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 third of four posts looks at the exhibition as part of the festival.

Exhibition

The Unfolding Fase exhibition follows the origins and forty-year life of the dance performance Fase and other significant points along De Keersmaeker’s career, including time spent studying in New York. What I find curious is the museum-like approach to display. I both appreciate and gain from this conceptual and visual offering and its collaborating with the more tactile and felt living heritages found in the performances and human interactions as part of Body of Work.

The most significant and moving aspect of the exhibition is a small-scale video projection of De Keersmaeker dancing Piano Fase for the camera. Filmed close up and in slow lotion to capture movements that evolve from moment to moment as she is dancing. De Keersmaeker looks directly at the camera lens in a similar way as she did with her audience in the live performance that opened the festival in the STUK studio (see my first blog post for more on this performance). Although in this video her eyes look darker, things are slowed down and feel somewhat more serious. She is looking back at us, watching her, dancing her slowed down moves that progressively take her away from the camera and into a dark, endless-like backdrop. Until she, as is expected, fades into the distance. It is an obvious meditation on life, on dance and on mortality. It is beautiful in its realness and poetic in its representation of the strength, frailty and ephemerality of the human body. It is what De Keersmaeker captures best – the ironies of a life, as expressed through a bundle of tightly wound, close to explosive, yet controlled and contained dance moves. We have her to thank for this gift of humanness, this reality of all of our lives – in all of its contradictions and consistencies. We are all ageing, some fast, some slower and, together, through the work of such artists, we can – if even fleetingly or for somewhat longer stretches of time – feel the presence of our being as beautiful.

As De Keersmaeker says in one of the videos playing in the lobby at STUK, we “shape the future, by staying in the present”. She also says that we keep dance heritage alive by performing it ourselves and passing it on to the next generation. She has done both and it was a delight and an honor to witness such holdings and sharings and to be in the presence of the efforts of such labour and offerings both asks for and brings forth.

Walking through the archival material of the Rosas company I first notice how many books on display. Not the first item one thinks of when contemplating an exhibition on dance. As the curation was done by dance experts from STUK in collaboration with De Keersmaeker, it is striking how few objects, such as costumes and props, are on display.

This exhibition reminds me of the Yvonne Rainer Dance Works at Raven Row (2014), curated by Catherine Wood, in which there was a series of live performances of Rainer’s repertoire accompanying by installations of documents such as theoretical and lyrical writing, sketches and scores, photographs of performances, documentary and experimental films, and an audio recording of one of her early performative lectures on display (facsimiles of archival materials held at the Getty Research Institute). The exhibition was the first to present live performances of Rainer’s dance works alongside other aspects of her practice.

In the exhibition text it states that, “the similarities between Fase and the minimalist dance that set the tone in America with figures like Yvonne Rainer, Laura Dean and Lucinda Childs are apparent. But where their minimalist credo was accompanied by a neutral way of performing, De Keersmaeker does not hide the effort and pleasure of dancing.”

While I agree that there are similarities in De Keersmaker’s work with the American post-modern generation of artists named, I would make a case, based on my experiences dancing for and in the works of Rainer that she does not ‘hide’ effort and pleasure but, in fact, displays the labour of dancing (including effort) but that it might not have the expected bell curve (based in ballet) of preparation, climax, resolve. Effort, in Rainer’s work is ongoing, methodical and unenhanced. Something, perhaps, that can only be noticed when there is no emotional overlay on the dancing.

She also may have believed, making work in the late 1960s, early 70s and beyond, that in order to avoid the expected display of an often historically sexualised dancing female figure in a time of emerging feminism in the United States, that an unenhanced, less breathy, less sweaty and zero climaxed filled dancing – think more hammering a nail effort – would move perceptions forward in recognising that the female figure dancing is at work when performing. She is not necessarily there to entertain, excite or please you, the audience. Rather she was interested in her audience being confronted by their own bodily presence in the lack of being fed stimuli by the dancer. Her audiences needed to cope with their own, perhaps, disappointment, frustration, expectation or elatedness of not getting what they feel dance should deliver – emotive expression and titillating display of movements.

My experience of learning, performing and lecturing on Trio A (1966) by Rainer is that the emotional, sensual body is present yet in the background in order to foreground the labour of the moving body, the effort, the work – and that, Rainer claims, is the dancing.