Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui - influences

Background and Training

Philippine ("Pina") Bausch was born in Germany, in 1940. Her parents ran a restaurant, and Pina would often amuse customers with impromptu dances. After childhood ballet classes, she went on to the Folkwang school in Essen, headed by Kurt Jooss, who drew on the concept of Ausdruckstanz, the expressionist dance that had flourished in pre-war Germany. From there she won a three-year scholarship to New York's Juilliard School, where she studied with English ballet choreographer Antony Tudor and performed with both American modern dance groups and the Metropolitan Opera Ballet.

She returned to Essen in 1962, becoming a founder member of Jooss's new Folkwang Ballet, where she began choreographing in 1967. She led the company after Jooss's departure in 1969, until she accepted the directorship of the Wuppertal Opera Ballet in 1973. She remained there for the rest of her life, despite only ever signing one-year contracts. "I was always ready to go. It was never meant that I stay here in Wuppertal," she said. "It just happened."

A tall, sepulchral figure who subsisted on cigarettes and coffee, Bausch was

at her most iconic as the somnabulist in Cafe Müller (1978), a role she

continued to perform into her 60s. She died suddenly in July 2009, just

five days after being diagnosed with cancer. Her company,

though, remains determined to carry her legacy into the future.

Wuppertal Tanztheatre

To the disgust of traditionalists, Bausch completely revamped the Wuppertal into a vehicle for her own searing style of Tanztheater. Rules of style and presentation were bulldozed by her imperatives of emotional and psychological expression. Despite the hostile reactions, however, she began to attract an international cult following and the small town of Wuppertal became a mecca for the world of dance (and beyond: her devotees included several actors, directors, artists and film-makers). From the mid-80s onwards, many of the company's new works were made through residencies in international cities, including Rome, Lisbon, São Paulo, LA, Istanbul and Tokyo.

Bausch's Work

You can divide Bausch's work into three broad phases. Her earliest works were the most conventionally choreographic, with a development and denouement, and movement as the principal medium. The most powerful of these is The Rite of Spring (1975), set to Stravinsky: its emotional force still leaves audiences reeling. From Bluebeard (1977) onwards, Bausch abandoned development and progression: all her subsequent pieces are loose, unpredictable montages of scenes, strung together by free association. As she began to work more with ideas drawn from her performers' personal lives, soul-baring confession came to dominate the choreography. Meanwhile, movement became just one of an anarchic array of mediums that included song, film, costume, set design and props. Her later location pieces used her performers' reactions to the cities in which they were resident as source material for surreal, sometimes comic dances about local people and places. The result is like riffling through sets of intriguingly warped postcards.

Throughout her work, some themes recur: human frailty and brutality, the power and the pity of personal relationships (particularly between men and women), the blind force of desire, the desperate veneer of normality (she often dresses her performers in formal gowns and suits, representing a shiny layer of convention). Her earlier pieces, especially, were harrowing in their portrayal of haunted souls and precarious sanity; later in her career, there was more humour, though it was wry rather than sunny. Bausch's sets are often overwhelming – rocks and rivers (Vollmund), huge ramparts of earth (Viktor), bleak screes of dead leaves (Bluebeard), a field of flowers (Nelken).

Bausch's works are not meant to be watched: they're meant to be experienced. Surrender to her vision – with the pieces regularly lasting for three hours with no interval, you have little choice – and you'll find that they can flay your soul.

Background and Training

Born in 1960, Belgium, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker studied music as a child and at the age of 18 went to the Mudra dance school in Brussels. There she made her first piece and met composer and film-maker Thierry de Mey, who became her artistic collaborator and introduced her to the music of Steve Reich.

In 1980, she went to the Tisch School of the Arts in New York, met some of Reich's musicians and began choreographing to his music. In 1982 she presented Fase, an evening-length piece with music by Reich, performed by herself and Michèle Anne de Mey (Thierry's sister) in Belgium. Austere, demanding and riveting, it was a sensation. A major new choreographer seemed to have sprung, fully formed, from nowhere.

The following year, De Keersmaeker founded her own company, Rosas, with three other women. Their first work, Rosas Danst Rosas, became a signature piece, giving the company a distinctive female look: full skirts, tomboyish boots, squadron formations.With more resources and funding De Keersmaeker was able to create larger, more ambitious works and experiment with theatre, text and film. She has also directed opera, and many of her works have been adapted for the screen.

In 1995, she set up Parts (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios), a major international school that provides a multidisciplinary education in music, theatre and critical theory alongside dance training.

Belgium had little modern dance to speak of before the 1980s. De Keersmaeker changed that. By the end of the 80s, she had not only made an impact on the international stage, but also opened the floodgates within Belgium. There followed a veritable wave of Belgian experimentalists, including Wim Vandekeybus, Jan Fabre, Alain Platel and later Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. Together, they have made Belgium a world player in modern dance.

