Repeating Rosas danst Rosas On the transmission of dance knowledge

Abstract

This article explores how connecting choreographic ideas with dancers’ articulations of embodied experience may help us better understand practices of dance transmission. Using the multimodal publication A Choreographer's Score (2012) as an analytical framework, the article combines the inside knowledge of choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker with a series of in-depth interviews that were conducted with different generations of Rosas dancers on their experience with the performance and transmission of the choreography Rosas danst Rosas. The goal of this text is to propose an expansion of the notational endeavor of A Choreographer's Score by adding testimonies of the dancers’ corporeal ‘enunciation’. As such, this article is a further investigation of ‘performance-style’, which performance scholar and musicologist Bojana Cvejić distinguishes as one of the main thematic parameters that runs through the four scores of Rosas’ ‘Early Works’. It connects the repetitions within De Keersmaeker's work with the question of how these practices themselves can be repeated by dancers in their long-term engagement with the company's repertory. By showing how they breathe life into the complex choreographic architecture of the choreography, dancers provide a deeper understanding of the information that is made available in A Choreographer's Score. These considerations also tie into the present debate in dance studies on how ‘dance knowledge’ could be shared beyond the boundaries of its own discipline.