Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker finds fresh life at Avignon Festival — review

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The celebrated Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker isn’t known for her sense of fun. Of the 60 works she now has to her name, most are austere, exacting exercises in musicality. Yet in EXIT ABOVE — after the tempest, one of the highlights of this summer’s Avignon Festival, she suddenly makes space for exuberance, with thrilling results.

Is it the new generation of dancers she is working with? The 13-strong cast are young, bright, multitalented, and De Keersmaeker has taken note. The curly-haired Solal Mariotte sets the tone with a shape-shifting solo, spinning on one knee and arching his back in gravity-defying dives to the floor.

While Shakespeare’s The Tempest is merely alluded to throughout, Mariotte acts as an Ariel figure to Nina Godderis’s commanding Prospero, her arms curling and darting through space with the force of a magician. Both seamlessly move from De Keersmaeker’s trademark walks and symmetrical lines to looser techniques, and when the group comes together, they keep finding individual expression within the choreographer’s swirling patterns.

Meskerem Mees, who composed much of the score as a series of variations on the work of the blues artist Robert Johnson, brings her crystalline folk voice to the proceedings, only for the dancers to interject with rousing scenes. There is breakdancing, death drops, even twerking — startling in De Keersmaeker’s minimalistic universe, and all the more irresistible for it.

EXIT ABOVE — after the tempest is the latest success for De Keersmaeker in Avignon, a festival that has been good to her over the years. New director Tiago Rodrigues has decided to revive one landmark production created in the French city each year, and the first to get the nod was De Keersmaeker’s En Atendant, made in 2010.

En Atendant was designed to unfold at dusk, in the open-air Célestins cloister, without artificial lighting. The sun simply sets on the dancers as they respond soberly, artlessly, to intricate 14th-century polyphonic music.

On opening night, a pigeon decided to make its stage debut during the opening flute solo, skipping and bobbing its head to the rhythm. It didn’t feel out of place in a production so aware of its surroundings, one that simply ends when the last dancer is nearly in the dark. Revivals are increasingly tough to bring to the audience in the current economy, as De Keersmaeker said during a conference earlier that day. It’s good to see the Avignon Festival advocating for them, and allowing a new generation to experience En Atendant.

★★★★★

Festival continues to July 25, festival-avignon.com