Coltrane by De Keersmaeker, Freewheeling but Structure Intact

“Anne Teresa is really a great composer,” Mr. Sanchis said on the phone from Philadelphia, where “A Love Supreme” was running at FringeArts Theater. “She doesn’t spend time on each minute movement; she is concerned with the timeline and composition.”

Photo

Over coffee here, the morning after opening night of the Paris Opera’s “Così Fan Tutte,” which she both directed and choreographed, Ms. De Keersmaeker said she had come relatively late in her career to jazz. “In 2000 I was introduced to Coltrane’s music by friends who were jazz musicians,” she said. “I discovered the brilliant virtuosity, the extreme obsession, his interest in Eastern music, the discovery of the saxophone as a speaking voice.”

Mr. Reich, she added, had also talked to her about Coltrane. “Steve spoke about how Coltrane would use three notes and improvise endlessly on that; maximalizing the minimum. That made a big impression.”

Ms. De Keersmaeker’s growing interest in the music of Davis and Coltrane coincided with the first years of Parts, the professional training school that she founded at her company’s Brussels headquarters in 1995. Many of the teachers there, she said, were interested in improvisation as a tool to create dance vocabulary and for use in performance.

“My reference points are so tight, I was so into strategic composition, and then here was instant dance, which fascinated me,” she said. “And of course jazz is where improvisation is part of the DNA of the music.”

Enter the Spanish-born Mr. Sanchis, who was one of the first students at Parts, and who joined Ms. De Keersmaeker’s company, Rosas, as she began to work on “Bitches Brew.” Because he was injured while she was making it, he found himself sitting next to her at rehearsals, talking about the decisions she was making. In 2005, he created a solo to a Coltrane piece for her work “Desh.” Soon after, she asked him to collaborate on “A Love Supreme.”

Ms. De Keersmaeker is famously exacting. Was he intimidated?

“A little,” Mr. Sanchis said. Ms. De Keersmaeker, he added, “is a very strong person and artist, but also a huge collaborator. Of course there are moments when her decisions won’t be changed, but she knows her strengths and limitations, and she never hesitates in giving responsibility to people if they are willing to take it.”

Photo

“A Love Supreme” was recorded in 1964, with Coltrane on tenor saxophone, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. The four-part, album-length suite is an offering to God, with its final section based on Coltrane’s own religious poem. Ben Ratliff, writing in The New York Times, said its musical rhetoric “is that of a sermon in a black American Pentecostal church, building in intensity, cresting on notes corresponding to stressed words and phrases in the poem.”

Rising to this was a challenge. The choreographers opted for an approach that Mr. Sanchis described as “straightforward,” strictly linking each dancer to an instrument. When a dancer is dancing, his instrument should be playing, he said. “When you are bound to a strict rule like that you have to find solutions to make your choreography more interesting, to have contrast and difference, because you can’t play freely with the amount of people on stage.”

The structure of Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” is classical in form, he added. “There is a basic melody done over a progression of chords that is played once or twice at the beginning of each song. Then the musical improvisation begins. I created a phrase for each basic melody, then the dancers improvise when the musicians do, always referring to the original set phrase.”

They were, he said, greatly influenced by extensive discussions with jazz musicians. “In theory when a musician improvises over a chord progression, they should be hearing the main melody even though they are playing something else,” he said. “As a dancer you can train to do this too; you are moving freely, but always in relation to a structure.”

The silent opening section, he added, is “a preview of what comes later, a preparation for the music,” in which the four men move through the vocabulary that will later be given a more full-throated physicality.

“This music, in the act of playing, is extremely physical,” Ms. De Keersmaeker noted. “There are recordings of the Coltrane Quartet performing and there is steam coming up! How music is produced by the body — through the head, the breath, gravity, weight — is fascinating in terms of dance. How do you give choreographic answers to this? How do you sculpt the space? How do you make a complex musical structure visually readable? You want to give yourself the humble task of trying to reveal the beauty of that music.”

Continue reading the main story