From her earliest work, the renowned Flemish choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has used contemporary classical music as a source of inspiration. The present high point of this body of work is Vortex Temporum, which premiered in 2013 and is based on the musical piece of the same title by the French composer Gérard Grisey (1946-1998). For this performance, De Keersmaeker brings together the talents of the Ictus ensemble and her own company Rosas. Using basic, exact movements the seven dancers give physical expression to the pure, acoustic sounds and circular patterns of the composition. Jointly, the musicians and the dancers take the audience along on a search for different ways of experiencing time, ranging from extremely dense to endlessly expanding. It's a venture which results in a work of great beauty and sophistication.
dates
Sun June 1 2014 10:30 PM
Wed June 4 2014 10:30 PM
information
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Duration of performance unknown (zonder pauze)
In her latest performance Vortex Temporum, the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and her dance company Rosas team up with the musical ensemble Ictus in search of the many forms through which we can experience time. Based on the same-titled musical piece by the French composer Gérard Grisey (1946 -1998), the performance shows how time contracts, slows down, expands, whirls around, compounds and splits up again, like a maelstrom embodied in the sounds and the gestures of six musicians, the movements of seven dancers and the dynamics of the space.
De Keersmaeker has been returning regularly to the Holland Festival since her debut in 1993 with the premiere of her production Toccata, along with a number of reprises of earlier works. In 2010, she featured at the festival with three performances: Keeping Still part I, The Song and 3Abschied. Vortex Temporum sees her returning to her earlier minimalism, enriched by thirty years of experience as a groundbreaking choreographer. 'Contemporary music mirrors our time,' De Keersmaeker explains her fascination for this form of expression. 'I'm looking for ways to make the audience feel which elements of dance are hidden in the music. Contemporary music makes it all the more of a challenge, as it breaks with the steady rhythm and the tonal harmony we are so used to hearing because of the all-pervasive influence of pop music.'
From her earliest performances, De Keersmaeker has been using complex, contemporary music as her source of inspiration, early examples being Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich (1982) and Drumming (1988), which is set to the same-titled work by Reich. Musically,Vortex Temporum is a taut and sophisticated composition with a delicate timbre, great contrasts and an emphasis on spectral harmonies, natural acoustic sound and recurring circling and spiralling musical movements, patterns which are strongly representative of the Rosas choreographies. As previously in Cesena (2011) and En Atendant (2010), in Vortex Temporum De Keersmaeker pairs every musician with a dancer, the dancer giving shape to the music with his movements within a larger, fluid and interconnected group choreography.
De Keersmaeker first came across Vortex Temporum in 2006, at the time of her performance Zeitung, when the composer Thierry de Mey brought the composition to her attention. The abstract, mathematical construction of the piece had great dance potential, but it was the intense live performance of the music which especially inspired De Keersmaeker in her creation of the resulting choreography: the joint physical movements in playing the music, the relationship between the performers' bodies and instruments and the instruments' raw materialism and pure sounds.
The score has three parts with short breaks, in which the sound of the performers' breathing and movement, the noise and the reverberating sounds fill the silence in a subtle manner. The breaks are devised to give reprieve to the performers as well as the audience. Grisey himself has said about his work that the music exists in three different categories of time: 'In the human category (the time of language and of breathing), the whales' category of time (the periods of the sleeping rhythm) and the category of time of the birds and the insects (the most extremely compacted form of time, which makes the contours blur).'
'My walking is my dancing' served as a leading principle during rehearsals for Vortex Temporum. Although the music was her starting point, De Keersmaeker used the basic rhythms of the body – the heart beat, breathing and directional locomotion – to create the movements of the dancers. In close collaboration with Ictus' conductor Georges-Elie Octors every beat in Vortex Temporum was given an extremely exact physical expression. Interpreting the notes as well as the physical movements of playing the music, a special rapport is created between the dancers and the musicians, a constant and concentrated interaction between movement and sound. Everything is repeated, endlessly recurring in invisible mutual relationships, triggering a transformative theatre experience.
Vortex Temporum premiered on 3 October at the Ruhrtriennale and will have its Dutch premiere at the Holland Festival.
