Traditionally, dance is set to music. But what if the choreography comes first? Judith Mackrell reports on a revolutionary project (exerpts from an article published in The Guardian on March 18, 2003)

Dance and music go back a long way together, they're the most intimately connected of all the arts, yet during most of their affair dance has taken a dependent role. Even George Balanchine, the most dazzlingly inventive of choreographers, was happy to admit: "I cannot move, I do not even want to move, unless I hear the music first."

These roles, however, have been deliberately and elaborately reversed in Counter Phrases, a collaboration between the Brussels-based Rosas Dance Company and Ictus Music Ensemble. Instead of choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker fabricating her steps to a piece of music, 10 composers were commissioned to write a score for one of her existing dances. Ictus founder Jean-Luc Plouvier gave his chosen composers a very free hand in terms of duration, style and approach, but even so, the experience turned out to be a jolt to some of their habits. Unused to working around another artist's vision, another artist's language, some doubted what they could add to the project, while others felt daunted by the overload of information. One of the composers, Luca Francesconi, said: "Each language is a universe of its own, you have to struggle to find a relationship between them."

Struggle wasn't exactly what the project's initiators had in mind, more "an effective, constructive dialogue" between contemporary dance and music, and they did everything possible to smooth that exchange. Clearly it wasn't possible to have a bunch of composers sitting around a studio scribbling notes while the dancers rehearsed their moves. Instead they were sent a film version of one of De Keersmaeker's existing stage works, April Me.

For the purposes of the project, the choreography had been divided into 14 sections, each of which was filmed outside in a different garden. The architecture and atmosphere of each location - woods, flowerbeds, urban roof terrace, lakeside - gave a luxuriantly different look to each segment. So when film director Thierry De Mey sent out one to each of the 10 composers (the other four were to be left unscored), he had high hopes that their musical responses would vary dramatically. "You throw something out, you want to be surprised by what you get back."

At last week's premiere, it was clear from the finished production and the comments some of the composers made about their contributions that they'd all been as surprising, and as surprised, as De Mey had desired.

Steve Reich, for instance, had been determined to yield none of his creative independence, brusquely pointing out: "I don't do film music." He'd watched his allotted segment carefully (it was the roof terrace) and waited till he saw a good entry point for the music. Thus, during the first 40 seconds of his finished segment, nothing is heard but the scrape, patter and thud of the dancers' feet. Then, on an explosive repeated jump, Reich's music too seems to leap into the film. While composing, he'd noted down key structural changes in the choreography and synched these with changes in his own structure. Otherwise he'd allowed his music to follow its own logic. In the film there are vivid correspondences - a woman's jabbing elbow movement that seems propelled by a sharp and muscular musical phrase - but Reich delights in insisting that such moments were pure serendipity. (...)

A much less bullish Robin de Raaff admitted that he'd panicked when he first saw his segment - a lyrical, but vertiginously filmed sequence of a man dancing down a steep stone staircase. There seemed nothing for him to add. But the implicit scenario of a man descending and meeting a woman reminded him of the Orpheus myth, which in turn motivated the story and structure of his own music. It begins in a high fluting register and descends into deep bass, modulating into even darker depths even when the man climbs back up the stairs. (...)

(...) what makes the whole thing hang together is De Mey's masterly filming of the choreography. Counter Phrases is shown on three huge screens, like a triptych, which hang just above the heads of the musicians on stage. Sometimes the images run sequentially between the screens, sometimes they're deconstructed, sometimes they're duplicated. De Mey (who's also one of the contributing composers) brings a strong musical sensibility to the rhythm of the editing and the counterpointing of the images. He's also passionately revealing of De Keersmaeker's style. Sometimes the film underscores the dance rhythm, sometimes it moves into such intense close-up that we seem to get under the skin of the dancers' gestures, sometimes it exaggerates the visceral impact of the choreographic devices, shooting a whirling group sequence from a giddy height or a tender duet from underwater. His lighting crew have also made magic out of each location - the colours of the gardens, echoed in Dries van Noten's costumes for the dancers, are fabulous, saturated, exotic.

The music, instead of sounding fragmented, emerges like a series of meditations on the dance, even a set of love letters to its peculiar beauties. I didn't ask Plouvier if it was coincidental that all the 10 composers in the project were men. But at a moment when dance has music so elaborately playing to its own tune, at a moment when this historically feminised art form is so authoritatively setting the pace, it does seem very fitting.