Meg Stuart and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker: Exercises in Endurance

Abstract

Meg Stuart’s Cascade and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 are exercises in endurance. Each choreographer uses a different strategy of endurance to grapple with the theme of interruption. Stuart’s approach is maximalist, while De Keersmaeker employs bareness. The world of Cascade stages stamina and fortitude through excess of scale, sound bombardments, and electrified bodies ricocheting off one another in a dazzling push-pull of shared space and weight. On Philippe Quesne’s set of exaggerated inflatables, dangling rope baskets, and a sharp ramp to nowhere, Cascade blasts pulsing beats, bright lights, and sensory overdrive in a plea for feeling and togetherness. On another stage, De Keersmaeker’s persistence and determination takes shape through a paring down to one dancer—De Keersmaeker—moving through a starkly lit two-hour solo on Minna Tikkainen’s nearly bare stage, accompanied by Alain Franco playing from memory the entirety of J. S. Bach’s 1741 Goldberg Variations. Both Stuart and De Keersmaeker revel in exquisite movement and gesture in these bold pleas for makers and watchers to continue onwards, despite—or perhaps fueled by—discomfort in the face of ongoing obstacle and rupture.