Text Maarten Baanders (photo Herman Sorgeloos)
After the sensory work in Keeping Still - Part I and The Song had already been reduced to a minimum goes dance philosopher Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker in the final part of the trilogy, 3Abschied, confronting the most extreme reduction possible in life: death. Her choice of music again stands out Der Abschied, the last part of Das Lied von der Erde By Mahler.
Is it possible to dance to music about death and acceptance of the approaching end? At the sight of 3Abschied it seems not. De Keersmaeker seems to be sinking through the bottom of what is still dance. It starts with merely listening to the music on CD and ends with Der Abschied sung by De Keersmaeker himself. Both scenes are mostly reminiscent of someone unprotected in the living room being carried away by the music, trying to sing along and purely impulsively making some dance moves. The ecstasy can be read from her face. You can see from everything that her inner life is bubbling and undulating. But the singing is not beautiful. And you can no longer call it dance theatre.
What happens between this beginning and end? The 13-member ensemble Ictus accompanies mezzo-soprano Ursula Hesse von der Steinen in a thinned-out version of Der Abschied. De Keersmaeker dances between the musicians. The dance seems hardly more than the air moving between the instruments. By moving with the hand gestures of the vocalist and the musicians, De Keersmaeker seems to be expressing that there is really only music, and dance is no more than the movement that is made when making music anyway.
And then there is the contribution of Jérôme Bel, with whom De Keersmaeker created this performance. It is hard to imagine that De Keersmaeker does not perceive him as a disturbing element in the reflections she herself builds up with such seriousness. He orders the musicians to perform the final piece of Der Abschied play again, walking away one by one. Then one more time, but dropping dead one by one. It is inane and corny and distracts from the thoughts to which this performance might still inspire the audience.
Rosas (Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Jérôme Bel and Ictus), 3Abschied. Seen 12 June, Stadsschouwburg, Amsterdam. Still to be seen there: 13 June, with interview with De Keersmaeker afterwards
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A performance that starts with the collective listening to a CD (with a false start and an abrupt stop at the end), followed by the compulsory reading of the lyrics, after which Abschied is stripped down further and further, from an arrangement by Schoenberg - with musicians demonstratively falling dead from their seats - to a version for piano and clumsy voice, is a very flat, and at best a very delayed postmodernist gesture in an attempt to add something to the music by breaking it down. How sad. Surely Pina Bausch estimated that better at the time with Le Sacre du Printemps.
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