Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreography of Grisey’s Vortex Temporum I II III was premiered at last year’s Ruhrtriennale. The extensive tour that followed went to several cities in Belgium, France, and Greece. This year the production continues its tour with Keersmaeker’s dance company Rosas and Ensemble Ictus.

2014 Tour Dates:
February 5: Hasselt, Cultuurcentrum
February 22 and 23: Frankfurt, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm
March 18: Clermont-Ferrand, Comédie
March 20: Douai, Hippodrome
April 23-25: Grenoble, MC2
April 28-30 & May 02-07: Paris, Théâtre de la Ville
May 16-17: Marseille, La Criée
May 27-29: London, Sadler's Wells
June 01 & 04: Amsterdam, Hollandfestival
June 07 & 08: Mannheim, Theater der Welt

 “For Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker as one of the few distinguished choreographers who delights in intricacies of contemporary music, Vortex Temporum has been the piece around which her attention gravitated in the last decade. Rigorously constructed and refined in timbre, this mature work of the French composer Gérard Grisey offers, on the one hand, spectral harmony based on natural acoustic properties of sound, and on the other, a high sense of motility in circles and spirals—patterns in which performances of Rosas abound.

Dancers of Rosas and musicians of Ictus pair up in a shared quest for composing various experiences of time. De Keersmaeker will search for how time contracts and expands, swirls and foliates in a choreographic counterpoint of sound, musicians’ gestures, and dancers’ movements and spatial dynamics.”

http://www.rosas.be/en/production/vortex-temporum 

Vortex Temporum was composed between 1994 and 1996 for a small ensemble consisting of flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, and piano. Divided into three parts, the piece’s title refers to the beginning of a rotation. Grisey explained that he wanted to thoroughly explore the possibilities inhering in the use of the same material in different times (ordinary time, expanded time, and contracted time).

Thus, alongside the spectral writing, there unfolds a game achieved by a construction based on the number three. The initial musical cell is drawn from Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe; the “vortex” inspired the composer to write harmonics concentrated around the sounds of the diminished seventh chord, the “rotational” chord par excellence.

Each of the four sounds lead to multiple modulations, and the composer has declared that he even felt pushed to seek whatever significant or innovative qualities there might still be in the tonal system, though he himself by then was distant from it. The three parts of Vortex Temporum are dedicated to Gérard Zinsstag, Salvatore Sciarrino, and Helmut Lachenmann (Photo: Herman Sorgeloos).