By Any Other Name

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker hit the Théâtre de Chaillot like a bomb, as “Rosas danst Rosas” took over the theatre for a sold-out run this September, bringing with it the irreverence of the Belgian avant-garde of the 1980s. Chaillot acquired something of a festival atmosphere, with audiences gathering around De Keersmaeker and her work with palpable affection. The celebrations culminated during the Journées du Patrimoine, with two full days devoted to “Rosas danst Rosas” and its afterlives: “Multicast” reunited twenty performers from five generations of Rosas, while “Supercast” brought some fifty young dancers into Chaillot’s staircases and foyers, alongside an interview, the exhibition Sub Rosas, and screenings from the participatory project “Re:Rosas!,” inviting anyone to learn, dance, film and share some of the work’s most recognisable sequences.

Performance

Rosas: “Rosas danst Rosas” by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

Place

Théâtre de Chaillot, Paris, France, September 10, 2026

Words

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Rosas in “Rosas danst Rosas” by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Photograph by Anne van Aerschot

Rosas dancing Rosas themselves: “Rosas danst Rosas” is a self-reflexive work for the homonymous company, choreographed in Brussels in 1983 by the twenty-three-year-old Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, in collaboration with original cast members Fumiyo Ikeda, Adriana Borriello and Michèle Anne De Mey, all four former students of Maurice Béjart’s Mudra school. To paraphrase Nietzsche, one might say that De Keersmaeker’s dance is born from the spirit of music: she played the transverse flute from childhood, before beginning formal dance training only at eighteen, and understands rhythm, metre and musical structure so intimately that she makes them visible. American minimalism shapes the choreography—De Keersmaeker had just returned from a period of study at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts—while the score, developed in close dialogue with Thierry De Mey and Peter Vermeersch, was described by its composers as “maximalist”: raw, percussive, dense, at times almost rock-like in its physical force.

The rigorous compositional logic behind the work is evident in De Keersmaeker’s working documents, where complex spatial and formal structures are mapped through letters, numbers, arrows, pathways and geometrical patterns. The performers materialise this scheme by acting as parts of a single mechanism, aware of their shared space through a soft focus and an almost intangible sense of connection. The clockwork is animated by brief movement cells and ordinary gestures: turning the head, adjusting a shirt, brushing back the hair, smoothing a blouse, examining one’s nails, straightening a skirt. Through an exacting structure of serial repetition and variation, these actions become hypnotic, almost trance-like.

Original Rosas in “Rosas danst Rosas” by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Photograph by Jean-Luc Tanghe, 1983

The four newer cast members were trained by De Keersmaeker herself: Nina Godderis, Momiji Kuromaru, Jasmine Achtari and Eva Galmel, all displaying radically different energies and characters. Galmel is extraordinary: her presence is startling, intense, as if every gesture were being discovered at the very moment she performs it. In the darkness of the stage, the four dancers enter to the metronomic tick of the score, which gradually hardens into a powerful mechanical, industrial sound. The piece is structured in four sections, and it seems to unfold like a day.

The first section is without music, accompanied only by the sounds of bodies: breath, fatigue, limbs striking against the floor. The dancers roll across the floor in a shared geometric pattern, broken when one slips out of sync and breaks away. Their gestures evoke the uneasy rhythms of sleep, waking for a second and falling back again: a turn, a shifting limb, a sudden disturbance. In the second movement, the dancers draw eleven chairs from a dark cluster and place them in a precise grid. They sit down, tie their shoelaces and exchange complicit glances. Then, to the metallic rhythm of the score, they perform the work’s most famous phrase: tossing their hair back, folding and straightening their torsos, crossing their legs. One by one, they fall asleep in their chairs, resembling tired children at a grown-ups’ party. The strict pattern contrasts with the dance’s natural and spontaneous movements.

Rosas in “Rosas danst Rosas” by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Photograph by Anne van Aerschot

By the third section, the chairs have been lined up at the back of the stage and the choreography spreads horizontally across the space. One dancer remains seated and motionless, while the rest of the ensemble moves through fractal structures. By contrast, the fourth movement feels suddenly freer: the dancers change direction along diagonals and circles as they separate and recombine. Unison is recursively disrupted: one dancer arrives a fraction late, a phrase is altered. There is something almost euphoric about the way the choreography continually evades its own rules, just when we think we have grasped them. The music does the same, moving from a restless habanera to electronic noise and whistles. In the same spirit, a sudden blackout seems to bring the piece to a close, but then the dancers return for a brief coda that echoes the four movements.

