Counter Phrases is a unique collaboration between the choreography of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, the film of Thierry de May and the music of 10 composers, ranging from Steve Reich to Magnus Lindberg.
Performed by the Ictus Ensemble, the music accompanies the visuals on three enormous screens. Inverting the usual relationship between music and dance, the 10 pieces were written in response to the completed visuals, and the result is a complex competition between the different media: at times, the music seems to impose itself upon the dance, at others, the visuals dominate.
De May's images of De Keersmaeker's dancers are hauntingly beautiful. The dancers create an emotional counterpoint to the film's striking locations, from abundant gardens to desolate cityscapes. There is no overall narrative connecting the first section to the last, but similar movements and themes recur, like the sexual tension in a ménage à trois or a striking costume of black leather boots and delicate floral dresses.
The integrity of De Keersmaeker's choreography is offset by the diversity of the music. There is a wide stylistic range in the 10 pieces, with Reich's post- minimalist riffs rubbing up against Luca Francesconi's hard-edged modernism. And there are significant differences in the composers' approaches to the relationship between music and film.
Some project their own narratives on to the dance, as in Lindberg's glitzy number, which creates a miniature romantic epic from a film of a passionate, three-way love affair. Soaring melodic lines accompany the couple as they dance into the sunset, and gloomy, introspective music dramatises the emotions of the rejected woman.
The problem is that individual pieces of music create their own rhythms and relationships, but, unlike the dance, there is no consistency of language to make the sections seem more than the sum of their parts. And yet, in pieces like Jonathan Harvey's and Toshio Hosokawa's, the meeting of music, dance and film achieves a tangible synthesis: Harvey's sensuous ensemble, dominated by harp and celeste, realises the dappled sunlight of the film; and the vivid blooms of string writing in Hosokawa's piece recreate the luxurious flowers that surround the dancers.
