Features
A state of fragility: Improvisation in the new piece of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
I'll play it first and tell you what it is later. (Miles Davis)
That was my gift? having the ability to put certain guys together that would create a chemistry and then letting them go; letting them play what they knew, and above it. (Miles Davis)
In Rosas? studios, dancers are improvising and experimenting with new vocabularies. This is typical of the creative labour that precedes the birth of a new production. But this time, for the first time, the dancers are working without a safety net. There is no model outlining the spaces for them to fill. No choreographic phrase to serve as a unique matrix to be varied infinitely. The stakes are entirely different here. With these dancers, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is taking on Bitches Brew by Miles Davis.
In August 1969, two days after Woodstock, the great trumpeter Miles Davis locked himself up in a studio with 13 of the musicians he called his ?stock recording band?, outstanding musicians whom he invited to record with him. He suggested to them a very restricted number of chords and a few beats. On this basis, they began to improvise continuously in a session lasting three days. All of it recorded in real time.
Five more inspired days in November 1969 as well as in January and February 1970 followed this legendary session. The material was explosive. The musicians then listened to the eight days of improvisation again and for, the first time, an album was cut based on the montage of material born at the very instant it was recorded. Unclassifiable, complex and permeated with an explosive freedom, Bitches Brew came out in April 1970 and created a seismic shift in the music world. Two vinyl records, with seven tracks captured in their grooves, the first two of which develop over more than twenty minutes: Pharaoh?s Dance & Bitches Brew (LP 1), Spanish Key, John MacLaughlin, Miles Runs the Voodoo Down, Sanctuary and Feio (LP 2).
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is fresh from her solo Once, a personal encounter with the texts of the pacifist "folksinger" Joan Baez and, in particular, with her 1963 live album Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2. Her solitary movements built on improvisations starting from an imaginary classical barre. Entering into a dialogue with the folksinger?s words and silky voice, the choreographer danced the conflict between pride and disintegration, conquest and retreat, expansion and collapse, certitude and doubt, the directness of a line and its deviation, clear exposition and introspective meandering.
Again the "sixties". "A tumultuous decade", she notes, "of which Miles Davis in 1969 seems to capture the vibrancy in Bitches Brew. This album is not a break with the past. It extends the past, continues on in a musical direction that Miles had been exploring for a very long time. The double album seems to sum up the musical, political and cultural changes that had just shaken the United States. At a time when the spectacular popular success of the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown and Sly Stone was relegating jazz to the status of obsolescence, Miles Davis shattered the common view by absorbing all the excitement of rock and funk and the frenzy of young talent into his own universe. America was on fire, set ablaze by fiery speeches, riots and assassinations. John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had just been killed. It was the rise of the violent and pacifist African-American radical movements against racial discrimination. Citizens were protesting en masse against President Johnson?s unpopular war in Vietnam. Bitches Brew seems to galvanise these explosions.? The choreographer continues thoughtfully: "it is the first time since the late 1960s that people are today mobilising en masse against war?"
Not a break with the past, but its extension. In the same way, this encounter with Miles Davis sets in motion a choreographic challenge for De Keersmaeker that extends and radicalises her work, already performed in the shadows, in the studio, but that had so far never been revealed to the public in the final notation of her works. This challenge is improvisation.
The choreographer wonders: "just how much should an ensemble be structured to allow each dancer the possibility to develop in his or her own way? I don't yet have the answer to this question. I?ve always structured my choreographies around rigorous organisational and strategic hierarchies of space and time. These strategies are inspired by mathematical systems and natural phenomena: underlying layers along the perfectly proportional lines of the Golden Section and Fibonacci's recurrent mathematical series: individual axes for each dancer whose "home" is the starting point of a spiral. I had a minimal point of departure: a single choreographic phrase, from which the dancers drew maximal variations: a reduction to the infinite. It is very difficult work for them, as each movement takes form because it has been done and redone, counted and recounted, meticulously constructed on the basis of what existed before and of what is to come. Today, this inevitably entails notions of freedom, split-second decisions and working with the present. I have never spent so much time in the studio improvising material with the dancers, experimenting with it and searching without the slightest preconceived idea of a final architecture. And it doesn?t even worry me!"
