In the past decade, a growing discourse has developed among choreographers, dance artists, and their collaborators, who are eager to articulate their processes, practices, and working methods through different types of writing and publication. Artists’ books, objects, and online platforms—from Thomas Lehmen's Schreibstück (Reference Lehmen2002) and FUNKTIONEN tool box (Reference Lehmen2004), to BADco's Whatever Dance Toolbox (Reference Turing2011) in collaboration with Daniel Turing, and the Forsythe Company's project Motionbank (2010–2013)—have contributed to what we may describe today as the “publishing of choreographic ideas,” as proposed by Scott deLahunta (Reference deLahunta2015). Jeroen Peeters, editor of Are We Here Yet? (Reference Peeters2010), which focuses on the work of Meg Stuart, emphasizes the discourse intrinsic to dance making, while Mårten Spångberg invites artists to “write their own history,” with projects such as The Swedish Dance History (2009–today),Footnote ¹ to give but one example. Alongside these developments, practice-as-research, which involves dance making and writing, is becoming more established within university settings; and presentations of/on artistic research are now common in conferences, symposia, and other sites of knowledge exchange. We could argue then that the development of an artist's theory of knowledge, which scholars such as Susan Melrose (Reference Melrose2007) have been encouraging since the early 2000s, is now well under way both within and without the academy.

Against this backdrop, it seems timely for performance theorist and musicologist Bojana Cvejić and choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker to have embarked on the ambitious project of publishing three volumes on key dance works by the latter, from her early choreographic pieces to some of her most recent creations. Cvejić belongs to a generation of makers and thinkers for whom dance practice and theory often operate in a continuum: her understanding of the artist's discourse is key here. With this project, she is able to use the unique elements of De Keersmaeker's work to point toward new directions in choreographic research and writing. De Keersmaeker has admitted that the emphasis on the experience of the live dancing body has often been an excuse for dance artists not to articulate their working methods,Footnote ² and it is this challenge of articulating one's own poetics as an artist that she seems to be taking on here. As Cvejić points out, if dance wants to be taken seriously and be able to take itself seriously, then we need to defend its epistemic value; so it is imperative for dance makers to share their methods of practice with a broader, more heterogeneous readership who can then start to understand “what dance means in relation to how it is made” (2012, 8).

With this aim, these volumes present a combination of newly written texts and videos, as well as “archaeological” findings, as Cvejić calls them (2012, 10), such as interviews, illustrations, archival videos, personal notes, and sketches from creative processes, and documents related to performances of the works (program notes, reviews, etc.). The rationale for this approach lies in the complementary nature of such materials, as is well-argued by Cvejić when she acknowledges the limits of either writing, oral accounts, or visual documentation material alone:

The general title that unites these three volumes under one project should not go unnoticed. The authors reinvent the notion of “a choreographer's score” as a hybrid document, extending the discussion presented by Myriam Van Imschoot and Ludovic Burel in the special issue they curated for the journal Multitudes (Reference Van Imschoot and Burel2005), on the score-based work of artists such as Antonia Baehr, Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion, Thomas Lehmen, and Lisa Nelson. In the case of Cvejić and De Keersmaeker, their hybrid scores evidence a choreographic practice that works across different modes, collaborations, and materials. Hence, on the one hand, they offer immediate access to the choreographer's approach toward developing idiosyncratic ways of moving that include the minimal, the quotidian and the expressive, and toward structuring “movement vocabulary” in units, cells, and phrases. The accompanying glossaries at the end of each book are especially helpful in this sense. On the other hand, the scores give the reader/viewer a sense of the dramaturgical logic underlying the combination of such movement material with other materials. For example, we discover how the choreographer works with music and silence, from “mickey-mousing” (Bartók's String Quartet No. 4) to counterpoint and more complex methods that respond to polyphonic music (En Atendant and Cesena); or, how she exposes the workings of the group from rehearsal to performance, with principles like “my watching is my dancing” (2012, 157), whereby each dancer supports the others by watching them when they are dancing and she is not, so as to direct the spectator's attention, too, toward the dancing and invite a thoughtful way of viewing.

