GLA55

A space turns into circle and spiral; time and body into a repeating pulse. With GLA55. 10 movements to the music of Philip Glass, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, a pioneer of contemporary choreography, once again invites audiences into the mechanical yet trance-like world of minimal movement.

Six dancers from the Rosas dance company share the stage with seven members of the ensembles Ictus and Bl!ndman. Their inspiration comes from Philip Glass’s early works – Music in Contrary Motion, Music in Fifths, Music in Similar Motion and Music with Changing Parts. The result is a physical ritual that renders both geometry and time tangible: ellipses, circles, and spirals emerge as recurring figures, the choreography condenses movement into a continuum of tension and release, stillness and rotation. Each impulse, each turn generates a resonance in space that draws the audience into a corporeal experience of time, making obsessive repetition and rhythmic precision palpable. GLA55 is an experimental invocation that recalibrates the relationship between music, space and body, distilling minimal material to its highest intensity. Here, bodies, sound and rhythmic structure merge into a singular experience in which perception itself enters a subtle, hypnotic oscillation.

With GLA55, De Keersmaeker returns to a guiding principle of her practice: exhausting minimal abstract material to the limits of its possibilities. Trance-like states, manic turns and circling movements come to the fore – choreographic gestures that have shaped her artistic signature style since Fase (1982) and the founding of the company Rosas in 1983, and which have also been institutionalised with the establishment of the P.A.R.T.S. training center for contemporary dance in 1995.

For over four decades, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has developed works that rigorously explore the relationship between music, space, and movement. Earlier key pieces such as Asch (1980), Rosas danst Rosas (1983) and The Six Brandenburg Concertos (2018) exemplify her consistent use of a minimal formal language, which in GLA55 finds a new fusion with the music of Philip Glass.