Rosas danst Rosas

A choreographer who makes you think and feel at the same time and who makes you conscious of both processes is rare. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, born in 1960 in Belgium, turns out to be a member of that special breed

- Anna Kisselgoff, The New York Times

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is an institution in the world of international contemporary dance. Founder of the Rosas company in 1983 and named Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France in 2008, she has had a distinguished career as both dancer and choreographer.

Premiered in 1983 and now a classic, Rosas danst Rosas can be seen as prefiguring the tensions which characterised the later work of De Keersmaeker. Four women, including Anne Teresa herself, interpret a dance that brings us closer to the dialectic between aggression and tenderness, and uniformity and individuality. The performance is composed of five parts with both the dance and the music (composed by Thierry De Mey and Peter Vermeersch) based on repetitive, minimalist principles. The choreography combines two types of movement. On the one hand, abstract, and on the other, concrete, recognisable, day-to-day: a caress, a sudden turn of the head, a hand straightening out a blouse. In this way, a mundane reality takes hold of the work which has been described as "provocative and severe".

Rosas danst Rosas was first performed in Brussels' Théâtre de la Balsamine in May 1983. It won the Bessie Award for the Best Choreography and Best Lighting Design (1987) and the Eve du Spectacle de la Association des Journalistes du Spectacle (1989). Apart from this emblematic production, the Rosas company is also performing its latest work, The Song, at this year's Festival de Otoño.

www.rosas.be