En Atendant

Rosas’ most recent work, which the Belgian company premiered at the 2010 Avignon Festival in the courtyard of the Cloître des Célestins monastery, reminds us how tightly bound up with music the work of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker remains. Over the last thirty years, the celebrated choreographer has used music ranging from the Beatles to Mahler and Bach to Joan Baez, although Steve Reich remains the composer with whom her compositions remain most closely associated.

"En atendant" was inspired by the Ars Subtilior, a Franco-Flemish musical form from the late Middle Ages. The fruit of a dying age, the music combines the cerebral with the intellectual, the mystical with the sensual. Might De Keersmaeker be drawing parallels between our times and the Plague Years—another era which witnessed the unravelling of its social, religious and political fabric? Or could she be highlighting, once again, the value of a minimal approach to expressive means?

In the work, which was created for an open space, dancers dressed in plain black robes or naked move organically, sometimes to the sound of the music, sometimes in silence, their breaths uniting with those of the musicians and the soprano to form a single entity. Enlisting the aid of symbolic props and the lighting, De Keersmaeker choreographs each individual dancer’s relationship with the music with singular skill to weave a work of impressive beauty.

"En atendant" is both profound and poetic, simple and meaningful.