As part of the inaugural Body of Work – Unfolding Fase festival, a celebration of ‘living dance heritage’ hosted by STUK – House for Dance, Image, and Sound in Leuven, Belgium, I’ve had the privilege of witnessing bodies at work – both young and older – preserving and persevering a dance legacy through performances, new events (such as a public slow walk) and an exhibition. To preserve a ‘body of work,’ this post explores the cross-generational bodies at work – dancing and shaping the future while honoring the past. A central theme of dance history is its preservation and longevity. Through dedication, commitment and powerful agency Body of Work brings us closer to understanding how significant artistic legacies endure and thrive.
This second of three posts looks at the performances as part of the festival.
Performances
I had the pleasure of attending the opening night of the festival which featured De Keersmaeker performing Piano Phase, her first choreographed work from 1982. I would have been ten years old at the time and would only see the work on video, decades later, sharing it with students at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance as part of the course I led called Ways of Seeing. To see it now, live, in the intimacy of a dance studio was incredibly moving and timeless. This dance, now 43 years old, feels new (again) but, in a way that it was never ‘old’ or went out of style. De Keersmaeker, herself, somewhere in her mid 60s performing it again.
De Keersmaeker walks out on the bare stage space, takes her spot, the sound of piano music begins. She glances up to her technician and signals with her hand down by her leg, a small wave upward, to turn the music up. And off she goes, folding herself in and out of the musical score – a complex series of counting that requires study, focus and effort. Yet, somehow, it all feels quite light, but concentrated in a cerebral manner – the brain’s effort to keep with the fast-paced score.
The dance, minimalist in its aesthetic, harkens back to the late 1960s/70s downtown New York dance scene, is both easy to watch but also allows for an exposure that is human, empathetic and refreshing. We see Anne and she sees us. Moments of eye contact is made between her and individual audience members. A flicker of an eye, a small smile emerging and disappearing, a slightly tensed brow revealed, all in split second timings between a flurry of repeating gestures, performed with precision and also prone to human error with full recovery everytime.
Interesting to note a quote in the programme for the exhibition alongside the performances that says, in her work Anne allowed emotions but something that the Judson Dance Theatre artists, such as Yvonne Rainer, denied. Working closely with Rainer I would say that the emotive in her work is not ‘denied’ but, reather, held at bay in the background so that the dancing can be foregrounded – seen more clearly, without the layer of meaning and projection of self. I have followed De Keersmaeker’s work for the past three decades and have an interest in the influences of dance artists of the Judson Dance Theatre era on her work. Artists such as Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs and as mentioned earlier Yvonne Rainer, as well as their predecessor Merce Cunningham. I am curious to unpack, further, the ways in which work of Rainer’s has influenced De Keersmaeker’s minimalist aesthetic but, as well, the ways they are different in opinion around the female body, performance gaze and social-spatial-temporal elements in the dancing. But for now, back to De Keersmaeker’s dancing and it affects on my own physical presence.
I am watching, standing among others in admiration, and my entire body is, how do I put this – with her. I am not only following her movements with my eyes but my body is alongside those movements – and not because I know them or have ever performed them but – simply because I am aware that her body is working and that work is palpable and felt. I am kind of working, too, in my own bodily presence and along with the 160-some other bodies to co-create this space that is both light, heavy and held. We are holding space in an attempt to hold history up to the present and it is both giddy, weighty and wild. This upholding of dance feels absurdly important to all of us and that is why we are here.
De Keersmaeker is doing the heavy lifting, upholding, with each and every move coming one after the other – turns that happen so quickly and in sequencing requiring her to focus down on the floor to ‘spot’ (what dancer’s do to keep from getting dizzy while turning) to control the spinning and a complex web of spatial rotations that allow us, the audience around her, to see and experience every side of the dancing. A turning hologram of a dance. Like Simone Forti’s Holograms.
Piano Phase, part of the trilogy, was performed by two younger dancers from the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen the same studio, following Violin Phase. Having the same intimate setting in which it experience this next minimalist work with a next generation of dancers amplified the differences between seeing the maker perform her own solo at an advanced age and interpreters of a work who are of a younger generation.
This version of repertoire seemed very polished. Like a chat GPT version of an original. Attempting to get it right, eager to please yet intelligent and informed. I happened to be standing next to Fumiyo Ikeda, the rehearsal director and dancer with Rosas, who was scribbling notes down while watching the dancers. I sensed both her satisfaction with the performance and a need to furiously notetake – ever moving a dance forward, correcting and refining. My own Trio A (a dance of Rainer’s from 1966 which I learned from her and perform and teach to others) is often under scrutiny by Rainer in what she calls ‘tune ups’ in which I perform the dance for her to correct, give suggestions and, overall, keep the dance alive in me and, as one would with a text, take in any edits, suggestions and corrections.
What is at work is the evolution of a dance across generations. The effort to keep a dance alive and to allow it to both be held by its creator and passed to a next generation of dancers. This effort, this lineage, this work is what makes the experience of watching these performances so enlightening. It is not so much the product of dance, as such, as the process of the living archive – a beating heart both older and youngs and aligning all of our pulsing bodies in a collective action of upholding, holding and harnessing what feels, to all of us, important and necessary. A collaborative gesture of bodies at work.
