The slender silhouettes of two women appear in a blue light. Virtually naked, but veiled, they incarnate a tender complicity. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Cynthia Loemij perform a duo of combined fervour and lightness. Two beings made of satin seem to reflect each other. They cultivate their similiarities, play on what unites them and what distinguishes one from the other. They run, separate and then find each other again, making a whole. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker says “For me, dancing is always a way of speaking. Small hands is essentially about the notion of the mirror, notions of what is the same and what is different. A former student at the Brussels school of Maurice Béjart, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker learnt the perfection of gesture in dance. As of 1982, with her company Rosas, and performing already then at the Avignon Festival, she became the emblem of a new Flemish dance movement. Her work is always demanding, sculpting repetitive movements, limited in space, constructed in obsessional cycles. An adept of minimalism and abstraction, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker explores the tension of muscles as well as of the mind and nerves. Each break in the movement, each off-balanced movement consequently becomes an event. The dance finds its expression in mathematical constructions, in the prohibition of any spectacular demonstration. Her choregraphy finds its rhythmic source in music, from Monteverdi to Bartók, from Beethoven to Steve Reich. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Cynthia Loemij, a dancer with the Rosas company since the beginning of the 1990s, today weave dance that is made limpid by their complicity with a partition by Henry Purcell, and notably in a piece bearing an eloquent title, Welcome to All the Pleasures.
Distribution
choreography Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker
dance :Cynthia Loemij et Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
music: Henry Purcell
set and lighting :Jan Versweyweld
costumes :Anne-Catherine Kunz
Production
Production: Rosas, De Munt / La Monnaie
Avec la participation :du ministère de la Communauté flamande Remerciements :au Théâtre de Cavaillon-Scène nationale