Four Decades in Twenty Bodies

Rosas: Five Generations on Stage

Most dance performances ask the viewer to simply sit back, watch, and quietly enjoy. Not so with *Rosas danst Rosas*. This is a performance you undergo. An hour of repetition, exhaustion, and minimalism, danced right to the edge of fatigue. In an exceptional cast of twenty dancers spanning five generations, you can now see the piece in Paris and in Bruges.

On 6 May 1983, Rosas danst Rosas premiered at the small Théâtre de la Balsamine in Brussels, during the Kaaitheater Festival. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker was barely in her twenties at the time. Built from everyday movements such as sitting, lying down, running, and turning, the piece was read as a feminist statement and grew into a landmark of postmodern dance. Since then it has been performed almost five hundred times, by some thirty Rosas dancers across five generations.

Past and Present Meet

For the reopening of Rosas, P.A.R.T.S., and Ictus's renovated home base in Forest, earlier this year, De Keersmaeker devised an exceptional version: *MULTICAST Rosas danst Rosas*. Twenty dancers between the ages of 20 and 67 share the stage — from the four women who created the piece in 1983 (De Keersmaeker herself, Adriana Borriello, Michèle Anne De Mey, and Fumiyo Ikeda) to dancers who hadn't yet been born when the work was created. The youngest dancers belong to the most recent cast, while the others come from the four earlier casts that have performed the piece since 1983.

Going from four to twenty performers naturally called for a different approach. For MULTICAST, the original score was restructured. Movement phrases that followed one another in 1983 are now danced simultaneously by different subgroups. While one group repeats phrase A, another does phrase B, until everyone shifts together into C. In this way, sequence becomes simultaneity. You still get the exact same movements, now carried by bodies of different ages, side by side on the same floor — and in doing so, past and present meet. Where the youngest dancers bring the piece with sharp, fast attack — after all, it emerged in the wake of punk — part of the older guard brings a trained composure that carries just as much weight.

MULTICAST Rosas danst Rosas gives you the chance to relive that performance from long ago, both with the dancers of back then and with a sharp new generation.

More info and tickets: Chaillot Paris and Concertgebouw Brugge

Image: Multicast Rosas danst Rosas © Anne Van Aerschot

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