Partita 2: Bach in sneakers

(© Anne Van Aerschot)

“Bach is a composer I will always keep coming back to,” Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker once told an interviewer. In the past, the great composer, who recently topped Klara’s top-hundred chart yet again, inspired the choreographer to create gems such as Toccata (1993) and Zeitung (2008). For Partita 2, to a piece of music in six movements for solo violin, she has been joined by the renowned violinist Amandine Beyer and the French dancer/choreographer Boris Charmatz. Over recent years, Charmatz’s radically idiosyncratic work and boyish, impulsive body language have won him quite a reputation.

At the beginning of De Keersmaeker’s Partita 2, everything is pitch black, as Beyer first of all plays the entire score. “Watching music and listening to dance” is a favourite saying of De Keersmaeker’s, and Bach’s music does indeed itself contain a hefty portion of dance, even before a single movement has been made. Following that, the two dancers emerge into the space, in silence and wearing coloured sneakers: on the floor, in the best Rosas tradition, a number of concentric circles have been drawn as a geometric equivalent of Bach’s sophisticated structure. Along those lines there develops a choreography that is constructed straightforwardly on the basis of steps, hops, and running and which then becomes gradually more and more complex. The contrast in movement language between De Keersmaeker and the younger Charmatz is one of the attractions of this stripped-down and yet extremely vital tribute to Bach. The final part, accompanied by the legendary Chaconne, is one of the most beautiful things the celebrated choreographer has ever created: an intense duet in which she seems to suggest that we are lost without support from each other.

ANNE TERESA DE KEERSMAEKER, BORIS CHARMATZ & AMANDINE BEYER: PARTITA 2 19 & 20/12, 20.30, 21/12, 15.00, €8/16/20, Kaaitheater, square Sainctelettesquare 20, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-201.59.59, www.kaaitheater.be