GLA55

Certain “early works” have a very distinct resonance. They do not age and keep reminding us of the energy and radicality that characterize the emergence of a personal style. For the first time, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker works with the ‘principles’ of a minimalist icon: Philipp Glass. Music in Contrary Motion, Music in Fifths, Music in Similar Motion, Music with Changing Parts: the four pieces selected by De Keersmaeker all date from the period 1969–1970, a fruitful phase in the composer's career. They bear the traces of an encounter: during his studies in Paris, Philip Glass was hired as an assistant to the Indian composer and sitar player Ravi Shankar. Shankar had asked him to transcribe his music into Western notation, a difficult problem to solve that became a revelation for Glass: “I removed all the bar lines. And suddenly I saw the flow of the rhythm.” This entire aesthetic adventure is the humus of the GLA55 project. Here, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker connects with a principle that has characterized her entire career: making maximum use of minimal, abstract material. This involves concepts from trance, as well as the repetitive-obsessive turning around one's own axis, also known as ‘spinning’. Circles, spirals, and ellipses form the key figures in this performance in ten movements, just like the ∞ sign or the loop of infinity. For this occasion, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker brings together six dancers from Rosas with the musicians of the ensemble Bl!ndman (whose 2024 American Icons recordings of Glass were universally praised) and with her regular partners from the ensemble Ictus. • Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker created Asch (her first choreographic work) in 1980, following her dance studies at Mudra in Brussels and the Tisch School of the Arts in New York. Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich premiered two years later. In 1983, De Keersmaeker founded the dance company Rosas in Brussels, during the development of the performance Rosas danst Rosas. Her choreographic work is based on a meticulous exploration of the relationship between dance and music. With Rosas, she has created a comprehensive oeuvre that utilizes musical structures and scores from different eras, from early music to contemporary composition and pop. Her choreographic practice also derives formal principles from geometry, mathematical schemes, nature, and social structures –resulting in a unique perspective on the movement of the body in time and space. In 1995, De Keersmaeker founded the Performing Arts Research and Training Studios (P. A. R. T. S.) school in Brussels. Over the past ten years, her work has also explored the visual arts, producing projects in museum contexts such as the Louvre, Tate Modern, and MoMA. In 2023, she created EXIT ABOVE with a cast of 13 dancers, and in 2024 Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Inventione, inspired by Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Her latest creation BREL (2025) is a collaboration with dancer and choreographer Solal Mariotte.