Architectural Spaces in the Choreography of William Forsythe and De Keersmaeker’s Rosas Danst Rosas

Abstract

Throughout this book body/space interfaces in dances have been examined and discussed focusing on the particular locations of site specific works, on actual and metaphorical in-between spaces and on inside/outside bodily borders in order to rethink identity and subjectivity. This chapter brings these ideas together by examining dances which play with inside/outside architectural spaces in a deconstructive manner. I am using ‘architectural space’ here to mean spaces that are structured actually or conceptually according to ideas associated with building design. William Forsythe’s choreography creates architectural spaces, and the filmed version of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas Danst Rosas (1983, film version 1997), is set in and interacts with the architectural spaces of an empty school building (Plate 15). In Forsythe’s Enemy in the Figure (1989) the stage space is divided by a wavy wooden screen and various lighting effects into architectural spaces, like rooms, which the dancers move between (Plate 16). In this sense the dancers are seen inside and outside different spaces. In Rosas Danst Rosas dancers are filmed inside and outside the school building and its rooms where the dance is set. They are filmed from within, from without and through glass windows and doors rendering the space of the building at times difficult to fathom.