In 1980, after studying dance at Mudra School in Brussels and Tisch School of the Arts in New York, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (b. 1960) created Asch, her first choreographic work. Two years later came the premiere of Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich. De Keersmaeker established the dance company Rosas in Brussels in 1983, while creating the work Rosas danst Rosas. Since these breakthrough pieces, her choreography has been grounded in a rigorous and prolific exploration of the relationship between dance and music. She has created with Rosas a wide-ranging body of work engaging the musical structures and scores of several periods, from early music to contemporary and popular idioms. Her choreographic practice also draws formal principles from geometry, numerical patterns, the natural world, and social structures to offer a unique perspective on the body’s articulation in space and time. In 1995 De Keersmaeker established the school P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) in Brussels in association with De Munt/La Monnaie.
Barbara Browning teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. She’s the author of three academic books (Samba: Resistance in Motion, Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture, and Caetano Veloso: A Foreign Sound) as well as three ficto-critical novels (The Correspondence Artist, I’m Trying to Reach You, and The Gift (or, Techniques of the Body)). With Sébastien Régnier, she co-authored a work of auto-fiction à quatre mains, Who the Hell is Imre Lodbrog? She also maintains a performance practice, both solo and collaborative.