Dance games from Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker at Sadler’s Wells

Forget the pedantic classifications of genres, styles and schools. When it comes to dance performances, it all boils down to two kinds: those that make one think and those that entertain. Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker is a veteran of the first category. Since 1983, the year she founded her company Rosas, she has used the choreographic idiom to explore and question other areas of culture and performance-making. Music and its multiple uses have always been her main sources of inspiration, and her thought-provoking, if not puzzling or purely irritating, challenges to music remain at the core of her creative process. Over the years, she has also fine-tuned her signature movement vocabulary: carefully thought out, austere, never gratuitously ornamental. But it is also engagingly unpredictable, still prompting all sorts of thinking games among viewers — or, as her detractors would say, giving them a damn good headache.

Last week, the opening of Vortex Temporum was saluted by a rather thin number of dance-goers. Luckily, their enthusiasm compensated for the theatre’s unusually empty seats. Her work is applauded and followed with almost religious reverence on the Continent, but its merits remain open to debate over here. Whether such diverse reactions stem from the different responses to those thinking games, or depend on choreographic aesthetics, which, for cultural and artistic reasons, are still regarded as too ‘Continental’, is difficult to say. Having grown up in that Continental milieu of ideas, revolutions and revisitations, I tend to like her works.

Vortex Temporum has all the distinctive traits of Keersmaeker’s art, and yet is never  tritely predictable. Here, as in other recent creations, she confronts the audience with a non-dance opening — a performance of Gérard Grisey’s 1996 score by six members of the Ictus ensemble.