• Tuesday 12 October 2010 - 20h30
• Wednesday 13 October 2010 - 20h30
• Friday 15 October 2010 - 20h30
• Saturday 16 October 2010 - 20h30

Man and his own death; Gustav Mahler, Jérôme Bel and A. T. De Keersmaeker engage body, art and soul in this extreme experience.

This unexpected encounter between two figures of contemporary dance revolves around farewell biddings three times repeated. Haunted by Gustav Mahler’s Farewell, the final part of The Song of the Earth, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker invited her colleague Jérôme Bel to work with her on this project. The association of the two artists may seem surprising to a lot of contemporary dance lovers, however Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Jérôme Bel are deeply interested in each other’s work, and for years they have kept a privileged and intense relationship going through dialogue. Despite the obvious formal differences between them, they both share a similar ethical approach to the stage in that they and consider it more as a place for interrogations than mere entertainment.
 3Abschied doesn’t go against this common programme, owing to the very choice of subject matter: to face one’s own death. In an attempt to describe the difficulty for a human being to confront their own death, Mahler pioneered a new musical form with his Song from the Earth, i.e. the symphonic poem. To the intimacy of the lied, he added the power of a large orchestra, here tempered by Arnold Schönberg’s transcription performed on stage by mezzo soprano Sara Fulgoni and thirteen musicians from the Ictus ensemble. It is through Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker as an individual, thanks to her art, dance of course, but also thanks to her tool, her body and all its expressive possibilities, that this experience will raise questions and be experiences, so that every spectator can, in turn, either by empathy or denial, be made to feel and question their own relation to their unavoidable finiteness.