Thierry De Mey

A film adaptation of Michèle-Ann De Mey's "Sonatas 555" - choreographic variations on the highways and byways of love.

A woman who only has a couple of months left to live decides to go on a final journey, crossing several countries.

A dance set to Pierre Boulez's recording of Ravel's Ma Mere l'Oye

La Valse is dance a film by Thierry De Mey based on the choreography created on Maurice Ravel’s La Valse as the final part of ZOO’s performance Accords. Created as part of the triptych Equi Voci, the film La Valse exists in versions for one or three screens.

"Floréal" is the name of a garden city in a district of Brussels (Boitsfort). Hundreds of small houses with black and yellow woodwork, in streets named after flowers. This garden city was a first attempt to solve the problem of workers' housing after the First World War. A cooperative system ruined any hope of speculation since the land capital had to remain the property of the community. The director, who lived in Floréal until he was 18, filmed his "encounter" with this neighbourhood. A double portrait of its inhabitants and its architecture, sometimes reduced to abstract motifs, punctuated by the minimalist music composed by him.

In musical terminology, the term " study " designates pieces to approach a specific problem : study for arpeggios, for the left-handed etc. The question here is how to merge dancing footage with elements of fiction. What is the right tone, the golden proportion to tell/dance the stories without resorting to techniques of a musical or a ballet ? New ways of telling a story: this is, without a doubt, a critical challenge for dance today. Twenty-one micro fictions by four Cie Michèle Anne De Mey dancers in witch the educational aspect of experimentation soon gives way to the pleasur of joyful poetics: an original blend of tender insolence and srtict elegance.

Ten shorts by Thierry De Mey set to music by ten composers with ten danced phrases choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and performed by Rosas. These ten films encapsulate the best of De Keersmaeker and De Mey's collaboration: twenty years of assiduously practicing variation, of perpetually inventing algorithms, filters, and formulae that twist movement and space according to the capricious mathematics of pleasure. All of this is filmed - O Belgitude! - in exquisite flower-filled gardens and under impressionistic drizzling rain.

Three percussionists each have a small table as their only instrument. The variety of tones is ensured by the different striking modes. The positions of the fingers and hands and the rhythmic figures are codified in a repertoire of original symbols used in the score.

Thierry De Mey filmed Rosas danst Rosas in the former technical school of architect Henry Van de Velde in Leuven. The film version is much shorter than the show itself. In his film Thierry De Mey opts for a heavily ‘inter-cut’ version in which, apart from the cast of four dancers from 1995 and 1996, he also has all the other performers from the long history of the show dance along. He makes maximum use of the geometrical and spatial qualities of the Van de Veldes building. Incidentally, the building was thoroughly renovated straight after the film was made, making it one of the last testimonials to the original architecture. The film was shown on all of the major European television channels and also had a cinema career in the ‘art house circuit’.