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COMMUNICATIONS AND PARTNERSHIPS
DEPARTMENT
PRESS KIT
ANNE TERESA DE KEERSMAEKERWORK/TRAVAIL/ARBEID
26 FEBRUARY - 6 MARCH 2016
WORK/TRAVAIL/ ARBEID
#DeKeersmaeker
ANNE TERESA DE KEERSMAEKER26 FEBRUARY - 6 MARCH 2016 GALERIE SUD, LEVEL 1
CONTENTS
1. PRESS RELEASE PAGE 3
2. AN INTERVIEW WITH ANNE TERESA DE KEERSMAEKER PAGE 5
3. WORK/TRAVAIL/ARBEID, PAGE 6
A CHOREOGRAPHICAL EXHIBITION
4. THE CHOREOGRAPHER AND THE ROSAS COMPANY PAGE 8
5. THE ICTUS CONTEMPORARY MUSIC ENSEMBLE PAGE 10
6. CONCERT: TOURBILLON GRISEY PAGE 11
7. COMPANY PARTNER PAGE 12
8. VISUALS FOR THE PRESS PAGE 13
9. PRACTICAL INFORMATION PAGE 14
10 February 2016
communication and partnerships
department
75191 Paris cedex 04
director
Benoit Parayre
telephone
+ 33 (0)1 44 78 12 87
press attaché
Anne-Marie Pereira
telephone
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www.centrepompidou.fr
communication and partnerships
department
75191 Paris cedex 04
director
Benoît Parayre
telephone
+ 33 (0)1 44 78 12 87
press attaché
Anne-Marie Pereira
telephone
+ 33 (0)1 44 78 40 69
www.centrepompidou.fr
press attachés for live shows
of Centre Pompidou
MYRA
Yannick Dufour & Alexandre Minel
telephone
+ 33 (0)1 40 33 79 13
Opéra National de Paris
Head of press relations department
Emmanuelle Rodet-Alindret
telephone
+ 33 (0)1 40 01 21 64
www.operadeparis.fr/saison-15-16/
ballet/rosas
© photo : Anne Van Aerschot
22 January 2016
PRESS RELEASE
ANNE TERESA DE KEERSMAEKER
WORK/TRAVAIL/ARBEID26 FEBRUARY - 6 MARCH 2016GALERIE SUD, LEVEL 1
What would it mean for choreography to perform as an exhibition?
Melding disciplines, the Centre Pompidou is to collaborate with the Opéra National de Paris
to present “Work/Travail/Arbeid”, a choreographical exhibition conceived by renowned
Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. The result is a project that undermines
conventional ways of understanding, developing and experiencing both dance and exhibition.
The distinguishing feature of the Centre Pompidou, what sets it apart, is its being a
multidisciplinary centre of arts and culture, the improbable encounter of museum, live
performance, cinema, library and institute of acoustic/musical research (Ircam). I have sought
to make this encounter even more fruitful by promoting inter-disciplinary collaboration in the
programming of each space, for inter-disciplinarity, this formative feature of the Centre’s
character, is also an essential aspect of contemporary art. It now finds itself magnificently
exemplified by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s singular project in the Galerie Sud.
Serge Lasvignes, President of the Centre Pompidou.
The choreography has been especially created and adapted for the exhibition space in
the Centre Pompidou’s Galerie Sud.
“Work/Travail/Arbeid” is an adaptation of ”Vortex Temporum”, a choreographed work to music
of the same title by French composer Gérard Grisey, conceived in the first instance for the
temporal, spatial and perceptual conditions of the stage.
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In performing “Work/Travail/Arbeid” in the Galerie Sud, the dancers of the Rosas company and the
musicians of the Ictus ensemble are not just bringing a choreography to the Centre Pompidou; they are
also rendering dance in the form of a nine-day exhibition, in which the initial duration of the piece is
expanded to nine-hour cycles. A new section of the choreography is presented each hour, with a new
combination of dancers and musicians.
This project transforms the very material and conditions that have long been essential to dance,
in particular the rigorous structure and choreographic language for which De Keersmaeker is known,
into an entirely new exhibition form.
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has for many years now explored the relations between music and dance,
in isolation and together. Vortex Temporum shares the same structure, asking us as it were to “see”
movement when we only have the sound to go on, and to grasp the music when only the steps are visible.
This choreographical exhibition reveals the complex conceptual, technical, and physical labour – in sum,
the work – that is the backbone of her entire œuvre.
