Rosas: Genius in the machine

It took 20 minutes to cram the expectant audience into every available seat at FringeArts for Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's germinal 1982 dance, Rosas danst Rosas. It had its Philadelphia premiere Saturday after touring the world for decades, and while it may have arrived late and started late, for 90 minutes the still-mesmerizingly futuristic dance transported us.

The Belgian choreographer was only 22 when she created Rosas, (also the name of her dance company). To have made such a big bang in international dance and kept her staying power all these years fully establishes her niche in 20th-century art.

Tale Dolven, Sandra Ortega Bejanaro, Cynthia Loemij, and Sue-Yeon Youn somehow performed this tour de force without missing a beat or falling - unless falling was deliberate, in which case it happened often.

Like Lucinda Childs' 1979 Dance, also premiered here by FringeArts director Nick Stuccio 30 years later, Rosas used a minimalist score for its metronomic movement, but De Keersmaeker worked in tandem with composers Thierry De May and Peter Vermeersch. The score was percussive, to match the counts of the dance, with piquant notes from a clarinet and a humorous reference to a familiar tango.

A clanging industrial soundscape introduces the four dancers, who keep their backs to us far upstage before their first fall. For the next half hour, they remain horizontal, mostly in silence except for their breathing, or body parts slamming into the floor. Repeatedly, in perfect unison, they push up a shoulder, flop over, jut an arm out like an arrow, rise up on their torsos as if startled awake.

When I first saw the U.S. premiere in the '80s at Brooklyn Academy of Music, I took it for insomnia. Now, I also see it as a symbol of women's eons-long sleep. When the dancers stood up, one by one, to grab a breast, expose a flirty shoulder, coyly straighten a hem on their nondescript schoolgirlish blue-gray skirts and shirts, I began to see it as claiming their space and autonomy over their bodies and sexuality.

Throughout the next hour, they nodded at one another and smiled beguilingly at the audience, while maintaining the grueling tension of the incessant synchronized motion.

In 2011, Beyoncé rudely and literally stole many of the mechanized moves (and even costumes and set) from Rosas danst Rosas and De Keersmaeker's 1990 Achterland and crudely morphed them into near-pornography in her Countdown video. She misread De Keersmaeker's perfect feminist pitch.