A dialogue between dance and art - in her new live performance, Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Rosas meets the Museum Folkwang collection

The Ruhrtriennale and Museum Folkwang jointly present the world premiere of Y. In this new production by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker/Rosas, the Belgian choreographer and dancer responds to works from the Museum Folkwang collection. Under the title Y, short for "Why", De Keersmaeker explores the potential of questions and the relationship between figuration and abstraction, image and movement. Y will be shown at the Museum Folkwang in Essen from 17 August to 8 September 2024, from Thursday to Sunday.

The inspiration for De Keersmaeker's choreographic exploration of the Museum Folkwang collection is Édouard Manet's large-format painting Portrait de Faure dans le rôle d'Hamlet (The Singer Jean Baptiste Faure as Hamlet, 1877). Hamlet's famous quote "To be or not to be", the theme of doubt and how it unfolds in Shakespeare’s tragedy, guide De Keersmaeker in her cross-epochal and cross-media selection of works from the Museum’s painting, sculpture, photography, graphic art and poster collections: Manet's Hamlet enters into an exchange with Barnett Newman's Prometheus Bound (1952), Caspar David Friedrich's Woman before the Setting Sun (c. 1818), and Mark Rothko's Untitled (White, Pink and Mustard), (1954), for example.

De Keersmaeker and dancers Nassim Baddag/Jean Pierre Buré, Synne Elve Enoksen, Nina Godderis, and Robson Ledesma explore the tension between the artworks and transform these works through the (dancing) human body. They expand both figurative and abstract works in space and time. The dancers respond with expressive movements to works such as Rudolf Belling's sculpture Cain and Abel (1918), a depiction of the prehistory of human violence. Five young people on the beach, photographic portraits by Rineke Dijkstra from the 1990s, are deconstructed by the smallest movements. The life-size photographs (2020, 2023) by the Polish collective The Archive of Public Protests thematise today's crises and discourses. In De Keersmaeker's Y, they reflect on the significance of dance in protest culture and call for a dance-based dialogue at eye level.

The choreography Y traces a trajectory through an 800 square metre exhibition space in the Museum Folkwang. The audience is invited to follow the dancers freely through the space and thus participate in the dynamic interplay of dance, visual art, and music. The soundscape developed for the project by De Keersmaeker's long-time collaborator Alain Franco, combines sound material from classical, pop, electronic and contemporary music as well as poetry and interviews, thus evoking memories from our collective memory.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has been developing choreographies for museum spaces since 2015. This has resulted in highly acclaimed projects such as 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 director of the Ruhrtriennale, Ivo Van Hove, is part of the Ruhrtriennale's collaborations with the Museum Folkwang, such as those with Mette Ingvartsen (2021), Candice Breitz (2019) and Bouchra Khalili (2018).

A production by Rosas. A work commissioned by the Ruhrtriennale in co-production with the 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. Supported by the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation.

Information

Y
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Rosas
17. August – 8. September 2024
Thursdays/Fridays 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Saturdays/Sundays from 2 to 6 pm

Tickets: www.ruhrtriennale.de 
Price: 14 €, concession 7 €