Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker — Work/Travail/Arbeid — Centre Georges Pompidou — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 26 → March 6, 2016

Galerie Sud, Level 1

What if choreography was staged as an exhibition? Melding disciplines, the Centre Pompidou is to collaborate with the Opéra National de Paris to present “Work/Travail/Arbeid”, a choreographical exhibition conceived by renowned Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. The implications of her project undermine conventional ways of understanding, developing and experiencing both dance and exhibition.

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The distinguishing feature of the Centre Pompidou, what sets it apart, is its being a multidisciplinary centre of arts and culture, the improbable encounter of museum, live performance, cinema, library and institute of acoustic/musical research (Ircam). I have sought to make this encounter even more fruitful by promoting inter-disciplinary collaboration in the programming of each space, for inter-disciplinarity, this formative feature of the Centre’s character, is also an essential aspect of contemporary art. It now finds itself magnificently exemplified by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s singular project in the Galerie Sud. Serge Lasvignes, President of the Centre Pompidou.

The choreography has been especially created and adapted for the exhibition space in the Centre Pompidou’s Galerie Sud.

“Work/Travail/Arbeid” is an adaptation of ”Vortex Temporum”, a choreographed work to music of the same title by French composer Gérard Grisey, conceived in the first instance for the temporal, spatial and perceptual conditions of the stage.

2 In performing “Work/Travail/Arbeid” in the Galerie Sud, the dancers of the Rosas company and the musicians of the Ictus ensemble are not just bringing a ballet to the Centre Pompidou; they are also rendering dance in the form of a nine-day exhibition, in which the initial duration of the piece is expanded to nine-hour cycles.

A new section of the choreography is presented each hour, with a new combination of dancers and musicians.

This project transforms the material and context that have long been essential to dance, giving new expression to De Keersmaeker’s rigorous approach to choreographic composition.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has for many years now explored the relations between music and dance, in isolation and together. Vortex Temporum shares the same structure, asking us as it were to “see” movement when we only have the sound to go on, and to grasp the music when only the steps are visible. This “choreographical exhibition” reveals the conceptual, technical and physical labour — the work, indeed — that underlies her entire production.

After the Centre Pompidou, this exhibition initially conceived for the WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels (March — May 2015) will travel to Tate Modern, London (8 — 10 July 2016) and then MoMA, New York (25 March — 2 April 2017).

A dance performance, in principle, pulls together all the strata accumulated during work in rehearsals. I thought here that it would be interesting to see the simplicity and beauty of the physical movements in isolation from the whole, layer by layer, and so suggest the infinity of possible combinations of these elements.