Bartók, Ligeti, Monteverdi, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Webern, Schoenberg, Steve Reich, Stravinsky? all composers whose compositional systems provided models that inspired the choreographer?s increasingly contrapuntal writing. With In real time and the improvisers of Aka Moon, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker delves back into her listening experience of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. In the studios of P.A.R.T.S., David Zambrano and Elisabeth Corbett, William Forsythe?s key dancer, transmit very elaborate systems of collective and individual improvisation to the students.
Bitches Brew comes close, which makes all the hierarchical structures of the organisation of space and time explode musically.
In Rosas? studios, the dancers have established for themselves an incredible reserve of movements in constant transformation. There is raw material, as well as an overarching choreographic phrase that provides the matrix, and there are several varying cells taken from Once which they start playing literally on the instrument of their bodies while changing speeds, directions and accents... Material that is more lyrical and more structured. "Maybe it could play the role of a creative and autonomous bond modelled after the electric piano sections in Bitches Brew." Another theme arises that is radically new to the dancers and the choreographer: the appropriation and transformation of ?dancing steps? from old jazz movies, hip hop and break dancing figures, as well as African dance. All very "rhythmic" material, less structured, which strikes the floor ? the ground ? with regular beats. "Really groovy!" the choreographer smiles, searching for parallels in dance to a rhythm section in a jazz ensemble. ?There is a soloist, like Miles? trumpet. The soloist's role? Free electron and guide at the same time. "Dancing to music", which is to say "listening to music", which means to immerse yourself in what you hear happening, to absorb it and to improvise. "In jazz, all musicians are like ?speaking voices? and when one instrument takes the stage, the others say: he is telling his story. I like that." There are still ?shadows?, dancers who latch onto fragments of the others? architecture, fixing them in space at a very slow tempo. And there are "travelling voices", dancers who move among the various functions from one voice to another.
"Now, the thing is to find a way to allow all these individual voices to speak together and interact in the moment without descending into chaos! How can we preserve this complexity and keep a certain legibility?" We are in March 2003: looking for a pattern. The moon and the seasons have cycles; the planets follow ellipses; the constellations, a sun; tornadoes are governed by natural laws? "How much disorder can a system bear before it explodes?" the choreographer wonders. "All these questions are profoundly linked to the image I have of the world at this time. This creation will be called Bitches Brew but also Tacoma Narrows, because there was a superb suspension bridge, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, in Washington state. Its warped structure regularly adopted a sinusoidal shape under the steady rhythm caused by the movement of traffic. One day, that will be like any other day, the construction that danced gently will suddenly collapse. "Sudden change with gradual causes": certain structures can endure in such an extreme state of fragility that a permanent pressure on one of its fault lines can suddenly annihilate the whole. We are in such a state of fragility and are trying to share its beauty and precarious harmony without stifling the trembling of the moment."
The word "Tacoma" derives from a version of an Indian word that evokes the colour white, the white of snowy peaks and of a sheet of virgin paper. White will be the colour of the costumes in Bitches Brew ? a radically "black", almost tribal, resolutely urban musical fusion. The fabrics worn by the white Rosas dancers will be immaculate, milky, raw, silvery or gilded. The dancers? space will be encased in beige, a fluid curtain enfolding the stage and resting on high wooden poles.
Anne Teresa flips though the book that makes her dream, a scientific book that describes all the sophisticated forms that nature uses to grow and to initiate movement. "One could say a book about dance!" she says. The cover depicts a detail of the complex structure of a snow crystal. Its title asks: "What is the shape of a snowflake?" The answer given on one of the pages: "The shape of a snowflake."