After the Centre Pompidou, this exhibition that was initially conceived for the WIELS Contemporary Art
Centre in Brussels (March – May 2015) will travel to Tate Modern, London (8 – 10 July 2016) and then
MoMA, New York (25 March – 2 April 2017).
Usually, a dance performance brings the layers accumulated in the rehearsals together.
Here, I thought it would be nice to see the simplicity, the beauty, of the physical movements
as separate layers, to suggest the infinite combinations available to these layers.
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Dance at the
Venice Biennale of 2015.
A choreographical exhibition at Centre Pompidou produced in collaboration with the Opéra
National de Paris, in co-production with the Rosas company and WIELS (Brussels),
supported by the Fondation BNP Paribas.
“Work/Travail/Arbeid” was developed with the support of De Munt/La Monnaie,
the Center for Fine Arts Brussels (BOZAR), Kaaitheater, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Ictus,
BNP Paribas Fortis, Fondation BNP Paribas, and the Rolex Institute.
On the social media:
#DeKeersmaeker
@centrepompidou@operadeparis
https://www.facebook.com/centrepompidou
https://www.facebook.com/operadeparis
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Bernard Blistène - What does it mean for you, to make an exhibition of dance? How did the idea come
to you?
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker - The suggestion was made to me when I was working on Vortex Temporum.
The performance is designed in layers, on several levels, with a gradual accumulation of elements. That’s what
inspired the layered conception of time of the exhibition. I didn’t want to transfer theatre habits to a museum
gallery. On the contrary, I was attracted to the opposite idea: taking one’s time, extending the choreographic
process over a much longer time. A performance pulls together all its layers. The exhibition isolates them, one
by one and then suggests the infinity of possible combinations.
BB - How did you construct the argument of the piece?
ATDK - The starting point was the structure of Vortex Temporum, whose elements were then deconstructed,
the voices separated. Rather than working with seven choral voices together, the little visual and musical units
are considered independently, then by twos, by threes, by fours and so on. Basically, it’s as if the composition
of a performance were revealed stage by stage, not in didactic fashion but as they happen. The result is a nine-
hour cycle whose length does not coincide with the opening time of the museum, ten hours a day (Galerie Sud
is open from 11 am to 9 pm, excepting Tuesdays – Ed.).
BB - How do you see the relationship between dance and the visual arts today?
ATDK - I don’t believe that all art is political, but I do think that Jean Genet was right when he said that the
artist puts into question the way things are, which implies some form of anarchism. We find the world of today
disorienting in its complexity and multiplicity.
There’s no centre any longer; there’s nothing left but the consumption of things. Confronted with this, my
anarchism involves cultivating a certain simplicity, an inertia, a slowness, so as to achieve intensity without the
spectacular. It’s a modest attempt to create a new framework on the basis of which it might be possible to look
at things in a new way. Dance can bring something quite new to the idea of the exhibition: a shared experience
of a new sense of the present moment. And that’s not either a theatrical moment, in the black box; more fluid
and less impatient, the space-time of the museum, of the white cube, exposes us to the uncontrollable.
It can thus happen that a moment is lived as an unexpected experience of the collective.
AN INTERVIEW WITH
ANNE TERESA DE KEERSMAEKERAn interview with Bernard Blistène, director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, published in the
Centre Pompidou’s magazine, Code Couleur 24.
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WORK/TRAVAIL/ARBEID
What would happen to choreography when it is presented according to the code of the exhibition?
This question stands at the centre of Work/Travail/Arbeid, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s new project.
The task doesn’t seem very hard, and yet the exercise challenges the conventions of both contemporary
dance and exhibition, and our ways of thinking, constructing and experiencing them. Theatre and
museum remain very different from each other, in their architectural organisation, their meaning as
institutions, their ways of seeing things, and the protocols they follow.
Unlike contemporary dance, traditionally performed over a fixed period of time and conceived as a single
event presented on stage to an audience seated opposite, an exhibition displays works of art in a space
with daily opening and closing times, over a period of several days, during which visitors come and go as
they wish.
The conceptual rejigging involved in finding out what a dance piece would be like if it were reworked
according to the codes of the exhibition is what drives the development of De Keersmaeker’s Work/
Travail/Arbeid.
The renowned Belgian choreographer responded to the challenge by re-conceiving her Vortex Temporum,
a dance piece to music of the same title by composer Gérard Grisey, in accordance with the radically
different temporal, spatial and perceptual conditions of the museum environment.
