Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker wins Golden Lion at Venice Biennale
On Monday the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker was honoured with the Golden Lion for a Lifetime Achievement for Dance for all her work at the Biennale in Venice. Ever since the 1980s De Keersmaeker has been a leading figure in both Belgian and international contemporary dance and is particularly well known for her refreshing ideas about the intense relationship between dance and music.
According to the Biennale jury De Keersmaeker has an “original approach to formal simplicity and pathos”, which was also clearly demonstrated in her debut ‘Rosas dances Rosas’. The Director, Virgilio Sieni, commends De Keersmaeker as representing “the connection between creation and the transmission process” and is full of praise for “her poetic gestures, brought to life by the body, which have led to a significant shift among Western cultures in the understanding of the body on stage as a medium for experimenting with language”. Besides her talent in using body language as a way to communicate, Sieni also speaks highly of the way in which De Keersmaeker “uses the body on stage like a platform of the world”.
She will be presented with the Golden Lion on 27 June 2015 in Venice, which will be followed by a performance of ‘Fase, four movements to the music of Eric Reich’, her very first choreography from 1982. De Keersmaeker will perform the dance herself.