For more than ninety minutes, the four women perform in front of us as themselves, as their own stage personas, sweating and tiring to exhaustion, far from the fictitious effortlessness often associated with virtuosity. “Rosas danst Rosas’s” strict choreographic structure never flattens the individuality of its interpreters. Its central paradox is a rigid grid inhabited by distinct personalities: impatient, vulnerable, ironic, indifferent, seductive or playful. Costumes recall rehearsal clothes or everyday dress: loose pale-blue tops, light mauve skirts, leggings, sheer socks and laced shoes. It is so Brussels that you could imagine the interpreters on the iconic Parvis de Saint-Gilles, wandering among the tables and chairs of its terraces. Low mirrors run along the sides of the stage, catching the dancers at an angle and reflecting fragments of their bodies. Within this sparse setting, emotion and meaning emerge without needing a narrative framework.

$By the third section, the chairs have been lined up at the back of the stage and the choreography spreads horizontally across the space. One dancer remains seated and motionless, while the rest of the ensemble moves through fractal structures. By contrast, the fourth movement feels suddenly freer: the dancers change direction along diagonals and circles as they separate and recombine. Unison is recursively disrupted: one dancer arrives a fraction late, a phrase is altered. There is something almost euphoric about the way the choreography continually evades its own rules, just when we think we have grasped them. The music does the same, moving from a restless habanera to electronic noise and whistles. In the same spirit, a sudden blackout seems to bring the piece to a close, but then the dancers return for a brief coda that echoes the four movements. For more than ninety minutes, the four women perform in front of us as themselves, as their own stage personas, sweating and tiring to exhaustion, far from the fictitious effortlessness often associated with virtuosity. “Rosas danst Rosas’s” strict choreographic structure never flattens the individuality of its interpreters. Its central paradox is a rigid grid inhabited by distinct personalities: impatient, vulnerable, ironic, indifferent, seductive or playful. Costumes recall rehearsal clothes or everyday dress: loose pale-blue tops, light mauve skirts, leggings, sheer socks and laced shoes. It is so Brussels that you could imagine the interpreters on the iconic Parvis de Saint-Gilles, wandering among the tables and chairs of its terraces. Low mirrors run along the sides of the stage, catching the dancers at an angle and reflecting fragments of their bodies. Within this sparse setting, emotion and meaning emerge without needing a narrative framework.$

By the third section, the chairs have been lined up at the back of the stage and the choreography spreads horizontally across the space. One dancer remains seated and motionless, while the rest of the ensemble moves through fractal structures. By contrast, the fourth movement feels suddenly freer: the dancers change direction along diagonals and circles as they separate and recombine. Unison is recursively disrupted: one dancer arrives a fraction late, a phrase is altered. There is something almost euphoric about the way the choreography continually evades its own rules, just when we think we have grasped them. The music does the same, moving from a restless habanera to electronic noise and whistles. In the same spirit, a sudden blackout seems to bring the piece to a close, but then the dancers return for a brief coda that echoes the four movements.

For more than ninety minutes, the four women perform in front of us as themselves, as their own stage personas, sweating and tiring to exhaustion, far from the fictitious effortlessness often associated with virtuosity. “Rosas danst Rosas’s” strict choreographic structure never flattens the individuality of its interpreters. Its central paradox is a rigid grid inhabited by distinct personalities: impatient, vulnerable, ironic, indifferent, seductive or playful. Costumes recall rehearsal clothes or everyday dress: loose pale-blue tops, light mauve skirts, leggings, sheer socks and laced shoes. It is so Brussels that you could imagine the interpreters on the iconic Parvis de Saint-Gilles, wandering among the tables and chairs of its terraces. Low mirrors run along the sides of the stage, catching the dancers at an angle and reflecting fragments of their bodies. Within this sparse setting, emotion and meaning emerge without needing a narrative framework.

This absence of explicit dramaturgy also opens onto the question of femininity. Rosas danst Rosas is unmistakably an intimate space, a choreography of women. The implicit question is: is femininity essential, or performative? Gestures like crossing the legs, tossing the hair, adjusting a skirt, brushing the hair back from the face are immediately recognisable as feminine, but this association begins to loosen as the gestures are repeated to paroxysm, and all the more so as the choreography leaves its original cast. What happens when the same moves pass through different generations, amateurs, children or men? What seemed fixed suddenly becomes unstable, exposing the artificiality of gender roles.

Historically, “Rosas danst Rosas” stands at a crucial crossroads. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker responded to the minimalist structures of postmodern dance and the musical logic of Steve Reich, bringing into this formal rigour the expressivity of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater. By so doing, still very young, she found herself at the centre of a vibrant Belgian avant-garde, alongside the radical fashion of the Antwerp Six and the experimental energy of Brussels music venues. More than forty years later, the work remains strict and unruly. It has travelled so well precisely because it never produces the same dance twice: the choreography stays itself while continually becoming something else with each new interpreter, and each generation lives it anew, embodying one of De Keersmaeker’s principles: all dance is contemporary.

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti is a Paris-based philosopher researching ancient thought, divination, and practices of salvation at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. With over a decade of ballet training, she studied History of Dance as part of her Philosophy and Aesthetics degree at the University of Bologna. Alongside her academic work, she writes about dance.

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