Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House
January 8, 2016

Dance lovers should feel particularly indebted to outgoing Sydney Festival director Lieven Bertels, who has imported one of the 20th century’s most influential and insightful choreographers for his final season. Belgian dance visionary Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is a true living legend, exalted throughout the world as a master of her craft. This towering, global reputation all started almost 35 years ago with Fase, the first of two programmes she will be reviving for Sydney audiences during her brief appearance in Australia.

Created in 1982, these four short works are an astonishingly precise distillation of the phase minimalism experiments of Steve Reich, meticulously transcribing sound into movement. At the time of this piece’s premiere three and half decades ago, when the choreographer was just 22-years-old, this powerful symbiosis between music and dance was a revelation, and even now, despite the many hundreds of performances that this piece has had during the intervening years, it is just as transfixing and assertive.

Her response to Reich is a very literal one; De Keersmaeker’s methodology is both uncompromising and unsentimental. Dressed in simple, white knee-length dresses, white...