Repeating Rosas danst Rosas

Abstract

This article explores how connecting choreographic ideas with dancers’ articulations of embodied experience may help us better understand practices of dance transmission. Using the multimodal publication A Choreographer's Score (2012) as an analytical framework, the article combines the inside knowledge of choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker with a series of in-depth interviews that were conducted with different generations of Rosas dancers on their experience with the performance and transmission of the choreography Rosas danst Rosas. The goal of this text is to propose an expansion of the notational endeavor of A Choreographer's Score by adding testimonies of the dancers’ corporeal ‘enunciation’. As such, this article is a further investigation of ‘performance-style’, which performance scholar and musicologist Bojana Cvejić distinguishes as one of the main thematic parameters that runs through the four scores of Rosas’ ‘Early Works’. It connects the repetitions within De Keersmaeker's work with the question of how these practices themselves can be repeated by dancers in their long-term engagement with the company's repertory. By showing how they breathe life into the complex choreographic architecture of the choreography, dancers provide a deeper understanding of the information that is made available in A Choreographer's Score. These considerations also tie into the present debate in dance studies on how ‘dance knowledge’ could be shared beyond the boundaries of its own discipline.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The research for this article was made possible by the support of Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Christel Stalpaert (Ghent University) for her advice on this article.

Notes

1 The series A Choreographer's Score consists of three volumes that were co-authored by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Bojana Cvejić: Fase, Rosas Danst Rosas, Elena's Aria, Bartók (2012), En Atendant & Cesena (2013) and Drumming & Rain (2014).

2 Siobhan Davies RePlay (2009): www.siobhandaviesreplay.com, Oral Site: www.oralsite.be, Pre-choreographic Elements: http://www.ickamsterdam.com/index.php?id=4,5. Pre-choreographic Elements is a continuation of previous research projects around documentation, notation and transmission of dance: Inside Movement Knowledge (2008–10) and The Notation Research Project (2004–7), of which results were discussed in Capturing Intention (deLahunta, Scott: 2007).

3 A notable exception is the section on breath in Louppe (2010: 54–62).

4 A relevant exception is the incorporation of the gesture follower application by IRCAM researcher Frédéric Bevilacqua in the Double Skin/Double Mind installation, which was developed by dance company Emio Greco|PC as part of the research project Inside Movement Knowledge. In this installation the gesture follower produced breathing sounds in response to dance movements.

5 However, this analogy is all the more apparent in the recent Rosas performance My Breathing is My Dancing (2015), a duet performed by flautist Chryssi Dimitriou and De Keersmaeker, who dances ‘in the steps of the flutist's breath’ (Rosas: 2015).

6 Schirren was De Keersmaeker's rhythm teacher at the Mudra dance school and in the second half of the nineties De Keersmaeker invited him to teach at PARTS (Schirren 2011).