★★★☆

Two works by Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker are being performed at this year’s Sydney Festival.

The Opera House is hosting Fase, the work that catapulted De Keersmaeker into the big league in 1982 when she was just 22. Fase established the young dancer’s interest in looping, repetitive organisations of movement set to contemporary compositions.

Vortex Temporum, at Carriageworks, is a 2013 work performed by De Keersmaeker’s Rosas company, which was founded in 1983 off the back of Fase’s acclaim. Gérard Grisey’s 1996 composition was written for six musicians and De Keersmaeker has given each musician a corresponding dancer – two in the case of the pianist – to shadow and interpret physically the sound each instrument produces.

The space is starkly cavernous, and the distances both musician and dancer have to walk to get to the front of the stage feels like a declaration of intent – certainly of pace. The six musicians (piano, flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello) are from Ictus, a Brussels-based contemporary music ensemble. They’re the first to stride out. They play, then walk off. Then the dancers appear, positioned in a semi-circular formation on a floor covered in chalk ovals, as though a compass has drawn a circumference over and over again in the middle of the stage.

The dancers echo music that is no longer there – an act of interpretation that’s also one of imagination, not least on the part of the audience. Their bodies mimic those of the musicians who are their counterpart – jagged elbows for string instruments and so on.

This is a cerebral show; interested in exploring time – per the title – by the way sound reverberates in space, and in making polyphony physical. Or so the program tells me, anyway. This is the best kind of festival experience – one that pushes your understanding of a form by being beyond it. Yet it’s never smugly withholding or recessive – it’s accessible in its rigour.

Photo: Jamie Williams

Vortex Temporumwas reviewedat Carriageworks on Saturday January 16 as part of Sydney Festival 2016.

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