EXIT ABOVE

For EXIT ABOVE, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker retraces her steps: to the roots of dance, the roots of Western pop music. The starting point for the performance is the song Walking Blues by legendary blues artist Robert Johnson; even though the journey leads back to Der Wanderer by Schubert, the best known singer-songwriter of the 19^th Century. Meskerem Mees, a singer songwriter of today, composed a series of variations and adaptations of ​‘walking songs’, together with Jean-Marie Aerts, sound architect of the Belgian 80s rock formation TC Matic, and with dancer and guitarist Carlos Garbin.

These songs invite De Keersmaeker to embark on a journey towards the starting point of choreography itself – walking, the primary form of movement, so familiar that we hardly stop to think about it. EXIT ABOVE explores the tension between marching together and stepping out, between romantic solitary ​‘wandern’ (wandering) and the political potential of a group of unarmed people walking together, the individual and the collective, the line and the circle. A performance revealing the extent to which our inner world is also a landscape of thoughts and reminiscences that can often only be traversed on foot.

This production is part of Troika Dance