アンヌ·テレサ·ドゥ·ケースマイケル
АННЫ ТЕРЕЗЫ ДЕ КЕЕРСМАКЕР
Quatuor N°4

source:parisartcom
L’Opéra Garnier présente, conjointement, trois pièces de la chorégraphe Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Trois œuvres à la dynamique rigoureuse et affirmée : Quatuor no 4, Die grosse Fugue et Verklärte Nacht ; trois pièces solidement arrimées à leur structure musicale.

En octobre 2015, trois pièces de la chorégraphe Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker sont entrées au répertoire du Ballet de l’Opéra national de Paris. À savoir Quatuor no 4 (1986), Die grosse Fugue (1992) et Verklärte Nacht (1995). Ce sont ces trois mêmes pièces qui composent l’ensemble intitulé Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, présenté à l’Opéra Garnier. Pour une soirée en forme de déambulations géométriques, de Béla Bartók à Arnold Schönberg en passant par Ludwig van Beethoven. Chorégraphe infiniment attentive aux musiques, aux rythmes, ces trois pièces de jeunesse d’Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker ont un rapport à l’unisson et à la rigueur. Trois pièces-clefs qui ruissèleront dans la suite de son œuvre. Très structurée, la soirée commence par Quatuor no 4, pièce pour quatre danseuses. Elle se poursuit avec Die grosse Fugue [La grande fugue], pour huit danseurs. Et s’achève avec Verklärte Nacht [La Nuit transfigurée], un duo amoureux éclaté en plusieurs danseurs.

Quatuor à cordes sans contrepoint, le Quatuor no 4 de Béla Bartók est cependant inspiré de la musique folklorique des Balkans. Musique monophonique un peu raide, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker s’en est emparée pour mettre en danse une ronde enfantine. Quatre danseuses en uniformes d’écolière répètent une sorte de comptine dansée. Au fil du jeu, la fraicheur bucolique laisse la place à une répétition mécanique, quasi-industrielle. Les jupettes virevoltent toujours. Mais les visages s’éloignent. L’effort crispe les traits et suivant le point de focal adopté (par alternance, peut-être), se dévoile alors le côté aguicheur des jupes qui s’envolent, ou l’expression figée, mi-narquoise, mi-épuisée, des danseuses. Dans une maîtrise chorégraphique qui convoque l’excellence et finit par piétiner la grâce. Autre pièce rigoureuse : Die grosse Fugue, avec Ludwig van Beethoven. Composée tandis qu’il était sourd, La grande fugue se tient elle-même, par la force de la théorie.

Comme pour la pièce de Béla Bartók, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker plonge dans cette composition de Ludwig van Beethoven, Die grosse Fugue, pour mieux en enlacer la dynamique. Et là encore, la figure de la chute, qui se relève, occupe une place nodale. Une forme d’ascèse et de solitude à plusieurs hante cette chorégraphie. Les contacts entre danseurs, réduits, semblent être d’une intensité telle qu’ils ne puissent s’actualiser que dans la distance. Bien que romantique, Die grosse Fugue se teinte d’éclats tragiques. Enfin, venant clore cette trilogie chorégraphique, se déploie la pièce Verklärte Nacht. Une œuvre basée sur le sextuor à cordes d’Arnold Schönberg. Avec un poème de Richard Dehmel, à propos d’une femme qui, à la lueur de la lune, confesse à son bienaimé être enceinte d’un autre. Instant chorégraphique d’une gravité presque douloureuse, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker en fait une pièce à la beauté déchirante.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source:operadeparisfr
Born in 1960, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker studied dance, first at the Mudra School in Brussels, then at the Tisch School of the Arts in New York. In 1980, she made her mark with her first choreographic composition Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich. In 1983, in Brussels, she founded her own dance company, Rosas, whose first major work, Rosas danst Rosas, fused the gestures of daily life with formal abstract movement and revealed an innovatory choreographic style.

In 1992, Rosas was chosen as the company in residence at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels by its new director Bernard Foccroulle. This was the start of a rich artistic and intellectual collaboration and in 1995, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker founded P.A.R.T.S., a school of contemporary dance that has become the leading European training centre for choreographs and dancers and one of the most avant-garde in the world of dance.

Until 2007, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker was to develop a vast corpus of productions at La Monnaie, confronting dance with musical scores from every period. Works like Drumming (1998) and Rain (2001), performed in collaboration with the contemporary music ensemble Ictus, and featuring vast geometric structures and hypnotic motifs, became emblematic of the company’s identity. She created vast ensemble works such as Toccata in 1993 on music by J.S. Bach and Verklärte Nacht in 1995 on music by Schönberg), then ventured towards theatre and text in I said I in 1999 and In Real Time in 2000 and intensified the role of improvisation in her work through the use of Indian music and jazz in (But If a Look Should) April Me (2002) and Bitches Bres / Tacoma Narrows (2003). Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker also directed several operas at La Monnaie, notably the 2004 production of Toshio Hosokawa’s Hanjo.