Claire Diez
That was my gift? having the ability to put certain guys together that would create a chemistry and then letting them go; letting them play what they knew, and above it. (Miles Davis)
In Rosas? studios, dancers are improvising and experimenting with new vocabularies. This is typical of the creative labour that precedes the birth of a new production. But this time, for the first time, the dancers are working without a safety net. There is no model outlining the spaces for them to fill. No choreographic phrase to serve as a unique matrix to be varied infinitely. The stakes are entirely different here. With these dancers, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is taking on Bitches Brew by Miles Davis.
In August 1969, two days after Woodstock, the great trumpeter Miles Davis locked himself up in a studio with 13 of the musicians he called his ?stock recording band?, outstanding musicians whom he invited to record with him. He suggested to them a very restricted number of chords and a few beats. On this basis, they began to improvise continuously in a session lasting three days. All of it recorded in real time.
Five more inspired days in November 1969 as well as in January and February 1970 followed this legendary session. The material was explosive. The musicians then listened to the eight days of improvisation again and for, the first time, an album was cut based on the montage of material born at the very instant it was recorded. Unclassifiable, complex and permeated with an explosive freedom, Bitches Brew came out in April 1970 and created a seismic shift in the music world. Two vinyl records, with seven tracks captured in their grooves, the first two of which develop over more than twenty minutes: Pharaoh?s Dance & Bitches Brew (LP 1), Spanish Key, John MacLaughlin, Miles Runs the Voodoo Down, Sanctuary and Feio (LP 2).
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is fresh from her solo Once, a personal encounter with the texts of the pacifist "folksinger" Joan Baez and, in particular, with her 1963 live album Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2. Her solitary movements built on improvisations starting from an imaginary classical barre. Entering into a dialogue with the folksinger?s words and silky voice, the choreographer danced the conflict between pride and disintegration, conquest and retreat, expansion and collapse, certitude and doubt, the directness of a line and its deviation, clear exposition and introspective meandering.
Again the "sixties". "A tumultuous decade", she notes, "of which Miles Davis in 1969 seems to capture the vibrancy in Bitches Brew. This album is not a break with the past. It extends the past, continues on in a musical direction that Miles had been exploring for a very long time. The double album seems to sum up the musical, political and cultural changes that had just shaken the United States. At a time when the spectacular popular success of the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown and Sly Stone was relegating jazz to the status of obsolescence, Miles Davis shattered the common view by absorbing all the excitement of rock and funk and the frenzy of young talent into his own universe. America was on fire, set ablaze by fiery speeches, riots and assassinations. John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had just been killed. It was the rise of the violent and pacifist African-American radical movements against racial discrimination. Citizens were protesting en masse against President Johnson?s unpopular war in Vietnam. Bitches Brew seems to galvanise these explosions.? The choreographer continues thoughtfully: "it is the first time since the late 1960s that people are today mobilising en masse against war?"
Not a break with the past, but its extension. In the same way, this encounter with Miles Davis sets in motion a choreographic challenge for De Keersmaeker that extends and radicalises her work, already performed in the shadows, in the studio, but that had so far never been revealed to the public in the final notation of her works. This challenge is improvisation.
The choreographer wonders: "just how much should an ensemble be structured to allow each dancer the possibility to develop in his or her own way? I don't yet have the answer to this question. I?ve always structured my choreographies around rigorous organisational and strategic hierarchies of space and time. These strategies are inspired by mathematical systems and natural phenomena: underlying layers along the perfectly proportional lines of the Golden Section and Fibonacci's recurrent mathematical series: individual axes for each dancer whose "home" is the starting point of a spiral. I had a minimal point of departure: a single choreographic phrase, from which the dancers drew maximal variations: a reduction to the infinite. It is very difficult work for them, as each movement takes form because it has been done and redone, counted and recounted, meticulously constructed on the basis of what existed before and of what is to come. Today, this inevitably entails notions of freedom, split-second decisions and working with the present. I have never spent so much time in the studio improvising material with the dancers, experimenting with it and searching without the slightest preconceived idea of a final architecture. And it doesn?t even worry me!"
