Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker: En Atendant

Ruhrtriennale has invited Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker to present her two dance pieces En Atendant and Cesena at sundown and sunrise. The venue for this unique double performance is Jahrhunderthalle Bochum, with its peculiar architecture offering a natural spectacle of light and dark.

With En Atendant, the Belgian pioneer of contemporary art Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker dares a further step in exploring the relationship between music and dance. After having worked with Bach, Webern, the Beatles, and Mahler, she now turns to Ars Subtilior.

The popes rule in Avignon while Europe is dominated by the plague. Premiered in a cloister nave and enthusiastically celebrated, De Keersmaeker and her company ROSAS turn to the fourteenth century with its political and social devastation. The means used are minimalistic: an empty stage, the twilight of the ending day, four musicians and eight dancers. The latter fall down, bend over, stand up, crash down again. A silent, harmonic chaos is dominat a disturbingly erotic state of uncertainty between life and death. The stage becomes a space in which archetypical fears take hold and become almost physically palpable. En Atendant is an intense and radical encounter with the desaster that may strike at any moment, a tableaux dansant of fragile, touching beauty.

Ars Subtilior is a musical style from the end of the fourteenth century. Its improvisatory performance by the musicians results in an exciting play of individually marked voices. Changing harmonies and polyrhythmic structures develop an expressive sound reminiscent of contemporary music.