Tag : Percussion

The Rain premiere was on 10 January 2001, on the stage of Le théâtre royal de la Monnaie, in Brussels. Its choreography is based on Music for 18 Musicians, a work composed in 1976 by Steve Reich for four female voices, violin, cello, two clarinets, four pianos and a large ensemble of keyboard percussion instruments (marimbas, xylophones and vibraphone).

As in Drumming, composed a few years earlier (in 1998) and based on a work by the same composer, a large ensemble of dancers modulate space and time in accordance with the complex movements of the whole group, without ever leaving the stage and with only a secondary role for solos and duos. The obsession with the ‘grand form’, with the ‘grand flow’ and with continuity is taken to the extreme: in one hour of polyphonic excess, with a single breath, De Keersmaeker builds her performance with an uncompromising unity of material and style. On the stroboscopic rhythms of Reich’s music, the choreographer builds a diabolical intertwining of variations using very limited material: one choreographic phrase for the male dancers, another for the female. _“In Drumming and Rain, choreography encompasses integral composition, which, similarly to the logic of integral serialism in the music of Webern or Stockhausen, extends monothematicism and structure to all parameters: vocabulary, syntax, counterpoint, spatial organization, time, but also to set design, lighting, and costumes,”_ writes Bojana Cvejić (1).

Drumming and Rain, displaying a certain sense of excess, a certain ‘spirit of profusion’ that had fascinated the public in Rosas danst Rosas in 1983, are both inhabited by a wild and exuberant virtuosity, a joy of dancing on the verge of exhaustion, fuelled internally by a kind of joyous headiness. _“While Lyotard’s celebration of profusion and waste could be afforded by the economic affluence of the 1970s, and would nowadays be contrasted with the politics of austerity, the performances of Drumming and Rain in 2012 revive vitalist, machinic, and libidinal thought. By suggesting that dance can be a form of conducting intensities, hidden within a choreographic structure and then released from it once this structure is, like a machine, set into accelerating motion, these performances reclaim the importance of the living, both through its machinic and organic characteristics,”_ writes again Bojana Cvejić (2).

Drumming and Rain also share the fact of having been choreographed very quickly with a kind of creative ease previously unknown to De Keersmaeker (a “sudden harvest” is how she describes it). They undoubtedly constitute a key episode in her choreography; one could almost say a ‘classic moment’. Almost 20 years of experimentation, technical research and love of music come together suddenly in a utopian vision of an ‘Art of Fugue’ of movement, in step with the new complexity of our age.

In 2011 Rain was included in the repertoire of the Paris Opera. As De Keersmaeker's choreography had never been set down in writing, this required a major transmission operation: the dancers of Rosas taught the work to the ballet company of the Paris Opera by way of an arduous reconstruction process. The Ictus musicians were playing live from the pit. They know the work better than anyone (I hope you will excuse my presuming as much) after having played it dozens of times in concert while touring with Rosas and having worked with Steve Rich in person during Rain performances in New York. In 2024 it's the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen dancers' turn to make this great work their own—a work that seems destined never to stop touring. And the unstoppable is what it’s all about!

(1) and (2): Bojana Cvejić and Anne Teresa De Keermaeker, ‘Drumming & Rain:
A Choreographer's Score’, to be published by Fonds Mercator (October 2014).