Bartók, Ligeti, Monteverdi, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Webern, Schoenberg, Steve Reich, Stravinsky? all composers whose compositional systems provided models that inspired the choreographer?s increasingly contrapuntal writing. With In real time and the improvisers of Aka Moon, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker delves back into her listening experience of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. In the studios of P.A.R.T.S., David Zambrano and Elisabeth Corbett, William Forsythe?s key dancer, transmit very elaborate systems of collective and individual improvisation to the students.
Bitches Brew comes close, which makes all the hierarchical structures of the organisation of space and time explode musically.
In Rosas? studios, the dancers have established for themselves an incredible reserve of movements in constant transformation. There is raw material, as well as an overarching choreographic phrase that provides the matrix, and there are several varying cells taken from Once which they start playing literally on the instrument of their bodies while changing speeds, directions and accents... Material that is more lyrical and more structured. "Maybe it could play the role of a creative and autonomous bond modelled after the electric piano sections in Bitches Brew." Another theme arises that is radically new to the dancers and the choreographer: the appropriation and transformation of ?dancing steps? from old jazz movies, hip hop and break dancing figures, as well as African dance. All very "rhythmic" material, less structured, which strikes the floor ? the ground ? with regular beats. "Really groovy!" the choreographer smiles, searching for parallels in dance to a rhythm section in a jazz ensemble. ?There is a soloist, like Miles? trumpet. The soloist's role? Free electron and guide at the same time. "Dancing to music", which is to say "listening to music", which means to immerse yourself in what you hear happening, to absorb it and to improvise. "In jazz, all musicians are like ?speaking voices? and when one instrument takes the stage, the others say: he is telling his story. I like that." There are still ?shadows?, dancers who latch onto fragments of the others? architecture, fixing them in space at a very slow tempo. And there are "travelling voices", dancers who move among the various functions from one voice to another.
"Now, the thing is to find a way to allow all these individual voices to speak together and interact in the moment without descending into chaos! How can we preserve this complexity and keep a certain legibility?" We are in March 2003: looking for a pattern. The moon and the seasons have cycles; the planets follow ellipses; the constellations, a sun; tornadoes are governed by natural laws? "How much disorder can a system bear before it explodes?" the choreographer wonders. "All these questions are profoundly linked to the image I have of the world at this time. This creation will be called Bitches Brew but also Tacoma Narrows, because there was a superb suspension bridge, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, in Washington state. Its warped structure regularly adopted a sinusoidal shape under the steady rhythm caused by the movement of traffic. One day, that will be like any other day, the construction that danced gently will suddenly collapse. "Sudden change with gradual causes": certain structures can endure in such an extreme state of fragility that a permanent pressure on one of its fault lines can suddenly annihilate the whole. We are in such a state of fragility and are trying to share its beauty and precarious harmony without stifling the trembling of the moment."
The word "Tacoma" derives from a version of an Indian word that evokes the colour white, the white of snowy peaks and of a sheet of virgin paper. White will be the colour of the costumes in Bitches Brew ? a radically "black", almost tribal, resolutely urban musical fusion. The fabrics worn by the white Rosas dancers will be immaculate, milky, raw, silvery or gilded. The dancers? space will be encased in beige, a fluid curtain enfolding the stage and resting on high wooden poles.
Anne Teresa flips though the book that makes her dream, a scientific book that describes all the sophisticated forms that nature uses to grow and to initiate movement. "One could say a book about dance!" she says. The cover depicts a detail of the complex structure of a snow crystal. Its title asks: "What is the shape of a snowflake?" The answer given on one of the pages: "The shape of a snowflake."
Claire Diez