Vortex Temporum was a more-or-less hour-long stage performance by seven dancers of the Rosas
company, accompanied by six musicians and a conductor from the Ictus ensemble. Work/Travail/Arbeid
calls on the same dancers (here two alternating groups) and musicians, and has them perform through
the Centre Pompidou’s normal opening hours. Originally devised to match the length of Grisey’s
composition, the choreography is expanded into nine-hour cycles (nine being a key number in the
organisation of De Keersmaeker’s piece), each hour offering a different choreography, combination of
dancers (and musicians) and exhibition space. Each new iteration of the cycle is slightly different, so that
the choreography continues to develop, cycle after cycle, day after day. The whole follows a logic that is
itself “choreographed” in being based on strict mathematical and geometrical principles.
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The result is not a performance displaced into a museum, that is, a dance ensemble performing in a white
cube rather than a black box, but a dance piece fundamentally reconceived as an exhibition. There is then
no starting time, and the exhibition space remains just that. The public is not being invited to a timetabled
performance.
There is no stage, no numbered seating, no beginning and no end, nor is the work to be viewed from any
specific direction. And very likely, given the development from one cycle to the next, there is not either any
possibility of seeing the work in its entirety.
The outcome is a project that transforms dance’s very material and its long-established constitutive
conditions – here notably the rigorous structure and distinctive style that made De Keersmaeker famous –
into an entirely new form of exhibition. An exhibition that also reveals, as possibly no other of the
choreographer’s works could do, the conceptual, technical and physical activity – in short, the work – that is
the backbone of her entire achievement.
Extract from Elena Filipovic, “Vertiginous Force/The Exhibition at
Work,” in Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker: Work/Travail/Arbeid (Brussels:
Mercatorfonds/Fonds Mercator, 2014).
The exhibition was first presented at WIELS in Brussels, 20 March – 17 May 2015.
CREDITS
Concept & choreography: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
Curator: Elena Filipovic
Dramaturge: Bojana Cvejic
Artistic advisor: Ann Veronica Janssens
Artistique assistant: Femke Gyselinck
Performers (Rosas) : Boštjan Antoncic, Balázs Busa, Carlos Garbin, Marie Goudot, Cynthia Loemij,
Sarah Ludi, Julien Monty, Michaël Pomero, Camille Prieux, Gabriel Schenker, Igor Shyshko, Denis
Terrasse, Thomas Vantuycom, Samantha van Wissen
Music: Vortex Temporum, Gérard Grisey (1996)
Musical director: Georges-Elie Octors
Musicians (Ictus): Jean-Luc Plouvier (piano), Chryssi Dimitriou (flute), Dirk Descheemaeker (clarinet),
Igor Semenoff (violin), Jeroen Robbrecht (viola), Geert De Bièvre (cello)
Costumes: Anne-Catherine Kunz
Project coordinators: Inge Pieters, Anne Van Aerschot
Technical director: Joris Erven
PUBLICATION
A catalogue documenting the project, consisting of four separately bound sections, has been published
by WIELS, Rosas and Mercatorfonds/Fonds Mercator. The first part deals with preparations for the
project, while the second offers a more in-depth look at the exhibition itself. The catalogue also includes
a reproduction of the original Vortex Temporum programme, photographs by Babette Mangolte, Herman
Sorgeloos and Anne Van Aerschot, together with new essays by Douglas Crimp, Bojana Cvejic, Brian
Dillon, André Lepecki and Catherine Wood.
Available at the Centre Pompidou bookshop
In English | €49.95 | ISBN 978 94 6230 0880 | 4 paperback volumes, boxed | 115 illustrations
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THE CHOREOGRAPHER
AND THE ROSAS COMPANY
In 1980, after studying dance at the Ecole Mudra in Brussels and the Tisch School of the Arts in New
York, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (born 1960) created Asch, her first choreographic work.Two years
later, came the premiere of Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich (which would be performed
at the Centre Pompidou in March 1983, and again in March 2012 as part of the“Nouveau Festival”).
De Keersmaeker established the dance company Rosas in Brussels in 1983, while creating the work
Rosas danst Rosas. Since these breakthrough pieces, her choreography has been grounded in a rigorous
and prolific exploration of the relationship between dance and music. She has created with Rosas
a wide-ranging body of work engaging the musical structures and scores of several periods, from early
music to contemporary and popular idioms. Her choreographic practice also draws formal principles
from geometry, numerical patterns, the natural world, and social structures to offer a unique perspective
on the body’s articulation in space and time.
