Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich is a contemporary dance choreography by Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, created in 1982 for two dancers to the phase music compositions of Steve Reich. Fase is De Keersmaeker's second composition, which she began working on in 1980 during her stay in the United States and completed upon her return to Brussels the following year. The full version premiered in Brussels on March 18, 1982, at the (Beursschouwburg). This work is considered a landmark piece in De Keersmaeker's career and a major choreography in the global contemporary dance scene.
This piece consists of four distinct movements made up of three duets and one solo, directly named after four works by Steve Reich — Piano Phase (1967), Violin Phase (1967), Come Out (1966), and Clapping Music (1972) — each of which can be performed independently or in combination. De Keersmaeker danced the piece for years alongside her collaborator Michèle Anne De Mey. In 1999, she received a Bessie Award in New York for this choreography. Fase has been regularly performed for nearly 40 years as part of various cultural events and festivals worldwide, with over 200 performances. This piece marks the renewal of the close relationship between dance and music that De Keersmaeker would develop throughout her career. Its immediate success also led to the foundation of the in Brussels in 1983.
History
Following , De Keersmaeker's first work in 1980, the Fase ensemble became the young Flemish artist's second choreography. It consists of four movements composed at two different times and places. Violin Phase and Come Out were created in the United States in 1981 as part of De Keersmaeker's studies at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (NYU) from 1980 until the end of 1981. Meanwhile, Piano Phase and Clapping Music were conceived after her return to Brussels in January 1982. Rehearsals for the entire set were conducted with Michèle Anne De Mey,Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker met Michèle Anne De Mey, and consequently her brother Thierry De Mey, at the School in Brussels. Both would later continue their studies at the founded by Maurice Béjart in the Belgian capital. who participated in the creation during rehearsals with De Keersmaeker at the studio of the Trojaanse Paard company led by in Schaerbeek. The premiere of Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich took place on March 18, 1982, at the in Brussels. The piece was performed in various Flemish cultural centers that year with the support of . The immediate success of Fase and De Keersmaeker's international recognition was confirmed in 1983 during the Dance Umbrella Festival in London and later at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Between 1982 and 1985, Fase was performed over 100 times, solidifying the choreographer's career in Europe.
Danced for many years by the duo of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Michèle Anne De Mey, who were invited to perform at international festivals, Fase performances were halted between 1985 and 1992, as De Keersmaeker decided to stop performing the piece. Driven by a renewed desire to dance, after having distanced herself from the stage to focus solely on choreography, De Keersmaeker occasionally revived Fase starting in 1992, partnering with a different dancer, , for the duets. The success of Fase greatly contributed to the creation of the in 1983. The importance of this piece and the growing recognition of the company led to Fase being performed in 1985 with members of Steve Reich and Musicians, who provided live music during the finale of the international tour that had begun in 1982.
Steve Reich granted permission for the use of his compositions in 1982 while De Keersmaeker was working in New York with three members of the Steve Reich Ensemble (Edmund Niemann and Nurit Tilles on piano, and Shem Guibbory on violin), who performed the music live on stage with the company for two years. Reich did not see Fase until 1998 when the work returned to The Kitchen in New York. He wrote about this experience:
Reich insisted on including Fase the following year at the Lincoln Center Festival during a retrospective dedicated to his work. On this occasion, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker received a second Bessie Award: “To reward the grand unified theory of number and dance, the full blossoming of intellectual rigor and musical sensibility, the burning desire of the embodied body and spirit across the twenty-year history of Rosas, and most emblematically in its foundational atom, Fase.” As a tribute, Fase, performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October 2006, inaugurated New York City's celebration of Steve Reich's 70th birthday during the Steve Reich @ 70 festival. The Piano Fase section, danced by and , was incorporated into the creation of and performed in numerous cities worldwide between 2006 and 2008. From January 12 to 16, 2011, the Violin Fase section was once again performed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of the Performance Exhibition Series, which explored the theme of tracing in 20th-century art. In March of the same year, the full Fase ensemble was danced by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Cynthia Loemij as part of a repertoire cycle organized by the Kaaitheater, which included four of the choreographer's foundational pieces. The work was performed again in July for three shows alongside the premiere of during the Avignon Festival, this time with Tale Dolven as her partner. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, then 54 years old, and Tale Dolven performed the piece once more in July 2014 during a cycle dedicated to the choreographer at New York's Lincoln Center Festival.
