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The Arts Intel Report

Exit Above—After the Tempest, by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

A moment from Exit Above—After the Tempest.

Feb 25 – June 7, 2025

Blink, and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker has made another dance. In the last decade, the work has either been for herself and a junior colleague (a composer or choreographer) or for her longstanding Brussels troupe, Rosas, without her joining in. Exit Above—After the Tempest is a third thing. The performing belongs to the ensemble and to de Keersmaeker’s earliest, minimalist credo, “My walking is my dancing,” but joining them, to walk and sing, is Meskerem Mees. The young Flemish-Ethiopian singer-songwriter delivers variations on midcentury blues-master Robert Johnson’s “Walking Blues” (“Woke up this morning / feeling round for my shoes”), to which de Keersmaeker responds with her usual mathematical precision and low-key steps. It is typical for her choreography to swerve from and converge with the music—whether it’s Steve Reich, John Coltrane, or Bach. The results can range from dutiful to sublime. Exit Above—After the Tempest tours France this spring before traveling briefly to Spain and Portugal. —Apollinaire Scherr