From 1992 until 2007, Rosas was in residence in the Brussels opera house De Munt/La Monnaie. During
this period, De Keersmaeker directed a number of operas and large ensemble pieces that have since
been performed by repertoire companies worldwide. In Drumming (1998) and Rain (2001), both with Ictus
contemporary music ensemble, complex geometric structures in point and counterpoint, together with
the minimal motivic music of Steve Reich, created compelling group choreographies that remain iconic
and definitive of Rosas as a dance company.
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De Keersmaeker’s latest pieces mark a visible « stripping down » of her choreography to essential
principles: spatial constraints of geometric pattern; bodily parameters of movement generation,
from the utmost simplicity of walking to the fullest complexity of dancing; and close adherence to a score
(musical or otherwise) for the choreographic writing.
Taking her penchant for writing movements from musical scores to an extreme level of sophistication,
Vortex Temporum had a one-to-one ratio between the Rosas dancers and the live Ictus musicians,
bringing the choreography and the music into meticulous dialogue. In 2015, Rosas premiered Golden
Hours (As you like it), using for the first time a body of text (Shakespeare’s As You Like It) as the score for
movement, thus allowing the music (Brian Eno’s 1975 album Another Green World) to recede from strict
framework to soft environment. Later that year, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker continued her research
into the relationship between text and movement in Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph
Rilke, a creation based on the eponymous text by Rainer Maria Rilke.
www.rosas.be
Facebook: rosasdancecompany
Hans Galle
Press & communication
e-mail: [email protected]
telephone : + 32 (0)2 344 55 98
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ICTUS,
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC ENSEMBLE
ICTUS is a Brussels-based contemporary music ensemble of some twenty musicians. Formally
established in early 1994 as a smaller group of musicians around Rosas’ Amor Constante and formed
during Wim Vandekeybus’s tour, Ictus has since then shared a home with the Rosas company and
accompanied most of its performances.
Since 2004 the ensemble has also been resident at the Opéra de Lille, where in addition to a regular
programme of themed concerts and educational activities, it collaborates on a production once a year.
Ictus has also worked with the KASK Conservatorium in Ghent to establish a master’s in contemporary
music performance.
The ensemble has played in leading concert halls and at major festivals (Musica Strasbourg, Witten,
Brooklyn Academy of Music, Paris Festival d’Automne, Ars Musica, Royaumont, Milano Musica, Wien
Modern and many others) and has issued more than twenty recordings, mostly on the Cyprès label, while
also accumulating a large body of virtual music.
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CONCERT: TOURBILLON GRISEY
TOURBILLON GRISEY
On 5 March, Ircam and the Pompidou will devote an evening to Gérard Grisey, who died in 1998, at the
age of 52, after completing his Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil. A powerful influence on the music of
today, he believed that spectralism represented a revolution in music that swept away all existing canons
of composition. A music of process and of irreversible time, fusion of harmony and form, his L’Icône
paradoxale – inspired by Piero della Francesca, is a foundational work that has inspired numerous visual
analogies.
CONCERT
TOURBILLON GRISEY
5 MARCH, 7:30pm, GRANDE SALLE
“To do away with the musical material in favour of pure duration is a dream I have pursued for many
years. Vortex Temporum is perhaps only the story of an arpeggio in space and time, beneath and beyond
our auditory window, swirling in memory during the months devoted to the writing of the piece”. This
masterpiece of Grisey’s has afforded inspiration to many artists: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has set
dance to it. In An Experiment With Time, Daniele Ghisi, who also finds inspiration in Grisey, proposes a
curious machine to dilate time, bringing about the coexistence of past, present and future.
Gérard Grisey Vortex Temporum / Daniele Ghisi An Experiment With Time (a commission by Ircam-Centre
Pompidou and the Divertimento Ensemble, first French performance). Raphaël Cendo, Radium (French
government commission, first performance).
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At the suggestion of the teams from BNP Paribas Fortis, who support the programme of events organised by the W art centre , the Foundation met with Anne Teresa e Keersmaeker in Brussels to discuss this particularly ambitious project.
