Five female icons of the Belgian art world: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
Belga English paints the portraits of five renowned female artists from Belgium – in words. Today we look at Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, one of the world’s most illustrious choreographers and dancers.
In mid-July, the Japan Art Association announced that Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker would be awarded the Praemium Imperiale for her lifelong artistic achievements and contributions to the enrichment of the arts worldwide.
She is the second Belgian to be awarded this “Nobel Prize for the Arts”, after painter Pierre Alechinsky, and the first in the Theatre and Film category.
When she receives the award in Tokyo in October, the 65-year-old will follow in the footsteps of Maurice Béjart, at whose Brussels dance school, Mudra, she trained at the end of the 1970s.
After her stint there, she spent two years in the US, studying at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University, where she discovered American postmodern dance and broadened her horizons.
“It was my first time going out into the world, leaving my familiar environment behind,” she told the American arts magazine Bomb a few years ago. “It was incredible to discover the energy of the city.”
De Keersmaeker was born in Mechelen in 1960 and grew up in Wemmel, on the outskirts of Brussels. She presented her first piece, Asch, in 1980, but her breakthrough came a few years later, after she’d returned to Brussels from the US.
She stunned audiences with Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, now seen as a contemporary masterpiece. This September, she will again perform one of the movements – Violin Phase – at Bozar in Brussels.
Trailer for Fase, a film based on the first work made by De Keersmaeker
The solo will trace rose patterns in sand, with a movement language that not only illustrates the music but adds a new dimension to it.
Reich’s minimalist music is a recurring theme in De Keersmaeker’s early work, with Drumming and Rain other notable examples, alongside the use of geometric patterns.
From the beginning, she explored the connection between dance and music. She would later work with compositions from a broad array of genres, like classical, pop, jazz, folk and world music. In her most recent production, BREL, she dances to the music of the Belgian chansonnier Jacques Brel.
Building on the success of Fase, in 1983 she founded the dance company Rosas in Brussels. Its first piece, Rosas danst Rosas, immediately brought the company into the international limelight and remains a seminal work today.
In the piece, considered a feminist statement, four female dancers repeat abstract movements and small everyday gestures, sometimes rolling on the floor, until they become exhausted.
The film version of Rosas danst Rosas became as iconic as the performance itself. In 2011, Rosas accused American superstar Beyoncé of plagiarising parts of this filmed choreography for the video of her single Countdown, after which the video was adapted.
“Beyoncé is not the worst copycat: she's a good dancer, a very good singer, she has good taste,” De Keersmaeker told The Guardian at the time. “But you can’t just steal intellectual property.”
Throughout her career, the choreographer has continued to experiment, and not just with different music genres.
In Bitches Brew/Tacoma Narrows, she allowed her dancers to improvise for the first time. She started to work with texts, by authors such as Shakespeare and Rilke, and performed a choreography as an exhibition (Work/Travail/Arbeid) in art centres such as Wiels, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern and MoMA. In 2020, she created a new choreography for the musical West Side Story on Broadway.
De Keersmaeker also leads an international school for contemporary dance in Brussels, the Performing Arts Research and Training Studios (P.A.R.T.S.), which was founded by Rosas and opera house La Monnaie in 1995.
Sixty students from about 25 countries are trained there, over a three-year period, by more than 50 teachers.
“A ‘school’, by its nature, urges one to make choices, to continually re-evaluate what is important from the past, in the present, for the future,” she has said about the importance of the institution.
In the summer of 2024, De Keersmaeker was accused of toxic leadership by former Rosas employees and dancers in the newspaper De Standaard. They spoke of transgressive behaviour and of being humiliated to tears and pressured to perform despite injuries.
Months later, the choreographer publicly apologised. “As a leader, I take full responsibility for the working environment that existed within Rosas and as a person, I want to apologise to all the people I have disappointed and hurt along the way,” she said.
#FlandersNewsService | Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker in Berlin, 2022 © PHOTO JOHN MACDOUGALL / AFP
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