Mystery Sonatas / for Rosa

In 1980, after studying dance at Mudra School in Brussels and Tisch School of the Arts in New York, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (b. 1960) created Asch, her first choreographic work. Two years later came the premiere of Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich. De Keersmaeker established the dance company Rosas in Brussels in 1983, while creating the work Rosas danst Rosas. Since these breakthrough pieces, her choreography has been grounded in a rigorous and prolific exploration of the relationship between dance and music. She has created with Rosas a wide-ranging body of work engaging the musical structures and scores of several periods, from early music to contemporary and popular idioms. Her choreographic practice also draws formal principles from geometry, numerical patterns, the natural world, and social structures to offer a unique perspective on the body’s articulation in space and time. In 1995 De Keersmaeker established the school P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) in Brussels in association with De Munt/La Monnaie.

Amandine Beyer is recognized as a reference in the interpretation of the baroque violin repertoire. Her 2012 recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas received various awards (Diapason d’or de l’année, Choc de Classica de l’année, Editor’s choice de Gramophone, Prix Academie Charles Cros, Excepcional de Scherzo, and more). Her work with these Partitas continued with the performance Partita 2, choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and danced by De Keersmaeker and Boris Charmatz in 2013. Beyer has performed at venues and festivals worldwide, including the Théatre du Chatelet, Festival de Sablé, Innsbrucker Festwochender Alten Musik, and Wiener Konzerthaus, and she is part of various music ensembles, including Les Cornets Noirs, the duos with Pierre Hantaï, Kristian Bezuidenhout, Laurence Beyer, and her own ensemble, Gli Incogniti. She teaches at the ESMAE (Escola Superior de Música e Artes do Espetáculo) of Porto and in master classes worldwide: France, Taiwan, Brazil, Italy, Spain, the United States, Canada. Since 2010 she has taught baroque violin at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, Switzerland.

Rosas is the company of the choreographer and dancer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. It was founded in 1983 during the creation of the piece Rosas danst Rosas. Since her debut in 1982 with Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, De Keersmaeker has been engaged in a rigorous exploration and articulation of movement, from its simplest forms to its most complex. The relationship between movement and music is essential to De Keersmaeker’s concept of dance. Rosas has expanded the art of dance as an act of writing movements in space and time, and has over the years explored choreography in partnership with other compositional forces, namely music, geometry, the visual arts, and language. De Keersmaeker’s engagement of these disciplines has involved collaborations with experts—musicians, composers, visual artists, actors, writers—who have at different times been integral participants and performers in Rosas productions.

Concurrently with the creation of new pieces, Rosas continues to perform and teach the existing repertoire, which now spans a period of 30 years. In this way the company’s own artistic past continues to be passed on to new generations of dancers and audiences. Ever since De Keersmaeker’s early works began to gain international attention, Rosas has built a strong and vital presence in the dance world, engaging theaters, repertoire companies, opera houses, festivals, workplaces, exhibition spaces, and educational platforms. With the partnership and support of the De Munt/La Monnaie opera house, where Rosas was in residency from 1992 to 2007, and Kaaitheater, Rosas has had a consistent home onstage in Brussels, and has worked with those organizations to foster such projects as P.A.R.T.S., Bal Moderne, and WorkSpaceBrussels. These projects, made possible and propelled with the support of Rosas, have since their inception developed into entirely independent organizations, making space for new in-house projects at Rosas such as Dancingkids and RondOmDans.

The Rosas facilities in Brussels are a center of myriad artistic activities and resources in the performing arts. At present the campus is shared with P.A.R.T.S. and the contemporary music ensemble Ictus, and studios are also made available to WorkSpaceBrussels, the summer residents of Summer Studios, and the numerous companies and artists who come to work here. The site is one of the key places in Brussels where established and emerging performing artists can meet and interact in mutually enriching encounters.

Gli Incogniti was founded in 2006 by a group of friends, brought together by the violinist Amandine Beyer. It is named after the Accademia degli Incogniti, an artistic and academic circle that was among the most active and libertarian of seventeenth-century Venice. The spirit of this Accademia—its taste for the unknown in all its forms, sound experimentation, research for new repertoire, and rediscovery of the “classics” and lesser-known masterpieces—drives the Incogniti today. The genuine pleasure they take in rehearsing and playing together meets their core ambition, namely to transmit a committed and coherent vision of the pieces they perform, connected to their combined sensitivities and personal preferences. The group now ranks among the top reference ensembles for historically informed interpretation.