A Ballet That Turns on Weight of Emotion

There is a common but not obvious thread in the music of Schoenberg, Berg and Wagner that choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker uses in her full-length “Woud” (The Woods), which receives its Southern California premiere on Tuesday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

“All the music is based on triangular relationships,” she said in a recent phone interview from Brussels.

Schoenberg’s “Verklarte Nacht” (Transfigured Night) draws from a poem by Richard Dehmel in which a woman confesses to the man she loves that she is pregnant by another man. Berg’s “Lyric Suite” reveals the composer’s secret 10-year extramarital love affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin (Alma Mahler’s sister). And Wagner’s “Wesendonck” Songs grew out of his love for Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of one of his greatest benefactors. She inspired not only these songs but also the opera “Tristan und Isolde.”

Like the scores, the ballet merely alludes to such relationships. But finding the common thread was key in the choreographer’s “search for a [movement] vocabulary, even if a story is not told directly,” she said.

“Woud” opens with a film segment, “Tippeke,” by Thierry de Mey, in which de Keersmaeker improvises to a French nursery rhyme while onstage company members double her image. The Berg, Schoenberg and Wagner sections follow.

“The whole performance goes back in terms of time, music-wise,” she said. “It also goes backward in terms of emotions--not in a judgmental sense--but in a sense of how emotion is approached.”

Her setting of “Verklarte Nacht” originally made a bow in Brussels in 1996 on a program that included a setting of Schoenberg’s solo cantata “Erwartung.” But from the beginning, de Keersmaeker had envisioned the work as part of a longer piece. She added music by Berg and Wagner and, for the film, de Mey.

The great British choreographer Antony Tudor also used “Verklarte Nacht” for his famous ballet, “Pillar of Fire,” created for American Ballet Theatre in 1942, but de Keersmaeker said she was unaware of that work.

“There are a lot of choreographies to the music, about 60,” she said. “I met somebody in Vienna who was making a thesis on that.”

Starting with the music often works for de Keersmaeker, but she uses other approaches as well. “It depends on the piece,” she said. “In the last 15 years, music has been very important. I am surrounded by musicians. They are part of my daily life. For some pieces, it is the music that is first. That happened with ‘Woud.’

“But sometimes it happens a different way. Sometimes it’s text or an idea, and music will be searched for in the function of the theme. There is not a fixed path I’m following, in that sense.

“I’ve always been interested in very different things--very much in pure movement, but also in a theatrical approach. The only continuous line has been this close relationship with music and interest in developing different strategies about how dance and movement can relate in many different ways.”

Music has always been a factor. Born in 1960 in Belgium, de Keersmaeker studied flute as a little girl. “That’s how I took to dance. Then I became interested in theater. If I wouldn’t have become a dancer, I would have done something in theater.”

Her father, a farmer, and mother support her artistic efforts. “Very much so,” she said.

De Keersmaeker studied dance (but not choreography) from 1978 to 1980 at the Mudra School, directed by choreographer Maurice Bejart, at the Thea^tre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. She made her dance debut in that city in 1980 in a solo, “Asch.” A year later, she went to study at the New York University School of the Arts, where she came under the influence of choreographer Lucinda Childs and the school of American minimalism.

She founded her own company, Rosas, in Belgium in 1983. The name has several possible meanings, according to the company’s literature. It’s Latin for “roses,” French for “rosy” (rosace), or simply a group of women all named Rosa.

But in a 1992 interview, de Keersmaeker offered a different explanation. The word means “nothing at all,” she said. “Someone suggested that I choose a two-syllable name that could be easily remembered and had an ‘a’ in it. Like Kodak or Coca-Cola.”

The choreographer’s official biography describes her as “a minimalist, an obsessive perfectionist who makes only one new work a year, and yet, has received a considerable reputation for her body of work.”

In fact, years of awards and acclaim led to her appointment as artist-in-residence at the Monnaie Theatre in 1992, succeeding choreographer Mark Morris, who left after three turbulent years. Her contract runs through 2001.

Morris took the brunt of change, she said. “I didn’t have to come after Bejart. That’s a hard job. Mark had that hard job. After 25 years of Bejart, for anybody to come in, it was very, very difficult. So I was happy not to have to solve that problem.”

Running her company now competes with her dancing. The local audience Tuesday will see her dance only in the opening filmed segment of “Woud.”

“I still dance,” de Keersmaeker said, “but only a few pieces. It’s quite difficult to run a company and make pieces and dance as well. That’s the only reason.”

* Rosas will dance company director Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s “Woud” (The Woods) on Tuesday at 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. The music for the program will be played by the Duke Quartet. $24 to $28. (714) 854-4646.