Bist du bei mir (The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988)

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker - Alain Franco - Rosas

November 22 – 24, 2024

Bist du bei mir (The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988)

22, 23 and 24 November 2024

Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is a cult figure in world contemporary dance. In her new project she draws on her most recent and perhaps most personal solo dance, The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (2020), based on Bach’s composition of the same name, to inhabit the spaces of Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia.
This new site-specific performance is part of the Festival Aperto 2024 programme and continues the collaboration begun in 2009 between Fondazione I Teatri, Collezione Maramotti and Max Mara aimed at creating a dialogue between choreography and visual arts.
In the Goldberg Variations, Bach pushes the boundaries of the musical theme in an extraordinary play of variations, canons and fugues. The composer starts with a simple, quiet melody, which gradually develops into a musical cosmos characterised by extraordinary variety and unparalleled complexity.

Reimagined as a site-specific project in dialogue with the works and architecture of Collezione Maramotti, this performance – created in collaboration with pianist Alain Franco – takes the title Bist du bei mir, in reference to a 18th century piece by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel. This piece was recorded in the second Notenbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach, close to the Aria Goldberg, which appears in this notebook for the first time as a stand-alone composition.

Since 2015, Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker has imagined stepping outside the black box of the theatre to confront other spatial dimensions: from the black box to the white cube. This resulted in highly acclaimed projects such as Work/Travail/Arbeid (2015, Wiels, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, MoMA), Dark Red (2020-2022, Kolumba, Fondation Beyeler, Neue Nationalgalerie) and Forêt (2022, Louvre).

Over the years, at the invitation of Festival Aperto, performances by Trisha Brown Dance Company (2009), Shen Wei Dance Arts (2011), Wayne McGregor | Random Dance (2013), Hofesh Shechter Dance Company (2015), Saburo Teshigawara (2017), Dimitris Papaioannou (2019) and Peeping Tom (2021) have been presented at Collezione Maramotti.