Bartók/ Beethoven/ Schönberg brings together three early choreographies by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, originally created by her company Rosas to seminal works by Béla Bartók, Ludwig van Beethoven and Arnold Schönberg.

To Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet, De Keersmaeker created a choreography with playful and combative accents that finds its danceability in the complex and layered rhythms and harmonies. In Grosse Fuge (1992), the dancers defy gravity in a ‘masculine’ dance vocabulary. The starting point for this ensemble piece is Beethoven’s ingenious interweaving of simultaneously running melodic lines. Verklärte Nacht (1995) is a shamelessly romantic love story in which the contrasting feelings of a man and a woman are dissected, set to Schönberg’s music of the same name.

The dancers of Opera Ballet Vlaanderen perform the large-scale versions of these choreographies, accompanied live by the strings section of the house orchestra.