On a pedagogical level then, these publications offer a variety of choreographic tools, and suggest a number of possibilities for the young choreographer who is looking to experiment with compositional structures and patterns, to explore procedures of organizing movement in time and space, and to distribute such movement among dancers (e.g., through repetition, acceleration, variation, unison, canon). However, on a larger scale, these publications also reveal aspects of De Keersmaeker's work that raise further issues around choreographic practice and the making of dance performance; to do with collaborative structures, philosophical thought, gender, and representation; or the development of an artist's career. It is here, perhaps, where the thinking of the authors reveals some distinctive elements of De Keersmaeker's work and leads to important contributions to the field of publishing choreographic ideas, to echo deLahunta, beyond issues of craft and formalist concerns.

From the first volume, one gets a sense of De Keersmaeker's minimalist methodology and aesthetic, or how in her early works “cool abstraction” often leads to (or aims at) emotion. The body becomes exhausted both physically and emotionally through tasks of repetition (e.g., Fase, Violin Phase); rigorous precision meets a sense of anarchy, as the choreographer herself claims (2012, 115). It is surprising to discover that she only became aware of Trisha Brown and Lucinda Child's work in the mid-1990s, after she made the early seminal works Fase and Rosas Danst Rosas (2012, 85). Similarly, it is intriguing to read about the way De Keersmaeker works with texts of political significance alongside her minimalist techniques (e.g., the text in Come Out on the Harlem riots; Tolstoy's War and Peace and a speech by Che Guevara in Bartók's String Quartet No. 4), by treating such texts as material that helps organize time and space, and is generally spoken in a matter-of-fact manner (2012, 159). It becomes apparent here that a great influence has been Yvonne Rainer, who suggests approaching materials in choreography as “categories of things” in order to create connections, meaning, and varying degrees of emotional impact (2012, 139). A discussion also arises around the powerful, girlish femininity that the early works suggest, or the idea of female figures bordering on the “melodramatic cliché” of desperate women (2012, 155). Here it is illuminating that Cvejić offers Lucy Irigaray's idea of a deliberate assumption of the feminine role aiming “to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation” (2012, 15), in order to propose a feminist view on these early works. Regardless of who the women are who perform these works each time, the choreographer insists that when the dance is transmitted from dancer to dancer, they adhere to “the writing itself, the sovereignty—of the structure that persists” (2012, 115).

The second volume presents works that De Keersmaeker made from a very different position—namely, En Atendant and Cesena, commissioned by the Avignon Festival, and co-signed with Björn Schmelzer, director of the ensemble Graindelavoix. A more mature choreographic voice is evident here, not only in the works, but also in the volume as a whole. A series of confidently articulated principles is presented, such as “my walking is my dancing,” “my talking is my dancing,” “my walking-talking is my dancing,” which place emphasis on different aspects of the dance and the body, e.g., its verticality and relation to gravity, its ability to pace through the sound score, and its potential to relate to other bodies socially. One encounters here a more complex type of formalism that De Keersmaeker develops to engage with polyphonic fourteenth century music, and which relates to geometries of space and to arithmetic forms, informed by various sources, from ancient Greek art to Far Eastern philosophy. It is interesting how other grand figures of choreography are mentioned here: for example, the way in which natural order is pursued, with a pragmatic faith in the mathematical power of numbers and pre-existing forms, and is compared to similar approaches by John Cage and Merce Cunningham (2013, 9–10); or Deborah Hay's work is brought up because of the way in which De Keersmaeker invites the dancers in these recent works to focus internally, working with improvisation, as well as set material, in order to achieve a generation of movement intertwined with perception (2013, 34). Equally captivating is the discussion around the ways in which these works engage with the historically remote political, social, and cultural context of the fourteenth century and its music (2013, 11), for example, through sources and inspirations that carry narrative dimensions. In this sense a very different dramaturgical approach is presented in this volume, which we might not necessarily relate to De Keersmaeker's well-known minimalist style. Given that, as she states herself, the choreographer is not very confident as a leader in intensive creative processes that involve a larger creative team (2013, 123), it is significant that throughout this volume both authors acknowledge the obscure relation these works foreground between the individual and community. En Atendant and Cesena propose an intensity of collective experience, both among the dancers through the intricate choreography, and among spectators who come together as a community to watch these works in very specific lighting conditions, either at dusk or dawn.Footnote ³ This is telling of a more mature choreographer with larger concerns around choreographic practice, but also of the different times and context in which these works have been made, whereby questions around individualism and collectivity are being raised by artists and thinkers alike.

