Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker burst onto the contemporary artistic scene at the beginning of the 1980s, author of over sixty choreographies which borrow their musicality from various periods. She founded her company, Rosas, in 1983. Her plays, written according to the principles of repetitive music, Fase in 1982 then Rosas Danst Rosas the next year renewed the links that had become somewhat distended between music and dance since the works of Merce Cunningham and John Cage. What is striking in these first works its their extreme choreographic maturity, established on a virtuoso practice of movement and in an almost mathematical link with space and time. With an incomparable capacity for work, an openness to the most diverse musical styles and an ability to appropriate every choreographic influence, the Belgian artist has built a lively repertory, marked by emblematic pieces such as Mozart/Concert Arias, Rain and more recently Zeitung and The Song. A repertory that she keeps up with her company, Rosas, and the school she founded in Brussels in 1995, P.A.R.T.S. At the Festival, she danced Fase and presented Rosas Danst Rosas in 1983, Mozart/Concert Arias in the Cour d'honneur in 1992 and made a beautiful appearance in 'dieu & les esprits vivants' by Jan Decorte in 2005. She is continuing today the work she started with En Atendant: the marriage of dance and ars subtilior. Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker is an indispensable reference for generations of dancers and spectators, and has been invited many times to the Festival d’Avignon.

Portrait of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker © Johan Jacobs