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Rosas Danst Rosas / Yvonne Rainer: Ag Indexical, With A Little Help From H.M.

Introduced by Kyra Norman, Bristol-based dance artist and filmmaker.

Rosas Danst Rosas

Thierry De Mey Rosas danst Rosas is based on the choreography of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and her Brussels-based company, which served as their international breakthrough in 1984. The film was realised in the former Technical School in Leuven, a building by modernist architect Henry Van de Velde. Shorter than the show itself, the film by Thierry De Mey presents a heavily ‘inter-cut’ version of the dance work in which, apart from the cast of four dancers from 1995 and 1996, also all the other performers from the long history of the choreography are featured. The filmic style makes maximum use of the geometrical and spatial qualities of the Van de Velde’s building. Incidentally, the building was thoroughly renovated straight after the film was made, making it one of the last testimonials to the original architecture.

Thierry De Mey, 1997, 57 mins

Yvonne Rainer: Ag Indexical, With A Little Help From H.M.

This film reflects on the choreographic strategies of Yvonne Rainer and her interpretation of George Balanchine’s seminal choreography AGON from 1957. The dance AG Indexical proposes three women trained in modern dance interacting with one ballerina. The film looks at it from two different vantage points, at first in a rehearsal set-up, then in the first public performance of the piece premiered in New York City at Dance Theater Workshop in April 2006. Yvonne Rainer’s twenty-minute re-vision at once pays tribute, parodies, and analyses its classical modernist antecedent. Skirting the realm of dance archaeology and reconstruction, AGIndexical elicits flashes of recognition while turning ‘Mr. B’ over in his grave.

Babette Mangolte, 2007, 44 mins