En Atendant, Théâtre de la Ville, Paris

Subtler art: ‘En Atendant’

Has the audience been shortchanged when the main event in an evening of contemporary dance turns out to be the music? In Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s case, not necessarily. Her latest creation, shown this week at the Théâtre de la Ville, may be flawed as a dance work but her exploration of the ars subtilior, a highly refined, manneristic musical style born on the heels of what has been called the “calamitous” 14th century, is an unexpected revelation.

En Atendant is as much musical incantation as it is dance, and a lone flautist (Michael Schmid) welcomes us as the lights dim, sustaining notes for minutes on end while a horn seems to call from a distance. A poignant series of ars subtilior songs follows, performed by singer Les Van Laethem and two musicians. The genre’s haunting undercurrent of resignation and mortality is best expressed in Philippus da Caserta’s En Atendant, souffrir m’estuet: “While waiting, I must endure grievous pain / And live, languishing: it is my fate / Since I cannot approach the fountain / Surrounded as it is by too many streams.” Keersmaeker senses a mirror for our times in this medieval melancholy, but the choreography sadly falls short of capturing its reflection.

Ars subtilior could almost define the Belgian choreographer’s own choreographic style. At her best she is indeed “more subtle”, at once unostentatious and exceptionally attuned to music. In En Atendant, however, she shies away from her material. One of her great gifts lies in musical counterpoint, and yet we see musicians perform on their own and dancers in plain black clothes launch into virtuosic solos in silence. Stripped of its rhythmic complexity, her simple, organic style lacks depth, and what must have been magic in Avignon’s open-air Cloître des Célestins, where this work was created last summer, requires more work on a traditional stage.

Music and dance only come together in the last 30 minutes, and while it is too late to give coherence to the work as a whole, the multifaceted imagery Keersmaeker distils through her seven dancers as they join the musicians still reaches poetic heights many more perfect works never provide. Like ars subtilior, Keersmaeker thrives on extreme refinement, devising a crystalline response to the music for each dancer and weaving them together into a highly complex tapestry. Even fleeting symbols – a sculpturesque tableau evoking Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano series, subdued references to the 14th-century Black Death, a Christ figure lying naked at dusk – are handled with such lightness that we are left wondering what went wrong earlier on. For now, En Atendant, with its sumptuous score, remains a masterpiece in waiting.

Théâtre de la Ville, Paris