A love-hate affair with dance - Belgian dance company Rosas

Dance Magazine, March, 1998 by Rita Feliciano

My Belgian cabdriver approvingly nods hi s head after I give him my destination: Van Volxemlaan 164. He says, "So, you are going to Rosas." No, he has never seen a performance of the company, but, in a voice ringing with hometown pride, he asserts that "they are very good and they are very famous." Indeed, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, founder and artistic director of Rosas, has accomplished a remarkable feat. In a country with little modern dance activity, she has created, seemingly out of thin air, this phenomenon of Belgian postmodern dance. Other artists have followed her lead -- Wim Vandekeybus and Michele Anne de Mey come to mind -- but it is De Keersmaeker who has put Belgium on the postmodern dance map.

Rosas, founded by De Keersmaeker in 1983 as a company of four women, was in 1992 appointed resident company to La Monnaie, Belgium's national opera company, which coproduces many of Rosas's works. With a budget of slightly over $1.5 million (40 percent of which the company earns through touring) and a permanent staff of close to thirty, Rosas is doing well.

In 1995 the company moved into the kind of quarters that most American companies can only dream about. Home is a former factory that, it is rumored, was once a commercial laundry responsible for the "royal wash." Handsomely refurbished, the building now houses several large, skylit studios and contains ample space for rehearsal, production, videotaping, and administration offices; there's also a separate turn-of-the-century building for a fully subsidized child-care facility. PARTS (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios), Rosas's two-year-old professional performance school, is situated in a separate wing with its own kitchen that serves macrobiotic food. For once it appears that a prophet is being honored in her own land.

Looking at De Keersmaeker, a small woman with intense brown eyes, nursing her six-month-old daughter in Rosas's imposing conference room at dusk, one finds it difficult to imagine her as the creator of the brutally physical Rosas Danst Rosas which infuriated, bored, and thrilled New York City audiences in 1986. The work subsequently earned a Bessie award, and the film version by Peter Greenaway received the 1992 Dance Screen Award in Vienna. Rosas is still in the repertory and serves as training ground for new dancers, since it epitomizes the rigorous physicality for which the company has become known.

De Keersmaeker's voice is soft but focused as she recalls that she always wanted to make her own work. She had been encouraged as a child by a "young teacher who not only taught ballet, but also modern dance and improvisation." Of her first work, Asch, a site-specific duet for a dancer and actor, done while still a student at Maurice Bejart's Mudra, was about the "numb amazement of a small, self-willed girl and a tall, wounded pilot" in which she beats herself, ... collapses, and gets up again.

From the beginning she has chosen a controversial vocabulary. It has earned her work such assessments as "chaotic," "self-indulgent" "aggressive," and "anarchical," but also "formalist," "powerful," "emotionally tough," "stringently structured," "lucid," "gripping," and "honest." De Keersmaeker simply shrugs her shoulders at these contradictions. "What I [was and still] am trying to do," she explains, "is to practice economy of means, to create the maximum with the minimum."

The earlier pieces in particular are not easy on either the eye or the ear. Her dancers have been known to scream at the top of their lungs, as if haunted by some primeval fear or fury. Whether in heels, boots, or running shoes, they fling themselves into space with a fierceness that makes one worry for their joints. Clad in short black dresses and white socks or clingy sheaths, these child-women collapse to the floor only to rebound. Their physical abandon and pugilistic stances can make some audiences very uncomfortable. Her women have been called dancing machines. But ironically it's at their point of exhaustion, looking at us through stringy wet hair and panting in sweat-drenched clothes, that they reveal their frailty, their humanity, their aloneness. And underneath all that chaos and aggression one senses a tight control, a formalist fervor that is quite in contrast to the surface appearance of her work.

Two of De Keersmaeker's trademark devices are unison and repetition. "I have a love-hate relationship with them," she admits. "In some pieces I use them a lot; in others I don't. What I like about them is the way you can make one thing more emphatic, but also how you can point to small distinctions when different bodies execute the same movement." Fase, four movements on the music of Steve Reich, a work started during her 1981 stay in New York City, was inspired by the music's tiny shifts in inflection and rhythmic variety. She describes Fase as "a search for what's identical in what's different and for what's different in what's identical."

De Keersmaeker talks about that year she spent in Manhattan in impressionistic terms. Not interested in studying at any of the well-known schools or studios, she seems to have floated through her time in the city. "Stuart Hodes had accepted me, and Larry Rhodes was the head of the dance department at NYU. But I took classes in experimental theater, theater history, performing arts. Things that interested me." She calls the experience "a real kick. because so much was going on, not just in dance but in what was happening in the streets." But the city didn't hold her. "I wanted to go back and do my own work."