Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker wins prestigious Japanese art prize
Belgian dancer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is one of the recipients of this year’s Praemium Imperiale, widely referred to as the Nobel prize for the arts, in the theatre/film category.
The prize was founded in 1988 by the Japan Art Association, is awarded by an international committee and includes laureates such as Sophia Loren, David Hockney and, in De Keersmaeker’s category, Maurice Béjart, Mikhail Baryshnikov among other greats.
With this nomination, the influential choreographer becomes the second Belgian to win this prestigious prize after painter Pierre Alechinsky, a cornerstone of the CoBrA movement, who won a Praemium Imperiale for his artwork in 2018.
Come 22 October, she will be lauded at the awards ceremony and receive a medal in recognition, along with “an honorarium of 15 million yen and a testimonial letter”. De Keersmaeker will share the spotlight with Peter Doig (painting), Marina Abramovic (sculpture), Eduardo Souto de Moura (architecture) and Andras Schiff (music).
De Keersmaeker learned her craft under Béjart, started dance company Rosas in 1983 and the Performing Arts Research and Training Studios (P.A.R.T.S) in Brussels in 1995. Her work has also been “presented in museum contexts”, as the Praemium Imperiale website puts it, in such museums as Tate Modern, the Louvre and MoMA.
Congratulations to this talented Belgian lady.