In 2008, the production The Song, constructed more around silence and space than music, marked a certain change of direction in her work. The diptych En attendant and Cesena on the other hand, a work performed at the 2010 and 2011 Avignon Festival in the Cloître des Célestins, plays with light and time. In 2013, she returned to the music of J.S. Bach in Partita 2 (a duo danced with Boris Charmatz) and explored 20th century music in Vortex Temporum on Gérard Grisey’s 1996 work by the same name and Golden Hours (As you like it) in 2015 on the album Another Green World by Brian Eno (1975). She also pursued her exploration of the links between text and movement in Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (2015), a work based on the eponymous text by Rainer Maria Rilke.

In 2011, for the first time, a work by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker was performed by a company other than her own when Rain was introduced to the Paris Opera Ballet repertoire. This was followed in 2015 by Quartet no. 4, Die Grosse Fugue and Verklärte Nacht in a Bartók/Beethoven/ Schönberg programme. Anne Teresa de Keersmacker has renewed her links with the Paris Opera for the 2016-17 Season, this time as stage director of the new production of Così fan tutte.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source:nytimescom
PARIS — Four musicians, dressed in black, walk on to the stage and sit with their instruments. Four female dancers, dressed in black, walk on to the stage and stand at the periphery in a rough semi-circle. The dancers look at each other, look at the musicians. Nothing happens. Then the dancers suddenly whip into quick turns toward the center of the stage, stand in a close line, and do little slinky, side-to-side walks. The music starts — Bartok’s String Quartet No. 4 — and they flop unceremoniously to the floor, legs splayed gracelessly, white underwear revealed.

Almost any contemporary dance fan could tell you from these first moments that the choreographer of “Quartet No. 4” is Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, who burst on to the dance scene in the early 1980s with her distinctive combination of formal rigor and idiosyncratic gesture, sexualized yet powerful women and love for a tricky musical score.

But few contemporary dance fans would have guessed, back then, that almost 30 years after its 1986 premiere, “Quartet No. 4” would be danced by the Paris Opera Ballet in a full program of early works by Ms. De Keersmaeker. It’s a measure of how the boundaries between ballet and contemporary dance have eroded — and how ballet companies have become the repositories of 20th-century contemporary dance history — that this seems perfectly normal today.

At least, normal for the Paris Opera Ballet. Under the 19-year directorship of Brigitte Lefèvre, who retired last year and was succeeded by Benjamin Millepied, the company acquired a remarkable repertory of work by contemporary dance choreographers — Ms. De Keersmaeker, Sasha Waltz, Jérôme Bel, Pina Bausch and Trisha Brown among them. And it’s notable that the dancers show a facility, freedom and joy in performance of Ms. De Keersmaeker’s work that is frequently absent in the company’s classical repertory.

The movement vocabulary of “Quartet No. 4” (originally part of a longer evening, “Bartok/Annotations”) is simple, with elaborations on walking and turning movements that incorporate everyday motion (smoothing hair, opening out the hands, a quick unpolished handstand) and folk dance-like skipping, hopping and heel-clicking jumps.

The invigorating energy of the piece is palpable, grounded, earthy. The smoothly rounded arms and long lines of ballet are gone, replaced by a looseness and the directness of simply moving to music. But the movement, tightly bound to Bartok’s rhythmically complex, buzzing score, is also highly rigorous and controlled; the women — Laura Bachman, Juliette Hilaire, Sae Eun Park and Charlotte Ranson, all excellent — change with lightning speed from slow to fast, from stylized femininity to aggressive attack, from cheeky schoolgirls to confrontational amazons.

The effect of Ms. De Keersmaeker’s formal repetition of pattern and gesture is remarkable, appearing simultaneously meaningless — purely choreographic — and also full of narrative implication. The dancers seem both ordinary in their informal complicity (“shall we dance?”), and extraordinary in the precision and timing of the intricate mosaic of directional changes across the stage.

The next work, “Grosse Fugue,” set to Beethoven’s quartet of the same name, has a similar setup. Once again the musicans (Christophe Guiot, Cyrille Lacrouts, Éric Lacrouts and Pierre Lenert) enter, followed by dancers; this time seven men and just one woman (Alice Renavand), all in black suits and white shirts. It’s Ms. Renavand who plunges into movement, falling to the floor and rising again, as the music begins, followed by the male ensemble, who move through dizzyingly counterpointed and canonic sequences to exhilarating effect.

Here is much of the vocabulary that characterized Ms. De Keersmaeker’s work in the 1990s, when she brought men into her pieces for the first time. The extensive floor work, the constant falling and rebounding, the out-flung arms and exhilarating running, jumping momentum are all here, bound together with remarkable musicianship and craft. There are also slower, more tender moments, most memorably a long line of prone men who execute a dreamlike sequence of rolls along the floor, pulling themselves up on one elbow only to sink again, as if into the music.