Exit Above, after the tempest by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker / Chunky Move: 4/4

Sadler’s Wells Theatre / Queen Elizabeth Hall, London November 2024

The Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker arrived on the modern dance scene in 1982, creating and performing Fase to the rhythmic, repetitive music of Steve Reich. Fascinated, as he was, with building intricate structures out of simple patterns, she followed his lead into the variety of repetition, propelling her dancers through movement sequences again and again while insinuating minute changes into their speed or direction. 

Having established a company, Rosas, in 1983, she never looked back. Since 1995, Rosas has been the resident dance company at La Monnaie, Brussels’ opera house, and De Keersmaeker has directed operas, films, and videos, created new work, and staged her choreography all over the world.

Made last year, Exit Above, after the tempest, combines 12 dancers, the blues guitarist Carlos Garbin, and the extraordinary singer Meskerem Mees, all of whom contribute to the total effect by dancing, boogying and running around on a stage mapped with lines and curves of colored tape.

For a while, the ensemble simply walked, first marking time in a swaying group that spread out; then with a normal stride, away from us and back again; then running until freezing in approximate couples. I noticed only the counts and the relaxed precision in the unexpected shifts of rhythm, because there wasn’t much more to see—the steps sped up but didn’t really change. 

As the piece progressed over 90 minutes, passing through blues, spirituals, and Jean-Marie Aerts’ music, it gradually expanded still further. Two or three people suddenly shared a phrase while the others watched; a break dancer twirled nonchalantly on his head. Arms pinwheeled, cranking up each spinning body’s momentum. The dancers dropped casually into a wide circle, loping backward as an overhead spotlight circled them like a stalker 

When the loose organization disintegrated into an everyone-for-himself rave, clothes were gleefully tossed aside along with focus, and I lost track of the dance’s shape and purpose. Left to entertain myself as the performers’ energy turned inward, I concentrated happily on Mees, whose voice sustained an emotional intensity I couldn’t locate in the choreography.

De Keersmaeker has declared, “The starting point of dance is walking; this refers to both the everyday and the metaphysical, to verticality and horizontality, displacement of our verticality, the backbone, the base, our antenna between heaven and earth.” Presumably she instilled and can identify some metaphysical order in this piece, which developed deliberately into chaos, but I couldn’t discern even a hint of it. My guest went to sleep during the frenetic expression of personal freedom, announcing later, “When I woke up, they were still doing the same thing.”

 Several days earlier, the excitement, continuity and purpose I had missed in Exit Above flew off the stage at Queen Elizabeth Hall from Antony Hamilton’s 4/4, an edgy celebration of ingenuity. Geometry gained fluidity and rhythm acquired density as two teams of four dancers from the Australian company Chunky Move transformed dizzying robotic phrases into increasingly complex configurations.

Positioned on rolling platforms and moving to the impersonal music of single beats, relentless as a metronome, they piled one precise sequence on another with polished efficiency, carving each angular adjustment into the bright space. Their forceful clarity sharpened our attention and added a certain element of suspense; every combination came as a surprise, all the more intriguing for being thoroughly unpredictable.

As the teams rearranged the platforms and spliced the gestural variations together, the overlapping symmetries spread across the stage like mathematics evolving before our eyes. Though drawing on their experience with krump, freestyle hip-hop, house and contemporary dance, the dancers offered more than their physical skill. In their meticulous restraint, I saw the processes operating invisibly behind every aspect of mechanized society and the original ways the body has adapted to the life we’ve invented.

See  https://www.rosas.be/en/agenda/ for European tour dates of Exit Above through May 2025

See chunkymove.com for European tour dates of 4/4 through December 11.