Anne Teresa de Keermaeker’s Mean Girls

The Lincoln Center Festival is presenting a retrospective of the Belgian choreographer’s early works. Last night, I saw her Rosas Danst Rosas, a dance that has been canonized as one of the milestones of contemporary choreography. The film version, by Thierry de Mey, has been viewed and imitated thousands of times, including, most recently, by  Beyoncé. To me, the dance has a distinctly “mean girls” vibe—four adolescents, stuck in a kind of  study-hall purgatory.  Here’s my review of the piece, for DanceTabs.

 

Photo by Herman Sorgeloos
Photo by Herman Sorgeloos