Treasures

Tanzjournal 4/05
Gesa Pölert

“This is an imprint of my voice“, Mu-Yi Kuo explains the coloured stripes projected on the screen behind her. “It is unique. Just as unique as my thumbprint”. As if to prove this, the Chinese performer sings a vowel, and then runs it across the computer-generated image of her voice: a red trail on a blue-green background. The Belgian brother and sister Thierry and Michèle Anne de Mey are famous for such experiments. For the last 20 years, they have been developing an art which concentrates on the individual raw material of body and matter, he as a musician and filmmaker, she as a dancer and choreographer.

They (Michèle Anne and Thierry De Mey) collaborated once more on “13 Reasons … (to sing)”, commissioned by the Folkwang Tanzstudio, just as they used to do with Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. This time, Thierry De Mey doesn’t contribute an original score but older pieces, choreographed and composed to make them interlock. They form detailed sound images, condensed representations of the moods of different places and moments in time, ranging from quiet knocking sounds and rhythmic saxophone chaos to the jagged glacier lines of a string ensemble. The dancing (in simple, light everyday clothes) drifts through these images without robbing them of their mystery. It starts out as a simple chorus line, gradually dissolving into solos and small groups. …

The nine dancers’ fleeting gestures and forms always evolve into the same few basic lines: gliding across the floor, bodies stretched, brief tensions between two partners. Spinning, above all, vertical or on the floor. At one point, the magnificent Justo Moret Ruiz hangs on to a rope, spinning madly like a wound-up doll. The mood shifts from light to surreal: violins describe a deep lake, the light paints shadows on the screen, and at the back of the stage Lotte Rudhard, too, becomes a doll hanging from a rope.

This art makes visible what a treasure authenticity is. The brother and sister work with the simplest, most natural materials. Some white chalk dust on the floor is enough for them to re-locate the atmosphere on the bare stage again and again, plus lighting to paint the times of the day and the seasons for example when the dancers creep through whirling chalk dust like ghosts in the attic.

Thierry De Mey’s sounds are not computer-generated but rather filtered out of reality with great dedication. And the dancers - even when they dance abstract forms - make the personal element visible, particularly within unfamiliar structures. All this transforms into a 90-minute dance poem; light and tense, in polyphonic and atmospheric clarity.

Fascinating: Michèle Anne De Mey and Thierry De Mey’s choreography for the Folkwang Tanzstudio “13 Reasons… (to sing)” with marvellous music

Westdeutsche Zeitung, arts pages, July 5, 2005
Bettina Trouwborst

Essen. Anyone who, like the Folkwang Tanzstudio (FTS), invites the De Mey brother and sister to develop a guest choreography has also invited Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s spirit into their house. Anne Michèle and Thierry De Mey have close ties to the Flemish choreographer’s work. In 1982, the two women presented a post-modernist milestone with their “Fase”, choreographed to Steve Reich’s music. They formed the nucleus of the famous “Rosas“ company, founded in 1983.

With his band, Ictus, Thierry contributed music from day one and is now an internationally renowned composer and filmmaker. The brother and sister have just been appointed artistic directors of Charlerois/Danses. So the idea presented itself to proceed according to the old minimalists’ method in the premiere of “13 Reasons … (to sing)” at the Neue Folkwang Aula and start by teaching the marvellous Essen company about the addition and subtraction of energy.

The first third of the evening is the strongest, when the five female and four male dancers, dressed in intense colours, stalk up and down or form systematically but minimally changing geometries. The strict formations are imperceptibly translated into a certain casualness by means of tiny swings of the hips. The dancers struggle for freedom of movement, start running, fall down, roll through the white dust. Solos lasting only seconds, tailored to individual characters, interrupt the group dynamics.

Resurrección Rivera, a dancer like a volcano, screws himself into the ground, furiously spinning, before he cuts the air like an enemy with his arms and legs. Lotte Rudhart, who, incidentally, will shortly join „Rodolfo Leoni Dance“, celebrates her endless limbs. It is Thierry De Mey’s sensitive sound composition which can make this test arrangement for dancers fascinating.

The first crossings are still accompanied by the rhythm of their feet. The airy swings of hips underline drumbeats as gently as if butterfly wings were brushing against fur. Intensified, percussion drips into this space full of falling and tumbling dancers. The strings enter into a shrill argument, transforming a trio into a heated mini-drama.
So the arts are engaged in constant dialogue - a dialogue that couldn’t be more fruitful. …

Exciting, enduring, acrobatic

NRZ, July 4, 2005

(…) Over the course of the evening, nine dancers, who are taxed to the very limits of their artistic and acrobatic skills of speed, endurance and the vocabulary of movement, perform without a break for 90 minutes. The piece develops rapidly from gently striding formations to low percussion sounds to a recurrent breaking-up of this tutti block by eruptive solo intermezzi through to rumbling computer beats growing louder and louder. Various dance solos featuring lightning-quick movements on the chalk-covered floor fascinated the audience. (…)

All the elements were finely tuned to each other: that steady build-up of the piece with those crazy, angular, sharply contoured movements of the arms and legs, those violent leaps, the stage design with its chalk floor and the video, this harmony with the music.

WAZ Essen, July 4, 2005

(…) This 90-minute-piece demands an extreme degree of staying power and acrobatic skills of the dancers. The ZEIT once wrote about the Folkwang Tanzstudio: “Avant-garde even after 70 years”; and we can only confirm it after this performance.

Westfalische Rundschau, July 13, 2005

… The physical achievement during this unbroken one-and-a-half-hour programme deserves the highest recognition. One could call it dance acrobatics if that didn’t constitute an underestimation. Meditative strides keep recurring, followed by changes to tireless chases; all this was performed like clockwork, precise, rhythmical, and crystal-clear. The quiet moments in the musical phases were fascinating, just like the awakenings which lead to ecstasies.

There is nothing to limit the audience’s imagination - they themselves must interpret what is performed in gestures and forms. (…)