Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House
January 8, 2016

Dance lovers should feel particularly indebted to outgoing Sydney Festival director Lieven Bertels, who has imported one of the 20th century’s most influential and insightful choreographers for his final season. Belgian dance visionary Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is a true living legend, exalted throughout the world as a master of her craft. This towering, global reputation all started almost 35 years ago with Fase, the first of two programmes she will be reviving for Sydney audiences during her brief appearance in Australia.

Created in 1982, these four short works are an astonishingly precise distillation of the phase minimalism experiments of Steve Reich, meticulously transcribing sound into movement. At the time of this piece’s premiere three and half decades ago, when the choreographer was just 22-years-old, this powerful symbiosis between music and dance was a revelation, and even now, despite the many hundreds of performances that this piece has had during the intervening years, it is just as transfixing and assertive.

Her response to Reich is a very literal one; De Keersmaeker’s methodology is both uncompromising and unsentimental. Dressed in simple, white knee-length dresses, white sox and tennis shoes, De Keersmaeker is joined onstage by Norwegian dancer Tale Donivan for Piano Phase. Like the Reich, the choreography is made up of incessantly repeated cells of material, in this instance hypnotic swirling, sparsely punctuated with fleeting pauses and outstretched gestures. It adopts the compositional philosophy of the music, with this syncronised sequence of twirls slowly unlacing to become a mirror image. The inseparable link this display has to its score is offered once more as each dancer’s phrasing is superimposed as a silhouette, cast against the stark-white blankness of the stage.

As Reich’s myopic score subtly introduces minute variations, so too does De Keersmaeker, pulling the dance downstage into a harshly delineated stretch of white light. There is a pointed absence of any overt emotion, but this display is far from sterile. Certain sections adopt a more aggressive, muscular intention, which against the pervading clarity of form and gesture, strikes with surprising force.

In Come Out, there is a faint implication of place, with two pendant lamps strung from overhead illuminating the two dancers, now dressed in grey shirts, trousers and high-heeled shoes. Sat on stools, the formula of repetition and subtle variation is the same, yet the gestures here are infused with a distant sensuality. The elegant logic of this dance is enthralling, akin to watching a spider spin its web. Each twist and pivot, every carefully placed flick of a wrist or thrown back elbow feels indispensable, almost academic, and yet the abstract counterpoint of these clean, elementary configurations is quietly beautiful to behold.

For Clapping Music, the pair bounce like knock-kneed marionettes, springing into a kind of improvised en pointe in their tennis shoes. The sharp, percussive attack of the score informs the emphatic swagger of the movement, but once again there is an implied nostalgia to the construction; an undercurrent of balletic tradition that is just detectable in the background.

Choreographically the language of Fase is not especially impressive, but this work’s brilliance isn’t hooked to virtuosity or glib chutzpah. The wonder here is in the microscopic precision and mental endurance required to master such an exposed and fastidious exploration of the music, yet in this endevour De Keersmaeker has managed to keep these pieces from becoming completely inert. In Violin Phase, De Keersmaeker offers a solo, which traces a circle around the stage before adorning it an increasingly complex sequence of graceful lunges, outflung arms and nimble extensions. Here, more potently than its three sister pieces, we can feel the heartfelt sincerity of De Keersmaeker’s reverence for Reich’s ingenuity. It may be a more subliminal element in this work, but seeing the urgency and passion in her eyes, even after so many years living and performing this dance, transports these pieces from quotidian to profound.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Rosas presents Faseat the Sydney Opera House until January 11. Rosas presents Vortex Temporum at Carriageworks 15 – 18 January. Both part of the Sydney Festival.

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