★★★✰✰ The dance is spare and pedestrian, as is De Keersmaeker’s way, and lasts two hours, without intermission. And yet it’s not really a challenge to experience it all in one sitting.
Tag - Rosas
★★★★✰ What unfolds over the two hours is an extraordinary conversation between musician and dancers.
Gallery by Foteini Christofilopoulou...
★★★✰✰ The piece is strenuous, filled with running and partnering that, at first, verges on violent, and eventually turns rapturous, but never beautiful – De Keersmaeker never cedes to the lure of beauty...
Other years have been more exciting, I think, but this one has had its share of remarkable performances, including a few thrilling ones. Here, in no particular order, are the ones that really stood out, for one reason or another.
Eddie Nixon has just been appointed as The Place's Artistic Director - Graham Watts is first to interview him about his new role and plans...
★★★★✰ At moments, I was ecstatically aware of the beauty of the body in motion.
★★★★✰ Oh, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. What other choreographer can so doggedly drive a viewer to the verge of despair and then, almost casually, throw open the doors to ecstasy, all within the span of an hour?
★★★★★ It’s utterly captivating, full of unexpected, joyous exuberance.
From ★★★★★'s to ★★✰✰✰ Works by Joli Vyann, Compagnie MPTA, Compagnie Mossoux Bonté, Euripides Laskaridis and Charleroi Danses.
From ★★★★’s to ★ Works by Adriana Borriello, Lara Russo, Camilla Monga, Gabriel Schenker, Yasmin Hugonnet, Albert Quesada and Daniel Linehan
★✰✰✰✰ This abstract, largely silent interpretation of As You Like It ( a Shakespeare comedy I have never seen danced before) was so unintelligible that I might as well have been hearing it spoken in Urdu.
Gallery by Foteini Christofilopoulou...
5 Questions to Freya Jeffs - curator of Glasgow's Cottier Dance Project, which runs from 19th-26th June...
...I think it’s safe to say that she is an artist who follows her obsessions with a tenacity that is both admirable and frequently defeating.
Watching Rosas danst Rosas this weekend it was easy to understand why it still stands as a prime example of De Keersmaeker’s choreographic approach.
Reich's score is, of course, a constant pulse. De Keersmaeker provides no rest for the senses. She matches Reich in density and motion. It is mimicry of the highest order.
...while I may have successfully held my own for the first two rounds, I’d been soundly beaten by the end.
...for all that, the experience of watching En Atendant and Cesena was not an arid one. Instead, the two works managed to build an ascetic aura, like witnessing (or even taking part in) a kind of monastic ritual.
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s diptych - hinged by the night - is a paean to medievalism which emphasises the crucial aspects of those times.