Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke

Speaking dance, dancing speech

Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Song of the Life and Death of the Cornet, Christoph Rilke inhabits the space between prose and poetry, song and story, man and woman, love and death.

Choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker approaches Rilke’s sensuous fever dream as a musical score: ‘How can you embody language? Dance a story? How can breathing, one of the most elementary patterns of movement, develop into choreography? What happens when you confront the logic of a text with an autonomous logic of movement? Take, for example, Noh-theatre: movement underlines, accentuates or illustrates a story, and yet it maintains its own logic, its own beauty – independent of text or story. In Rilke’s Cornet, I wanted to explore the subtle nuances between breathing, speaking and singing, between the male and the female, the lyrical and the prosaic.’

• Over the last 31 years, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has, with her dance company, created an impressive series of choreographic works. Rosas’ dance is pure writing with movement in time and space. At its heart lies the relationship between movement and music. In some productions, the relationship between dance and text is also examined: speaking becomes dancing.

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