| Seven years since its last production, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Fase: Four Movements on the Music of Steve Reich, has been resurrected just in time for the 70th birthday celebrations of American composer Steve Reich. Shown as a limited engagement at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Fase was inspired by Reich’s early experimental musical compositions from the late 60s and early 70s. Drawing directly from the complex rhythms of Reich’s sounds, Keersmaeker created four choreographed movements that compliment and echo the ideas that make Reich’s music. |  |
Resurrecting Fase – Andrzej Lawn
Seven years since its last production, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Fase: Four Movements on the Music of Steve Reich, has been resurrected just in time for the 70th birthday celebrations of American composer Steve Reich. Shown as a limited engagement at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Fase was inspired by Reich’s early experimental musical compositions from the late 60s and early 70s. Drawing directly from the complex rhythms of Reich’s sounds, Keersmaeker created four choreographed movements that compliment and echo the ideas that make Reich’s music.
Reich’s early harmonic works operate on a series of repeated patterns often played on different tracks that gradually fade in and out of time, now known as phasing. The phasing method ruptured conventional musical time allowing Reich’s music to exist simultaneously on multiple different oscillating timelines in one plane.
Keersmaeker’s first movement is set to Reich’s two-track composition entitled Piano Phase. At the start of the dance, two female dancers stand together on a line parallel to the stage apron with their right arms outstretched and their fingers almost touching. Framed by a white backdrop, the dancers wait for the music to begin. Simply clothed in light-colored monotone dresses dramatically lit by spotlights, their shadows cast long on the blank background, the dancers set themselves in motion with a quick glance at each other.
Starting off in perfect unison, the performers begin spinning on their feet with their right arm extended parallel to the ground. With every turn, each dancer continually moves their arm up and down in a pendulum-like motion recalling a metronome counting off the timing of the music. Their movements are perpetually echoed in the swirling of their dresses and mirrored in their shadows, projected on the backdrop. Like machines, the performers’ timing is dictated by the music, and as the music of Reich’s pianos phases in and out of alignment, the two dancers begin to move off of and back on time. The minute changes and intricate patterns within the music becomes ever more explicit as the movement continues for the entire 23-minute length of the musical score.
The next movement is Reich’s Come Out, a musical composition composed of the spoken phrase, “I had to open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.” Taking place seated on two stools underneath low hanging lights, the stage takes on the presence of a police interrogation room. Without getting up from the stools, the two dancers rotate on their seats moving only their upper body to the music as the audio clip is slowly sped up and phased into a pulsating electronic sound.
Come Out is followed by Keersmaeker’s powerful solo portrayal of Reich’s Violin Phase. Slowly warming up with the music, Keersmaeker performs a series of twists, kicks, jumps and turns. Showing the audience her ability and maturity as a dancer, there are stretches within Violin Phase where the audience ceases to exist and Keersmaeker begins to dance for herself. Fase is then closed out by a playful duet to Reich’s Clapping Music.
The power of the four movements of Fase lies in how well the choreography and the music play off each other, creating a symbiotic organism. The music directly feeds the movements of the dancers and the actions of the dancers continually point back to the music, creating an infinite loop that highlights the complexities inherent in Reich’s compositions. Although Reich’s music alongside Keersmaeker’s Fase appears overwhelming in its precision and accuracy, its tactile qualities are revealed through Reich’s phasing process.
Listening to some recordings of Reich’s music, one can notice that two different performances of the same song sound quite different. The length of the track will vary greatly, at times by many minutes, and the phasing process will start and end at different times. Despite these differences, each recording is still an equally valid and accurate rendering of Reich’s original composition. Precise yet imprecise, on time, off time, Reich’s music takes on a John Cage-like quality. Understanding that perfection is an illusion, Reich finds a more human form of perfection, a perfection that can only exist in imperfection. Keersmaeker’s choreography is aware of this, and shows that real beauty is found when one goes off time to find a rhythm of one’s own while still maintaining a sense of unity within the whole.