Starting in September 2018, during a retrospective of eleven pieces from the Rosas company's repertoire presented as part of the , Fase was passed on to two new pairs of dancers: Yuika Hashimoto and Laura Maria Poletti, or and Soa Ratsifandrihana. They performed in various locations across Île-de-France and later embarked on new world tours featuring this work, which had entered the company's repertoire and become a cornerstone of contemporary dance. Notable changes in interpretation were introduced in certain movements of Fase, primarily due to the unique characteristics of the performers. This marked the first time in thirty-seven years that Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker did not dance in Fase, particularly in the Violin Fase solo, which she had always performed herself. While she did not rule out the possibility of dancing it again, she expressed that it was time to pass this piece on to a younger generation.
General presentation Fase is a work in four movements:Note that while Fase is generally performed in this order, the second and third movements are also frequently switched during certain performances.
Piano Phase; Violin Phase; Come Out; Clapping Music.
It consists of three duets in the form of pas de deux and one solo (Violin Phase), which can be performed separately or partially but constitute a coherent whole. Its total duration is approximately 50 minutes. The work is closely linked to the phase music of Steve Reich, which De Keersmaeker discovered in New York between 1980 and 1982 during her studies at NYU, and which has since become "the traveling companion and anchor point" for the choreographer. Like the music it accompanies, the fundamental principle of Fase is a stripped-down, even austere, choreographic structure—extremely rigorous, mathematical, and geometric, alternating between the use of the circle and the straight line. The choreographer herself acknowledges that the piece is "radical," based on exploring what her body wanted to express at the time with a sort of "non-know-how."
Fase consists of repetitive cycles of simple movements that play on the physically demanding task of maintaining rhythm and the logic of phase-shifting/re-aligning during the duets."Fase is a piece where space and the relationship with music are explored in an almost mathematical way. At the same time, it is done with immense physical and emotional intensity, in an abstract rigor based on logic," De Keersmaeker said during the presentation of the piece at Usine C in Montreal in January 2008. Although it employs so-called "minimalist" writing, the movement is expansive and evolving, utilizing variations around a central motif, and is technically extremely challenging to maintain.The dancer describes Fase as "emotionally exhausting" due to the constant need to count the execution of minimalist cells and the essential geometric understanding of the piece, which demands great "self-control" (). The work draws significant inspiration from two sources: the accumulation processes of Trisha Brown, whom De Keersmaeker admires, and the work of Lucinda Childs, who collaborated closely with the New York minimalist school in the 1960s and 1970s within the Judson Dance Theater. Childs notably worked with composer Philip Glass and visual artist Sol LeWitt, who respectively created the score and the scenography/video for one of Childs' most significant works, Dance, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1979. This piece, particularly its first two movements, inspired De Keersmaeker in composing the Violin Phase and Piano Phase sections, which share similar stylistic foundations, stripped-down techniques (arm and leg throws, repeated movements), and some choreographic principles (shifts, use of circles and straight lines). However, De Keersmaeker's proposal pushes these elements to the extreme, particularly due to Reich's music, which is more theoretical and radical than Glass's in its repetitive motifs and phase-shifting principles.
Lighting, designed by Remon Fromont and Mark Schwentner, is an essential part of Fase's staging, as it highlights and accentuates the phase-shifting processes. The overlapping shadows created during the first movement give the impression that the dancers number five or six instead of just two, reminiscent of Sol LeWitt's projected video use in Dance. Additionally, the simple, almost austere costumes—small, swirling gray and mauve dresses with white socks and childlike sneakers in the first two movements, followed by tight pants and shirts in the latter—also became a signature element of De Keersmaeker's visual identity for many years.
First movement: Piano Phase
Written upon her return to Brussels in 1982, this is probably the most famous and frequently independently performed part of the work. It is also considered one of the most spectacular, as it is certainly the most visual due to the play of shadows that multiplies the dancers' figures. In this first part, De Keersmaeker introduces the foundations of her repetitive dance and reveals the process of phasing/dephasing inherent in Steve Reich's famous Piano Phase, composed in 1967. The two dancers, powerfully lit by four lateral spotlights that create individual and overlapping shadows against a white background, repeat for about 15 minutes a swinging arm and body movement, combined with a sudden and vigorous half-turn, punctuated by a rise onto a pointed foot held in suspension before resuming the sequence. Following the music and its phase-shifting principle, one of the dancers accelerates her movement by a twelfth of a phase, thereby shifting her sequence relative to her partner until reaching phase opposition, followed by a complete rephasing after a few minutes. The two dancers remain aligned on the same plane but gradually and imperceptibly move toward the front of the stage, creating a diagonal shift (including two transitions to a plane perpendicular to the initial one, facing the audience). They continue their sequence on this new plane before returning to the initial plane at the end of the musical work, once again finding the synchronicity from the piece's beginning.
Second movement: Violin Phase