Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich

What is danced

Each of the four movements isolates one physical problem set by Reich's phase-shifting scores. In Piano Phase, two dancers repeat, for about fifteen minutes, 'a swinging arm and body movement, combined with a sudden and vigorous half-turn, punctuated by a rise onto a pointed foot held in suspension' while one dancer accelerates fractionally against the other until they fall into and out of phase opposition; lateral spotlights multiply their shadows so the pair appears to be five or six dancers. Violin Phase is a solo (created and long danced by De Keersmaeker herself) built on a 'pirouette motif similar to that in Piano Phase,' traveling around the cardinal points of an imagined circle, alternating centrifugal and centripetal patterns, and culminating in a triple swinging leg motion performed standing on the other, static leg — described as tracing 'a fictitious eight-segment rosette on the floor with the tip of the dancer's foot.'

Come Out inverts the vocabulary onto stools: dancers stay seated and repeat 'seven distinct arm and torso movements without standing, in an extremely jerky and chaotic manner,' turning gradually as the taped phrase 'Come out to show them' loops and phases, with the choreography explicitly mimicking the words of the original spoken source (referencing 1960s civil-rights-era police violence). Clapping Music closes the work with dancers moving diagonally across the stage on a simple foot pattern — 'shifting from demi-pointe to flat feet on the floor, accompanied by sudden knee flexion under tension, paired with opposing half-bent arm movements' — mapped onto the twelve rhythmic phases of Reich's hand-clapping score. Across all four sections the technical demand is endurance and exactness rather than balletic amplitude: dancers must hold a simple repeating phrase with total rhythmic precision while a partner (or the recorded/live music) drifts out of and back into unison with them, and 'the movement is expansive and evolving, utilizing variations around a central motif.'

Context

Fase was made just as De Keersmaeker was absorbing the American postmodern and minimalist dance scene of the early 1980s — the article names Trisha Brown's accumulation technique and Lucinda Childs's 1979 Dance (made with Philip Glass and Sol LeWitt) as direct models, situating the piece within the Judson Dance Theater lineage rather than European ballet tradition. Reich's own compositional method — strict, mathematical phase-shifting between identical musical lines — became, in the article's account, the literal generator of the choreography's structure, an unusually direct transposition of a musical procedure into stage movement.

The piece is presented as the founding statement of De Keersmaeker's choreographic language and of Rosas itself: its European success between 1982 and 1985 (over 100 performances) established her reputation, and Come Out is cited as the direct source for the second movement of her next work, Rosas danst Rosas (1983).

Staging history

De Keersmaeker and Michèle Anne De Mey danced the work together from the 1982 premiere; De Keersmaeker withdrew it from 1985 to 1992, then revived it with a new partner, Tale Dolven. Steve Reich himself did not see the piece until 1998 at The Kitchen in New York, after which he insisted on including it in a 1999 retrospective of his work at the Lincoln Center Festival, where De Keersmaeker received a second Bessie Award. Live musicians from the Steve Reich Ensemble performed on stage with the dancers during the 1982–85 international tour and again in later revivals; the Piano Phase section was folded into the larger piece Steve Reich Evening (2006–08), and the Violin Phase solo was performed by De Keersmaeker at MoMA in 2011 as part of a programme on line and tracing in twentieth-century art. From September 2018 the roles passed for the first time to a new generation of dancers (Yuika Hashimoto and Laura Maria Poletti, alternating with Laura Bachman and Soa Ratsifandrihana), ending De Keersmaeker's own thirty-seven-year run in the Violin Phase solo.

How to watch it

Watch for the mechanics of phase-shifting itself: two performers begin in unison and one very gradually accelerates or drifts until the pair reaches phase opposition and then re-synchronizes — the drama is in the slippage, not in expressive gesture. In Piano Phase, side lighting throws multiplying shadows so two bodies read as several; in Violin Phase, watch the floor pattern the solo traces around an implied circle. The piece rewards patience with repetition rather than narrative or virtuosity, and the article notes that some audiences find its 'extremely repetitive nature' 'exasperating' unless they accept, as one scholar put it, 'a dilation of time through successive revelations.'

Structure

1. Piano Phase
   Two dancers repeat a swinging arm-and-body phrase with a half-turn and a suspended pointed-foot rise, gradually shifting out of and back into unison as one accelerates fractionally against the other; side lighting multiplies their shadows.
2. Violin Phase
   A solo, originally danced by De Keersmaeker herself, built on a circling pirouette motif traveling between cardinal points of an imagined circle, culminating in a triple swinging leg motion.
3. Come Out
   Two seated dancers repeat seven jerky arm-and-torso movements under bare lamps, gradually turning in time with the looping recorded phrase 'Come out to show them,' evoking a police interrogation.
4. Clapping Music
   Dancers move diagonally across the stage on a synchronous/asynchronous foot pattern shifting between demi-pointe and flat feet, mapped onto the twelve rhythmic phases of the hand-clapping score.

Structure read from an encyclopaedia article, not from a libretto or score we hold. Confirm against a programme before treating the numbering as authoritative.

Credits

• composer: Steve Reich

Questions