Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker / Rosas

Drumming (1998) is one of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s most iconic choreographies, written to the eponymous, minimalistic percussion score by Steve Reich. The music starts with a single rhythmic motif, which subsequently multiplies and unfolds into a rich cornucopia of textures including drums, woodwinds, brass and voice. Reich here ramps up the technique already used in his earlier composition Piano Phase: through minor tempo accelerations the musicians almost imperceptibly push their unison out of joint, resulting in a never-ending volley of canons. In the dance, the choreographic complexity was devised in a similar fashion: a single movement phrase serves as the foundation for an infinite number of variations across time and space. When the music stops and the bodies come to a halt, the audience realizes what they have witnessed: a wave of pure dance and pure sound, a vortex of vital energy.  


In 1980, after studying dance at the Mudra School in Brussels and the Tisch School of the Arts in New York, ANNE TERESA DE KEERSMAEKER (who was born in 1960) created Asch, her first choreographic work. Two years later, she premiered Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich. She founded the Rosas company in 1983, in Brussels, while working on Rosas danst Rosas. Her choreographies have ever since been seen as means to explore the existing relation between dance and music.