ‘A’ for ‘animal’ to ‘Z’ for ‘zigzag’. The words of this Alphabet Book are not exactly depicted in this production, but are the basis for its dance vocabulary. They are concepts that provide punctuation, rhythm, purpose and precision. The Rosas dancers search for their own unique, expressive freedom within this strict framework and these rules of play.

The six concerti grossi of the Brandenburg Concertos are famous for their progressive nature. In these six pieces Bach uses the standard baroque instruments in extremely unusual and daring combinations for the period, turning the traditional hierarchy of the orchestra upside down. Instruments such as the recorder and the harpsichord, which generally played an accompanying role in classical baroque music, are given unexpected solos. But it was also the vigour and vitality of this work that made such a deep impression on De Keersmaeker: ‘In Bach’s music one recognises experiences buried in the memory of every individual human body: joy, rage, comfort, disdain, revenge, pity, pleasure, pain, melancholy, ecstasy. Everything in his music is about communication.’