GLA55

Performing Arts Season 2026/2027

Gla55. 10 movements to the music of Philip Glass – Mehrere Personen stehen oder bewegen sich in einem Probenraum, um sie herum sind bunte Kreise.

GLA55 explores the power of minimal means. In her new work, premiering at the Berliner Festspiele, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker weaves obsessive turns, geometric forms and early compositions by Philip Glass into a choreographic experiment suspended between trance and rigorous form.

A space turns into circle and spiral; time and body into a repeating pulse. With GLA55, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, a pioneer of contemporary choreography, once again invites audiences into the mechanical yet trance-like world of minimal movement.

Six dancers from the Rosas dance company share the stage with six members of Ictus and the Bl!ndman Ensemble. Their inspiration comes from Philip Glass's early works – Music in Contrary Motion, Music in Fifths, Music in Similar Motion and Music with Changing Parts. The result is a physical ritual that renders both geometry and time tangible: ellipses, circles, and spirals emerge as recurring figures, the choreography condenses movement into a continuum of tension and release, stillness and rotation. Each impulse, each turn generates a resonance in space that draws the audience into a corporeal experience of time, making obsessive repetition and rhythmic precision palpable. GLA55 is an experimental invocation that recalibrates the relationship between music, space, and body, distilling minimal material to its highest intensity. Here, bodies, sound and rhythmic structure merge into a singular experience in which perception itself enters a subtle, hypnotic oscillation.

With GLA55, De Keersmaeker returns to a guiding principle of her practice: exhausting minimal abstract material to the limits of its possibilities. Trance-like states, manic turns, and circling movements come to the fore – choreographic gestures that have shaped her artistic signature style since Fase (1982) and the founding of the company Rosas in 1983, and which have also been institutionalized with the establishment of the P.A.R.T.S. training center for contemporary dance in 1995.

For over four decades, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has developed works that rigorously explore the relationship between music, space, and movement. Earlier key pieces such as Asch (1980), Rosas danst Rosas (1983), and The Six Brandenburg Concertos (2018) exemplify her consistent use of a minimal formal language, which in GLA55 finds a new fusion with the music of Philip Glass.

Artistic Team

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker – Choreografie

Danced by and created with

Boštjan Antončič, Niklas Capel, Lav Crnčević, José Paulo dos Santos, Sunai Elbers, Sue Yeon Youn

Music

Music in Contrary Motion, Music in Fifths, Music in Similar Motion, Music with Changing Parts 

by Philip Glass

Musicians

Ictus & Bl!ndman

Fabian Coomans, Chryssi Dimitriou, Aisha Orazbayeva, Hendrik Pellens, Jean-Luc Plouvier, Piet Rebel, Eric Sleichim

Minna Tiikkainen – Lighting Design

Aouatif Boulaich – Costumes

Wannes Gyselinck – Dramaturgy

Alexandre Fostier – Sound

A Rosas production in co-production with Berliner Festspiele, Concertgebouw Brugge (Bruges), Festival d'Automne à Paris (Paris), Schrit_tmacher Festival (Heerlen), Piccolo Teatro di Milano – Teatro d’Europa (Milan), La Villette (Paris)

With the support of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels

This production is realised with the support of the Tax Shelter of the Belgian Federal Government via Casa Kafka Pictures.

Rosas is supported by the Flemish Community and the Flemish Community Commission (VGC).

Next date:

• Date Thursday, 19/November/2026 19:30 ( 2 more dates )
• Venue Haus der Berliner Festspiele - Große Bühne
• Address Schaperstraße 24, 10719 Berlin-Wilmersdorf