De Keersmaeker's Style

De Keersmaeker's early work Fase, based on the compositional methods of Steve Reich, is illustrative of her style. On one level, it is an obsessive, cerebral study in pattern. Yet it also uses naturalistic gestures and steps, creating a dramatic undertow and emotional nuance. The linchpins to De Keersmaeker's work are close, structural relations to music and a tension between two sometimes contradictory impulses: formalism and expressionism.

In the company's early years, De Keersmaeker made distinctive all-female quartets, their drilled discipline offset by displays of "femininity": tip-toe strutting, swishy skirts and swinging hair. When men joined the company in 1987, she became more obviously concerned with gender roles and experimented with cross-dressing. She also developed a vigorous, sometimes violent style of action that she has since left behind, although many of her pieces still require a great deal of stamina.

She also began to add more layers to the work – text, voice, film – sometimes producing work that was closer to experimental theatre than dance. In between her most theatrical works, she returned to pieces based on a wide variety of music (Bach, Beethoven and Bartók to Joan Baez, John Coltrane and Indian classical music). The composer she is most closely associated with is Steve Reich.

Composition is key. In many of De Keersmaeker's works, there is a tension between order and disorder – complexity glimpsed at the chaos like patterns in rain, or disturbances appearing in machine-like patterns as if spanners thrown into works.

Background and Training

Alain Platel, a 28-year-old Belgian educationalist working with disabled children, was urged by an old teacher to go and see a ballet by Maurice Béjart. He thought it was terrible. His old teacher said to Platel: well I'd like to see you do better. Platel, whose theatre experience amounted to some amateur drama and dance he had done as a child, picked up the gauntlet and gave it a go.

Thus began Les Ballets C de la B, now one of the most influential dance theatre companies in the world. Platel got together with his sister and a friend – and produced a little performance in his loft

An audience member happened to be from a new theatre festival; he invited the group to perform there, and they walked off with a special prize. Then in 1993, a group of 30 international theatre programmers who were attending a festival in Amsterdam went by chance to see Platel's piece Bonjour Madame. They loved it, and Les Ballets C de la B was catapulted to a new level, beginning to receive big tour bookings and to attract state funding (which was doubled in 1997).

Since then, the company has become a major international player. It is run as a collective, which encourages its performers to develop their own choreography, and several important artists have emerged from it, notably Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. Its performers are diverse in age, nationality and training, and outside performers join in for particular projects – most unusually, the 65 babies for Christine de Smedt's 9x9 in Rotterdam (the piece was performed with completely different casts in different cities between 2000 and 2005), even 14 dogs for Platel's Wolf (2003).

Les Ballet C de la B's Style

An influential source of inspiration for Platel is German dance theatre icon Pina Bausch. Like her, he is interested in the performers as people. Like Bausch, too, his pieces are created collaboratively with a diverse set of performers (they draw on their personal experiences and skills to make the material), and are typically montages of different scenes loosely linked by a theme. There's a lot of talking, but Platel pays notably more attention to music than Bausch, and frequently incorporates musicians (often singers) into his performances, as well as using classical scores including Bach, Mozart, and Monteverdi. The characters in Platel's work are often outsiders and, like Belgian artist René Magritte, he can also make the normal surreal.

This approach has become something of a house style: the choreographers nurtured within the collective, such as Cherkaoui, using similar means even though their ends may vary.

Expect diversity at a C de la B performance: you might see an aerialist, a ballerina, a contortionist and a countertenor all choreographed together; or themes that interweave war with shopping, or religious iconography with domestic life; or scenes that veer between violence, comedy and compassion. It's a tricky balance to pull off, and sometimes the pieces can dissipate their own energy. But at its best, this multiplicity of means and media can give flashes of insight into our own selves and panoramic views of the spectacle of our lives.

William Forsythe

Background and Training

Born in 1949, native New Yorker William Forsythe danced with the Joffrey Ballet and was influenced by New York City Ballet's neoclassical guru George Balanchine. He moved to Germany to join Stuttgart Ballet in 1973, where he became resident choreographer.

It was his directorship of Frankfurt Ballet, from 1984, that put Forsythe on the international map. He made a series of pieces that variously extended, inverted, warped or downright wrecked traditional ballet. And he often used deliberately disorientating multimedia stagings that were closer to experimental theatre than to classical ballet.

By 2002, the municipal authorities had had enough. They wanted to put the ballet back into Frankfurt Ballet, and asked Forsythe to leave - which led to widespread outrage and protracted wrangling. Forsythe, not willing to serve up ballet as a "fine dining experience", left anyway. In 2005 he set up his own smaller company.

Sidi Larbi was inspired by;

Composition of choreography using mathematical structures

Experimentation with choreography e.g drawing circles with the head, one body part being heavier than the rest - element of play.