A relatively simple and slow theme, in a saraband rhythm, opens the Goldberg Variations, published in 1741. At the end of a dazzling journey, it is heard again, identical to the note and completely renewed by the memory of the stages it has traversed. For before this return - conclusion and recommencement - Bach had unfolded it in thirty variations, multiplying forms and styles with a science and sensitivity that make the work one of the summits of music. Only specialists know what compositional refinements constrain and structure their expressive diversity (to take a relatively simple example, not only is the succession of pieces controlled by tonal progression, but every third variation from the fourth onwards consists of a canon, the first in unison, the second in the second, the third in the third-and so on until the tenth and last in Variation 31, which dramatically breaks the rule just before the return of the initial theme). But you don't have to be a musicologist to appreciate this art of regulated transformation, declined according to the forms of a discipline that its creator has freely imposed on himself. The same is true of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's choreographic work. Her way of tracing in space, figure against figure, a rigorous geometry that listens to variations, her search through and in the movement for a "still focus" from which the danced form radiates and is organised, can be understood immediately, intuitively: circles and spirals, rotations, diagonals, all of which are free of formulas. Some may recognize quotations, allusions to some of his pieces such as Achterland, Rosas danst Rosas or Drumming, which have become major references in contemporary dance. Such memories are precious, but are not essential to an encounter with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, as she embarks on the last of her solos that she still performs herself. If we are indeed witnessing a work as a whole, it is being constructed in front of us. On one of its sides, it already plunges into the history of choreography; but this history is made up of stories that are conjugated in the present, linked as if in a sheaf in the living performance of a great artist. Project shared with Le Dancing CDCN Dijon Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, as part of the Art Danse 2022 festival.
Types
- Dance