Leap of faith

Traditionally, dance is set to music. But what if the choreography comes first? Judith Mackrell reports on a revolutionary project

Tuesday March 18, 2003
The Guardian

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<small>[ 18 March 2003, 02:52 AM: Message edited by: Emma Pegler ]</small>

Counter Phrases
By Tom Service for The Guardian


Counter Phrases is a unique collaboration between the choreography of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, the film of Thierry de May and the music of 10 composers, ranging from Steve Reich to Magnus Lindberg.
Performed by the Ictus Ensemble, the music accompanies the visuals on three enormous screens. Inverting the usual relationship between music and dance, the 10 pieces were written in response to the completed visuals, and the result is a complex competition between the different media: at times, the music seems to impose itself upon the dance, at others, the visuals dominate.

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Counter Phrases
By Geoff Brown for The Times


REMEMBER The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film? The questing Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker does not seem the type to have drunk deep from Dick Lester’s Goon-esque movie of 1959. But we had the essential ingredients: the running, the jumping, plus jerking the arms, hopping down steps, wriggling the hips. Some light relief, then, for these tortured times? Not a bit. We were watching a serious work, with dance, film and music brought together in a blast of pretentious hot air.

The dancers were from the Rosas company, but they were not flesh and blood: they existed only on three film screens, performing ten routines plus a few linking twiddles against garden landscapes and glass-cum-concrete towers.

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If the tune fits...
The chicken or egg problem always faces choreographers. By Jann Parry for The Observer.

For Counter Phrases, a collaboration between the Ictus music ensemble and Rosas dance company (both based in Brussels), we are alerted to the fact that 10 composers wrote their brief scores for existing choreography by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.

Each composer was sent a video of their bit of dance, filmed by Thierry De Mey, a polymath composer himself. They then had the choice of matching the dance phrases or going their own way.

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