Biography
Born in 1960 in Belgium, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker studied dance at the Mudra school in Brussels, then at the Tisch School of the Arts in New York. She created her first dance piece, Asch, in 1980. Two years later, she won critical acclaim for Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich. In 1983, De Keersmaeker created Rosas danst Rosas and set up her dance company, Rosas, in Brussels. Following her foundational works, she continued a rigorous and in-depth exploration of the relationship between dance and music. With Rosas, she developed a vast corpus of works delving into musical structures and scores of all eras, from Antiquity to modern times, including popular forms of expression. Her approach to choreography is based on formal principles of geometry and mathematical models, with an eye for nature and social structures. The result is unique perspectives on movements through space and time. De Keersmaeker’s recent works cut to the very essence of her style: geometrically constricted spaces; oscillation between the stark simplicity of a movement’s genesis – for example, walking – and the rich complexity of the choreographic design; and a deep connection between the score, musical or otherwise, and her own writing