Golden Hours (As you like it)

Shakespeare meets Brian Eno

What happens when Shakespeare’s rhythmic and poetic visual language becomes dance? How do you embody the act of listening to a partner who is speaking to you through dance, but otherwise remains silent? With the double title Golden Hours (As you like it), Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker alludes to an encounter between Brian Eno’s ambient album Another Green World and Shakespeare’s eccentric comedy As You Like It. In the play, two enamoured characters escape back to nature – to the idyllic Forest of Arden where time stands still – away from a corrupt royal court.

An enchanted world full of capricious characters unfolds during an intrigue comprised of glances, amorous gestures and steps. Delicately balancing between formal abstraction and concrete gestures, they dance uninterruptedly through their intricate entanglements, masquerades, temptations and misunderstandings. Golden Hours (As you like it) draws you into the intensity and sensuality of a mildly ironic world, where the characters speak a language that doesn’t need deciphering to be grasped, yet isn’t pantomime.