Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's VERKLÄRTE NACHT Comes to Baryshnikov Arts Center

Baryshnikov Arts Center's new season opens with the New York Premiere of choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's Verklärte Nacht, a work set to Arnold Schönberg's well-known composition of the same name based on a poem by Richard Dehmel.

This presentation by one of today's preeminent dance companies, Rosas, runs for five performances only: Wednesday through Saturday, January 30-February 2 at 7:30PM and Sunday, February 3 at 3PM in the Jerome Robbins Theater (450 W. 37th Street, Manhattan). Verklärte Nacht is the first in BAC's complete lineup of Spring 2019 dance, music, theater, and multimedia presentations, to be announced in December.

Brussels-based Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker is internationally celebrated for an oeuvre distinguished by "rich, intoxicating friction between human architecture and expression" (The New York Times). One of her early works, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), is set to Arnold Schönberg's eponymous, late romantic tone poem. The 1899 score, originally composed for a string sextet and later arranged for orchestra, was the instrumental realization of a poem published three years earlier by German Symbolist writer Richard Dehmel, in which a woman confesses to the man she loves that she is pregnant with another man's child. Drawing inspiration from the poem's dramatic arc and the music's expressive crescendos and diminuendos, De Keersmaeker developed Verklärte Nacht, which premiered in 1995 as part of an evening of Schönberg music at the Brussels Opera House De Munt / La Monnaie.

Originally created for an ensemble, she reconstructed the work in 2014, concentrating the narrative structure into an evocative dance for three performers.
Verklärte Nacht is performed by Rosas dancers Boštjan Anton?i?, Cynthia Loemij, and Igor Shyshko, with lighting design by Luc Schaltin and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, costumes by Rosas / Rudy Sabounghi, and musical dramaturgy by Georges-Elie Octors and Alain Franco.

Tickets $25 (orchestra) and $20 (balcony) are available now at bacnyc.org or 866-811-4111. Running time is 50 minutes.

Lead support of dance programming at BAC is provided by the Rudolf Nureyev Endowment. Major support for dance programming and activities provided by the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Harkness Foundation for Dance.

Rosas is supported by the Flemish Community and by the BNP Paribas Foundation.
About the Artists

In 1980, after studying dance at Mudra School in Brussels and Tisch School of the Arts in New York, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker (b. 1960) created Asch, her first choreographic work. Two years later came the premiere of Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich. De Keersmaeker established the dance company Rosas in Brussels in 1983, while creating the work Rosas danst Rosas. Since these breakthrough pieces, her choreography has been grounded in a rigorous and prolific exploration of the relationship between dance and music. She has created with Rosas a wide-ranging body of work engaging the musical structures and scores of several periods, from early music to contemporary and popular idioms. Her choreographic practice also draws formal principles from geometry, numerical patterns, the natural world, and social structures to offer a unique perspective on the body's articulation in space and time. In 1995 De Keersmaeker established the school P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) in Brussels in association with De Munt/La Monnaie.