Bitef

become the symbol of the Afro-American straggle against discrimination, the struggle of the Other America. Protest song. Some forty years later, on that dark day of September 11, thousands of New Yorkers joined voices, singing this song as the hallucinatory ashes of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers continued to fall. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has chosen the quavering voice of Joan Baez to underscore her dance. The black vinyl cracks of Baez’ music cradled this choreographer’s childhood and adolescence. In risked introspection, Anne Teresa dances to the illuminating melodies of the most popular, most pacifist, folk singer of the 19605, a singer acutely sensitive to the distress of the downtrodden and the heartbroken. The CD version, burned from the original record, plays in the studio. Anne Teresa rams an anniversary page, that of 20 years of Rosas with the stage set to re-launch the leaps and bounds of several of her greatest repertoire pieces, danced by their original performers: Fase, Bartók/aantekeningen, Toccata, among others. She returns with a solo dance after the premiere of ( but if a look should) April me, inspired by Stravinsky’s telluric Noces, and after the collective breaking-out of Drumming, gushing with the percussive flood of Steve Reich playing live with the musicians of Ictus. Anne Teresa retakes the stage, along with her emotions, alone with the voice of her own body, facing Joan Baez in concert - she, too, alone with her acoustic guitar. The old LP, re-recorded today, makes a natural mark on her choreography. Anne Teresa heard the album for the first rime in 1967. Brand new and incongruously offered as a gift celebrating the birth of her sister, the record was proudly displayed next to a bouquet of flowers in the maternity ward. As a child, Anne Teresa understood nothing of the lyrics, sung in a foreign language, but allowed herself to he swayed by their tenderness, their bright melodiousness, by the velvet quaver of this clear, transparent voice. Gazing into the photo of Baez on the 33 rpm cover, she dreamed. Time passes and the old, much listened to LP gathers scratches. Time passes to reveal - behind all the tenderness of this young 22-year-old singer with the ethereal voice and folk guitar the bold rock of her egalitarian convictions, the mournful melancholy of loss, the vital energy of her tireless struggle against all forms of human degradation, of violence by man against man. Behind all this gentleness, the passage of time reveals her intransigent rejection of arms and war. Locked up in American prisons, Baez pays the price of this rejection, a rejection that mobilizes the masses to her side. “Only you and I can help the sun rise each coming morning, If we don’t, it may drench itself out in sorrow (...) Action is the antidote to despair.” It was the 19605. “The utopian years”, the choreographer smiles. “Joan Baez spread a profound belief in social change. She fought for human dignity, for a sense of well-being devoid of materialism. The word ‘together’ was supposed to mean something and its force made everything seem possible. Today, society is so atomised, problems are so complex that we don’t know where or with what to begin, and that sometimes gives us such a feeling of powerlessness!”/odw Baez in Concert, Part 2. The chore-

ographer rediscovers her seductive tenderness, intact “I love her economy of means, her rich soprano tessitura, the iridescence and simplicity of her folk chords. Baez submerges us in both the greater history of society and the more down-to-earth stories of individuals. Closer to my work on Tippeke, the nursery rhyme where I explored which movements might emerge from a simple, repetitive ritornello, I want here to discover the gestures that are suggested by the spoken word and that, inversely, deny the text and give life to movement. I like the fact that these songs tell stories. I want the audience to listen to what is being sung, while the dance itself offers nothing explicit. I don’t want to interrupt the concert. The CD will be played without a break, with all its live remarks and applause, with its songs that refer to the history of political causes and personal stories (intimate tales between two people), with its popular ballads and protest anthems, tenderness and pain, gentle caresses and biting commentary.” In the studio, the choreographer improvises. The space is bare. She knows, as always, that it is difficult to tame this, our space, aw'orld without reference points. She gropes about, steadying herself on an imaginary' barre: pliés, battements, tendus, ronds de jambes. But she knows that this strict and proud form of dance is not her own, and she instills a sense of wavering, breaking awaysearching. “I am obsessed by pure and taut lines, magnetized by the rigorous equilibrium of classical dance, but while I can formally execute this severity, beauty and certainty, it doesn’t mesh with me at an intimate level. So I put up resistance and use the resulting tension - between pride and fail, between charging forward and retreating, between certitude and doubt, between reaching out and withdrawing, between the straightness of a line and the meandering curve - to compose a clear exposé of the odyssey of introspection...” Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2 revisits the poetic ballads, soothing lullabies, activist anthems, popular “spirituals”, short narrative scripts and manifestos of rebellion. From the traditional folk repertoire, Baez sings Once I Had a Sweetheart and Queen of Hearts, melancholy laments of lost love, Jackaroe, a spicy' ballad of a young woman wfio transvestites herself into a soldier and sailor to follow her lover. In the vein of modem folk music, throbbing with new energy, she sings Long Black Veil w'here, by gallantry or naivete, a lover allows himself to be accused of a murder he never committed so as not to expose his relationship with the wife of his best friend. In Portland Town, she pays homage to a beautiful ballad written by her contemporary, Dettoli Adams, a tender and mournful hymn to mothers who have lost their sons to war. She sings the song of Brazilian Luiz Bonza, pillar of the emerging bossa nova and tightrope-w'alker in her Manha De Carnaval, originally composed for the famous film Black Orpheus, set in Rio. 1963 also falls in the period of her impetuous friendship with Bob Dylan, whom she first introduced to the public. In concert, she frolicked with his ironic Don’t think twice, it s all right. She sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic, today a most ambiguous call to arms: “Let us die to make men free". And juxtaposes it with God on our side, aiming her sights at - and picking off one by one - all