The third volume returns to the high midpoint in the curve of De Keersmaeker's career and the so-called pure pieces, Drumming and Rain, which focus on compositional structures and the raw materials of dance, body, movement, time, and space, without necessarily a reference to narrative content or other contexts. The main task revealed in these scores is “how to press out a maximum of variation—structural, dramaturgical, kinaesthetic—from a minimum of initial material” (2014, 8). Hence, in the diagrams, the written description, and the choreographer's commentary on the DVDs, the spatial structure of the spiral that lies at the heart of the works is explained thoroughly, alongside choreographic procedures that are articulated with clarity and maturity, such as mirroring, shadowing, “video-scratching” (when a phrase is looped in going back and forth) and retrograding (2014, 118–22). Cvejić notes that De Keersmaeker's minimalist procedures aim to produce a temporal process rather than a serial object (2014, 11), while the dancers are meant to be affected by the movement and not just execute it, to find expression and freedom within the structure and without sacrificing precision (2014, 66, 157–58). Such observations allow her to raise a crucial point about the implications of these works being revived today, given their vitalist, machinic, and libidinal character, which to some degree reflects the economic affluence of the 1970s in contrast to today's politics of austerity: “These performances reclaim the importance of the living,” she claims, and it is here where one wishes the authors would engage further with the significance of such works today, not just in terms of De Keersmaeker's development, but also in terms of the current times in dance, choreography, and the world.

Intriguing about this project as a whole is the distinct temporal relation each volume has with the works it presents, despite their similarity of approach (i.e., in the way works are presented and analyzed in each volume). The artist prompted by the theorist to look back at her early pieces is certainly very different from the two authors discussing works that have just been made and are being performed as their score is being produced. In the former case, the authors are able to raise issues and refer to contexts that De Keersmaeker was probably not even aware of at the time she made the work, while in the latter, the choreographer is evidently more eager to share doubts and questions that are very much alive for her now. At the same time, certain cross-references between the different pieces are only made possible precisely because of the authors’ awareness of De Keersmaeker's history, which allows us, too, to draw connections as we look at her oeuvre as a whole. For example, it is striking how working with silence and darkness in Elena's Aria points forward into more recent experimental works such as Song and 3Abschied, as well as the concept of death that is to be explored more extensively in En Atendant and Cesena.

If these volumes allow us to follow the development of De Keersmaeker from her first steps as part of the Flemish New Wave to becoming a key figure in the international dance and performance scene, then it is also true that they hint at the role which collaborative relations have played in her career. Even though it is mainly an authorial account that is being presented here, one gets a sense of her relation to composers, such as Steve Reich or Thierry De Mey, dramaturge Marianne van Keerhoeven, or some of the Rosas dancers, such as Cynthia Loemij and Chrysa Parkinson (whose drawings, included in the second volume, are particularly striking). Similarly, Cvejić's questions and contributions in the books and DVDs, as well as her references to philosophers, ideas, and other artists, help us not only to understand the various layers of the works presented, but also create a broader context for them. Perhaps more of this meta-writing would have offered a richer critical framework for the work. At the same time, one wonders how De Keersmaeker's choreographic work and the principles or approaches presented in these scores link to her role and work as director of the school P.A.R.T.S. After all, alongside their main aim of presenting and preserving certain works, arguably these books also evidence both authors’ commitment to dance pedagogy and choreographic study. Certainly, the methodological tools and accounts of the works presented here are detailed, informative, and rich; the way in which both Cvejić, as an “outside eye,” and De Keersmaeker, as a reflective choreographer, engage with old and new materials opens out a space for us, too, to approach these choreographic scores with an explorative attitude, as students, researchers, or even amateur dance enthusiasts.