Y – Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Rosas

A work commissioned by the Ruhrtriennale in co-production with Museum Folkwang

Dance meets visual art, meets music – in this year's collaboration with the Ruhrtriennale, Belgian choreographer and dancer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Rosas responds to works from the collection of Museum Folkwang. Under the title Y, short for why, she explores the power of questions in her commissioned work for the Ruhrtriennale. Addressing the current crises and the state of uncertainty we find ourselves in, what can we do other than ask questions?

In developing the concept for the choreography, she takes Édouard Manet's large-format oil painting, Portrait de Faure dans le rôle d'Hamlet (The Singer Jean Baptiste Faure as Hamlet, 1877), acquired in 1927, as a starting point. Hamlet’s famous quote ‘To be or not to be’ and the theme of doubt as it unfolds in Shakespeare's Hamlet inspire the selection of works. In this selection seeming opposites meet with both abstract and figurative art as well as a cross-epochal and cross-media approach: Manet seeks an exchange with Barnett Newman's Prometheus Bound (1952), Caspar David Friedrich's Woman before the Setting Sun (around 1818) with Mark Rothko's Untitled (White, Pink and Mustard) (1954).

Following her choreographic principle of "embodying an abstraction", Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, together with dancers Synne Elve Enoksen, Nina Godderis, Robson Ledesma and Nassim Baddag/Jean Pierre Buré/Solal Mariotte, explores the tension between figuration and abstraction through the lens of the human (dancing) body. Visitors are invited to follow the dancers freely through the space and experience the dynamic interplay between dance, visual arts, theatre and music realized in collaboration with De Keersmaeker’s long-time musical companion Alain Franco. This immersive experience embodies the spirit of the Gesamtkunstwerk, envisioned by Folkwang Museum founder Karl Ernst Osthaus.

Since 2015, De Keersmaeker has been developing choreographies for museum spaces. This resulted in highly-acclaimed projects including Work/Travail/Arbeid (2015, Wiels, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, MoMA), Dark Red (2020-2022, Kolumba, Fondation Beyeler, Neue Nationalgalerie), and Forêt (2022, Louvre).

The project under the new artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale, Ivo Van Hove, joins collaborations from previous years such as those with Mette Ingvartsen (2021), Candice Breitz (2019) and Bouchra Khalili (2018).

Produced by Rosas; Commissioned by Ruhrtriennale in co-production with Museum Folkwang.

Rosas is supported by the Flemish Community and the Flemish Community Commission (VGC), and by Tax Shelter of the Belgian Federal Government, in collaboration with Casa Kafka Pictures.

Supported by Ammodo. Funded by Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach-Stiftung.

Tickets: 14 € / concession 7 € (only via www.ruhrtriennale.de)

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