Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Work/Travail/Arbeid asks whether choreography can only be presented on stage, or whether it can also be experienced as an art exhibit, in a gallery. It’s a strange question to ask, given that gallery performances have been a regular feature of dance since the first postmodern choreographers held them in 1960s New York. But perhaps for De Keersmaeker, the austere high priestess of Belgian contemporary dance, a question has not truly been asked until it has been asked by her.
Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, where the piece ran for three days last week, is an appropriately testing venue. Vast and vertiginous, its concrete walls radiate an unremitting sternness of purpose. Work/Travail/Arbeid is similarly grand in scale. Set to an avant-garde score by Gérard Grisey, Vortex Temporum (1995), which is played live by the Ictus ensemble, the piece comprises nine hour-long sections, performed by differing combinations of the Ictus musicians and dancers from De Keersmaeker’s company, Rosas. Between each section is a brief pause, and at the end of each nine-hour cycle the work begins again. Over the course of the Tate run, approximately two and a half cycles are completed.
The dancers wear all-white outfits and trainers. They move with precision to Grisey’s nervy and harmonically complex score. There are ponderous plunks and skimming runs on the piano; the cello growls like an idling power tool, the violin and viola deliver skittering glissandi. De Keersmaeker’s choreography – slow sways, shuffles, swinging turns, pounding runs – is calculatedly unshowy, and a lot less interesting than the music. At intervals the dancers race around in circles, the soles of their trainers squeaking on the floor.
Is De Keersmaeker’s question answered? Can contemporary dance be experienced in the same place and on the same terms as gallery art? Clearly it can, and transposing it from the stage to what De Keersmaeker calls “the radically different temporal, spatial and perceptual conditions of a museal space” has identifiable consequences. For a start, it eliminates any lingering expectation in the mind of the viewer of a dramatic or virtuosic outcome. We can treat the dance as a foreground or background event, we can cut away from it, move it in and out of our conscious focus, or simply leave. Which we may well be moved to do, because as an art exhibit Work/Travail/Arbeid is not especially engaging. It’s the choreographic equivalent of the video loop playing silently in a corner of the room, or the framed sheet of graph paper covered with cryptic technical notes.
There have been those who have made several visits to Work/Travail/Arbeid in the course of its run (it has already played in Brussels and Paris), and reviews have generally been laudatory. My experience was otherwise. What I found dispiriting was not the project’s unbending earnestness, but the colourlessness of De Keersmaeker’s choreography, especially when compared to Grisey’s astonishing, spectral score. The spectators at Tate Modern applauded politely at the end of the hour-long performance; most, like me, had watched it from the beginning. But that hour had been a long one. As the piece’s title tells us, it’s work.
