That feisty maven from Brussels is at it again. Even though I have found Keersmaeker’s recent works to be so-so, her world premiere of Zeitung at Théâtre de la Ville last night left me surprisingly appreciative. Given her intent to set movement to Bach, Webern and Schoenberg, I have a hard time dismissing an evening of unpretentious choreography that is based on some of my all-time favorite music. In spite of its length and often meandering choreography, the work resonated with stark musical richness and austere, honest movement.
Zeitung (translation from the German, “newspaper” or “The Times”) gives the impression of a casual, rainy day rehearsal. The proscenium is laid bare, Alain Franco sits upstage at his grand piano, and dancers wander on and off the wooden-plank covered stage dressed as if they had just stepped in to the studio from a leisurely Saturday afternoon tea. Keersmaeker sets movement to twenty-three musical pieces, mostly Bach preludes and fugues, but with interspersed snippets of Webern and Schoenberg’s symphonic compositions. The music selection is fantastic, as is Franco’s mathematical precision and unromantic interpretation on the piano, but what isn’t always fantastic is Keersmaeker’s approach to the choreography.
I was curious to see how she would come up with enough craftiness to match the music’s compositional richness. It turns out Keersmaeker succeeds when she makes friends with the form of the given musical work. Once given a structure, her abstracted movement shines with clarity and poise. A trio set to Bach’s G minor fugue from theWell-Tempered Clavier was perhaps the best example of this, and you could watch the counterpoint play out before you, the three dancers never losing relation with each other. Much like Bach’s music, whose linear, contrapuntal melodies never lose sight of their harmonic (vertical) implications. She tweaked with the fugue form just enough so that it wasn’t entirely straightforward, although her movement investigation was obvious: using certain areas such as the head and neck to propel the body into space. (The movement vocabulary was developed in collaboration with David Hernandez)
The other noteworthy moments are those in which she doesn’t resort to her idosyncratic movement chains of slinky, postmodern vocabulary. Much of the time, you watch a solo or a duet play on for five minutes -articulate movement that is like a European cousin to Trisha Brown’s, but that lacks coherence to the music at hand.
The moments that caught my eye were actually not “dance”, but the seemingly casual interaction of bodies in the space, like when the nine dancers simply change places on stage to a section of suspenseful symphonic work by Webern. In this case, a simple gesture (walking, relating to each other) was more stunning than yet another phrase of slinky movement.
The dancers embody a sort of shy virtuosity and joyful calm. Though in general good movers, some of the dancers that make up the company Rosas often lack personality and presence. The newcomers, no doubt fresh out of Keersmaeker’s modern dance factory in Brussels, P.A.R.T.S., are wonderful, open movers (Tale Dolven and Sandy Williams), but their dancing lacks the maturity that only age and experience can bestow. Rosas veteran Cynthia Loemij exhibited a quiet, thoughtful presence and Mark Lorimer demonstrated an evolved, subtle articulation. Still though, I was not impressed with a couple veterans, including Fumiko Ikeda (on and off with Rosas since 1983), who despite her cute stage presence has always seemed to me a little stiff in her upper body movement.
But again, it is hard for me to criticize dancers that tend towards introversion, as I am one myself. Though, being introverted is separate from having presence, and it is the latter which I find most appealing.
The dynamic lighting design, believe it or not, had more presence than the dancers. Jan Joris Lamers crowns the bare stage with bleak flourescents and often draws upon the dim rehearsal lights high in the proscenium. What gave it so much presence, however, was the lighting’s strong independence from the music and movement. While pianist Franco would be interpreting a piece, for example, the lights would abruptly alter, then switch on again in a different format, and then dim, leaving the dancers in semi-darkness and reminding them perhaps just how vulnerable they are. But instead of being ostentatious or distracting, the lighting design achieved a kind of mellowed charisma that matched that of the dancers. This was very remarkable.
The dismantled set, also by Lamers, flaunts its bare wings and poses canvas flats against the walls (which are never used and whose canvases are never turned to the audience). Adding to this casual rehearsal ambiance were the dancers’ quotidian clothes by Anne-Catherine Kunz ; jeans and a tank top, a simple blue jersey dress, a grey suit coat paired with an even greyer pair of slacks. Yet Keersmaeker likes to play with even further dismantling; halfway through the performance the dancers roll up two panels of marley revealing the stage beneath to be wooden planks; some dancers even remove their pants by the end. Cynthia Loemij, in Keersmaeker’s typical matter-of-fact attitude, grabs a chair and takes it with her offstage as the very last gesture of the piece. The rehearsal -I mean the performance- is over.
The brief critique in Le Monde, Paris’s centrist newspaper, praised Zeitung and called it Keersmaeker’s “return to Romanticism.” This is kind of a stretch, considering that neither the music nor the interpretation was even remotely Romantic. Perhaps this critic (whose name didn’t appear on the website) was referring to the few moments in which the dancers show charisma or playfulness? Still, it wasn’t enough to merit such a sweeping artistic classification. As for me, despite lags in the choreography, I couldn’t help but deeply enjoy the fine music and Keersmaeker’s largely unforced interpretation of it.
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