The collaboration between Short Theatre 2025 and Romaeuropa Festival takes new shape, opening the Roman September by bringing for the first time in Italy a work that is itself the result of a special encounter and sharing. At the invitation of the Festival d’Automne in Paris, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Rabih Mroué – two of the most significant artistic figures on the international contemporary scene – join forces for the first time in the play A little bit of the moon.
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, a fervid and rigorous Belgian innovator in the field of choreography since the early 1980s, and Rabih Mroué, an author and theatre director from Lebanon, creator of a multimedia and political theatre, shared for ten months their thoughts, doubts and questions on politics, art and life. This encounter resulted in A little bit of the moon, a performance that moves on the border between dance and theatre in an attempt to generate an intimate space between two people. In the openness generated by friendship as a political gesture in a present of death and terror, movement and word coexist without any one element prevailing over the other. Stories, music, poetry and choreographic fragments intertwine in a collected dialogue made up of archive materials, texts and gestures suspended between ephemeral pasts and a dark future, between the personal and the universal.
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In 1980, after studying dance at Mudra School in Brussels and Tisch School of the Arts in New York, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (b. 1960) created Asch, her first choreographic work. Two years later came the premiere of Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich. De Keersmaeker established the dance company Rosas in Brussels in 1983, while creating the work Rosas danst Rosas. Since these breakthrough pieces, her choreography has been grounded in a rigorous and prolific exploration of the relationship between dance and music. She has created with Rosas a wide-ranging body of work engaging the musical structures and scores of several periods, from early music to contemporary and popular idioms. Her choreographic practice also draws formal principles from geometry, numerical patterns, the natural world, and social structures to offer a unique perspective on the body’s articulation in space and time. In 1995 De Keersmaeker established the school P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) in Brussels. Over the past 10 years, her work has also engaged with the visual arts in museum contexts such as the Louvre, Tate Modern and MoMA. In 2023 she created EXIT ABOVE with a cast of 13 dancers, in 2024 IL CIMENTO, exploring Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. This summer, Anne Teresa will perform her new creation BREL with dancer and choreographer Solal Mariotte.
Rabih Mroué born in Beirut and lives in Berlin, is a theatre director, actor, visual artist and playwright. Rooted in theatre, his work includes videos and installation art. In 1990 he began putting on his own plays, performances, and videos. Continuously searching for an alternative and contemporary relations among all the different elements and languages of the theatre art forms, Mroué questions the definitions of theatre and its relationship with the other art-mediums and performing practiced. He is a contributing editor for The Drama Review /TDR (New York). He is also a co-founder and a board member of the Beirut Art Center (BAC). He was a fellow at The International Research Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures/ FU/Berlin since 2013-2014. He has been working as theatre director at Münchner Kammerspiele (Munich) from 2015 to 2019.He has performed and exhibited internationally including dOCUMENTA (13) – Kassel, CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo – Madrid, The ICP Triennial and MoMa – New York , Centre Pompidou – Paris, SALT – Istanbul, among others…
concept, directed, performed by Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker and Rabih Mroué
technical director, sounds and lighting Thomas Köppel
produced and commissioned by the Festival d’Automne à Paris, December 2024
co-production MC93 and Fondation Fiminco
in co-realization with Romaeuropa Festival
ph. Herman Sorgeloos