Into the Light

Top choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker talks about her new piece opening in Brussels

A solitary male figure intones strange melodies: half plaintive, half aggressive, interspersed with searing intakes of breath. We grasp strains of Latin and French, but don’t understand the words. The man then runs a fast circle and we glimpse his nakedness in the shadows before he disappears. We feel urgency, intensity and fear.  Our eyes gradually adjust to the half-light; we wait in anticipation of what’s to follow.

This is Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s latest work, Cesena. The piece was originally conceived to be performed in the 14th-century Cour d’Honneur of the Palace of the Popes in Avignon, now the principal outdoor venue of the annual Avignon Festival. It premièred there last summer at 4.30 in the morning, illuminated by the rising sun.

Even seen in a conventional theatre setting, it’s a startling beginning for an event that is neither strictly concert nor dance performance, but something in between that our senses soak up. It leaves an indelible trace in the mind.

The work’s underlying narrative is the true drama of the Papal schism and the ensuing massacre carried out in 1377 in Cesena, a small northern Italian town, under the orders of the anti-pope Clement VII. Despite this historically charged backdrop, the heart of the dance is music: the ars subtilior, the highly refined and sophisticated 14th-century polyphony that flourished in Avignon and which De Keersmaeker began exploring in En Atendant, the work she made prior to Cesena.

“I looked for music that was specifically linked to the schism of the papal court in Avignon,” explains De Keersmaeker after the first performance of Cesena in an indoor venue in Utrecht. “For En Atendant, I used northern Italian music from the same epoch, and for Cesena mainly vocal pieces from the Codex Chantilly that, in parts, relate the historical drama.
“Working with this music is a little bit like coming home for me,” she continues. “I find it very beautiful and it contains everything that I like: its formal complexity and precision give rise to very high emotional intensity. The genre is often referred to as intellectual, but I think that’s unjust, as if complexity was exclusively intellectual! Some people also consider the music sacrosanct, but that doesn’t bother me. I’ve tried to do what I always do with music: reveal and bring to the surface what I experience as beautiful, what touches me.”

See Cesena

La Monnaie, Brussels, November 12-16,  www.lamonnaie.be

Vooruit, Ghent, December 9 and 10,  www.vooruit.be

deSingel, Antwerp, December 17-20,  www.desingel.be

Dubbelspel STUK & 30 CC, Leuven, January 12 and 13,  www.stuk.be

C-Mine, Genk, February 11,  www.c-mine.be

Concertgebouw, Bruges, March 10,  www.concertgebouw.be,  www.rosas.be

Read full article in The Bulletin, November 4