Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, an indefatigable researcher, has explored a wide array of musical landscapes over her career spanning more than twenty years. A boundary-pushing experimenter, she has brought her dancers, and occasionally herself, to the stage with an infinite range of soundtracks, exploring and devising new expressive modes and movements. Without limits or boundaries, her works range from minimalist music by Steve Reich to compositions created for her by Thierry de Mey, and include works by Monteverdi, Mozart, and Bach, as well as Bartók, Schönberg, and Ligeti. She has engaged with jazz by Miles Davis, ballads by Joan Baez, and more recently, classical Indian music.
From this latest 'love', she created the production Desh, which Oriente Occidente presents in its first and exclusive Italian premiere. Co-created in 2005 with the Spanish dancer Salva Sanchis, her former student at PARTS in years past and a favored interpreter of productions like Bitches Brew/Tacoma Narrows, also seen at Oriente Occidente in 2003, Desh is structured in five parts following an 'arc' format as defined by the author: it opens and closes with two duets, with a trio in the center, preceded and followed by two solos.
An intimate piece for just three performers—De Keersmaeker, Sanchis, and Marion Ballester—Desh opens with Raga Desh, from which it takes its title. It unfolds into a duet for flutes, Raag Khamaj, accompanied by Tavil Tani percussion, the composition Dhun by Hariprasad Chaurasia, and India by John Coltrane, a historic LP from 1961 recorded at the Village Vanguard. As is well known, 'raga' in Sanskrit means 'color, atmosphere', and each raga is a series of sounds, a melody with a fixed fundamental note. Each raga possesses its own character and personality, corresponding to a particular mood, and in the case of Raga Desh, it is often associated with the theme of the absence of a loved one.
However, the beauty of this piece lies primarily in its choreographic vocabulary dominated by arm impulses, intricate hand positions, balances that propel bodies into positions of imbalance, and suspensions of bodies in the air. It is a piece suspended between fragility and strength, between calm and frenzied rhythms that lead to trance. Jean-Marie Wynants of the newspaper Le Soir writes eloquently about Desh: "When everything ends and the light returns to the hall, it feels like reopening your eyes after deep meditation."
Yet, those who think of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker solely as an abstract author or a choreographer who meticulously crafts gestures and bodies flooding space, seemingly devoid of 'narrative', are mistaken. There exists a 'committed', 'narrative' De Keersmaeker, as demonstrated by her other work, Once, presented at the Festival this year.
