Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is an indefatigable researcher who, over her career spanning more than twenty years, has explored diverse musical landscapes. A boundary-pushing experimenter, she has brought her dancers, and on rare occasions herself, onto the stage amidst an infinite range of soundtracks where she has sought and devised new expressive modes and movements. With limitless boundaries, her works span from minimalist music by Steve Reich to scores created for her by Thierry de Mey, and from the works of Monteverdi, Mozart, and Bach to Bartók, Schönberg, and Ligeti, as well as the jazz of Miles Davis, the ballads of Joan Baez, and, more recently, classical Indian music.
It is from this latest "love" that the production "Desh," hosted exclusively in Italy for the first time by Oriente Occidente, takes its inspiration. Created in 2005 in collaboration with Spanish dancer Salva Sanchis, her student at PARTS in years past and a favored interpreter in productions like "Bitches Brew/Tacoma Narrows," also seen at Oriente Occidente in 2003, "Desh" is structured in five parts according to what the author has described as an 'arch' pattern: it opens and closes with two duets, at its center is a trio, 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, and moves through a duet for flutes, Raag Khamaj, accompanied by percussion from Tavil Tani, the piece "Dhun" by Hariprasad Chaurasia, and "India" by John Coltrane, an LP historic to 1961 recorded at the Village Vanguard. As is known, "raga" in Sanskrit means 'color, atmosphere,' and each raga is a series of sounds, a melody with a fixed fundamental note. Each raga has a character and personality, corresponding to a particular mood and in the case of the raga Desh is often associated with the theme of absence of the beloved. However, the beauty of this work is found mainly in the choreographic vocabulary dominated by impulses of the arms, the articulated positions of the hands, the balances that drag the bodies into a position of imbalance, and the suspension of bodies in the air.
The piece is suspended between fragility and strength, between calm and frenzied rhythms leading to a trance. Jean-Marie Wynants writes in the daily "Le Soir" about "Desh": “When everything ends and the light returns to the room, you get the feeling of reopening your eyes after a deep meditation.”
Those who see Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker as exclusively abstract, or as a sculptor of gestures and bodies flooding the space carried by music, are mistaken. A 'committed' and 'narrative' De Keersmaeker exists, as demonstrated by her other work "Once," presented at the Festival this year. It is a solo, her third in order of time (after "Violin Phase" in '81 and "Solo for Vincent" in '97), created in November 2002 to songs by Joan Baez. More than forty years after the release of the vinyl "Joan Baez in Concert Part 2," it was 1963, De Keersmaeker felt she wanted to dance this music, born with the protest attitude and pacifist commitment of the American singer. She felt she wanted to combine the private sphere with the public, bringing on stage the past and present, her memories as a child listening to the record given to her sister, and the political situation of today.
The piece opens with Anne Teresa's entry on stage, where she says the word 'once.' The same attack as the song "Once I had a Sweetheart" begins, after a danced part in silence, with the historic LP of Joan Baez, which De Keersmaeker makes us listen to in full. The solo is masterfully expressed between rivers of words heard and displayed on a screen that cradles the dancer. At times she illustrates the lyrics with narrative gestures, at times she opposes the words with a danced commentary. Sober in her blue dress, then semi-nude and disarmed in front of war in the finale, De Keersmaeker builds a piece that oscillates between melancholic memories and warrior spirit. A moving manifesto on non-violence, absolutely not to be missed.