The BNP Paribas Foundation, a sponsor of both museums and contemporary choreographic creations, was naturally keen to support Work/Travail/Arbeid, not only because of the pioneering nature of this project, which brings together choreography and the museum space, but also because of the quality of the art venues associated with it: the work will initially be shown at the art centre in Brussels, with the support of , before being performed in Paris, from February 26th until March 6th 2016, at the Centre Pompidou, in association with the Opéra national de Paris.
A co-production by the art centre and the Rosas dance company, Work/Travail/Arbeid explores the status of choreography as an art form by bringing dance into the museum space and raising questions about how a choreographic work - an artwork in its own right - should be presented in a museum, and how it can be maintained throughout the period it is open to the public. When the darkness of the stage meets the light of the museum, what new possibilities does this open up for choreographic works?
The BNP Paribas Foundation, a committed patron of the Centre Pompidou
Carrying out philanthropic actions in Arts & Culture, Social Inclusion and Environment, the BNP Paribas Foundation is committed for more than 30 years to promoting and preserving the cultural heritage of museums.In this capacity the BNP Foundation supports for long the Centre Pompidou. Its cooperation with this prestigious cultural institution initiated in 1989: hence, the BNP Paribas Foundation dedicated 2 publications of the Musées et Monuments de France collection to paintings and sculptures & graphic arts of the museum.In 2007, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Centre Pompidou, the BNP Paribas Foundation has shown its commitment to contemporary heritage through a triple patronage programme: supporting the restoration of Yayoï Kusama artwork, My Flower Bed, editing the publication of contemporary collections and the donation of Jean Prouvé’s ladder kept until then in a strong-room of the bank. Given the close and strong ties that exist, the BNP Paribas Foundation is partnering once again with the Centre Pompidou accompanying – through its programme BNP Paribas pour l’Art – the restoration of two greatest works of the museum: the
painted by Max Ernst in 1923, master piece of the surrealism and Le Magasin de Ben created from 1958 which symbolizes an objet d’art concept constantly evolving.
Press contact For the BNP Paribas Foundation
Heymann, Renoult Associées Agency, Sarah Heymann Eléonore Grau [email protected] 33 1 44 61 76 76 Julie Oviedo [email protected] 33 1 44 61 76 76
The BNP Paribas Foundation, sponsor of Anne Teresa e Keersmaeker and the Rosas dance company for Work/Travail/Arbeid
COMPANY PARTNER
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VISUALS FOR THE PRESS
© photo : Anne Van Aerschot
© photo : Anne Van Aerschot
© photo : Anne Van Aerschot
© photo : Anne Van Aerschot
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6. PRACTICAL INFORMATION
PRACTICAL INFORMATION ALSO AT THE CENTRE CONTACT
Centre Pompidou
75191 Paris cedex 04
telephone
+ 33 (0)1 44 78 12 33
metro
Hôtel de Ville, Rambuteau
Opening hours
Exhibition open 11am - 9pm
every day except Tuesdays
Admission
€14
Reduced price: €11
Valid the same day for the musée
national d’art moderne and all
exhibitions. Free admission for
members of the Centre Pompidou
(holders of the annual pass).
Admission to the Centre Pompidou is
free for under-18s.
Young people under 26*,
teachers and students at schools of
art, drama, dance and music
and members of the Maison des
artistes may visit the Museum
for free and buy tickets for
exhibitions at the concessionary
rate. Admission to the Museum
and to children’s workshops is
free on the first Sunday of each
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Tickets can be purchased at
www.centrepompidou.fr
and printed at home.
With these, visitors can go in directly
without queuing at the ticket
office.
* nationals of Member
States of the EU or the
European Economic Area
aged 18–25.
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CHRISTIAN RIZZO
Ad noctum
17, 18, 19, 20 FEBRUARY - 8:30pm
GRANDE SALLE, LEVEL - 1
with Ircam
DANCE FILM
3 MARCH - 8pm
CINEMA 1
Rain, 2014, 70’
A film by Louise Narboni.
Music by Steve Reich. Choreography
by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.
The screening will be followed by a
discussion with the choreographer.
IRCAM CONCERT
Tourbillon Grisey
Gérard Grisey Vortex Temporum
5 MARCH - 7:30pm
GRANDE SALLE, LEVEL - 1
GÉRARD FROMANGER
17 FEBRUARY - 16 MAY 2016
press attaché
Céline Janvier
+ 33 (0)1 44 78 49 87
ANSELM KIEFER
UNTIL 18 APRIL 2016
press attaché
Élodie Vincent
+ 33 (0)1 44 78 48 56
Serge Laurent
Head of live shows department