With En Atendant in 2010, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker took the polyphonic music of the Ars Subtilior as the starting point for the development of a new dance vocabulary. This performance, originally created for the Cloître des Célestins during the Avignon Festival, laid the foundations for her principles “my walking is my dancing” and “my talking is my dancing”, and was a starting point for a renewed questioning of our physical architecture in relation to music.

The Ars Subtilior is a complex and intellectual musical form from the 14th century that starts from a dissonant, unexpected stratification. This music matured in a world scarred by the plague, at a time when the social, political and religious pillars of medieval society were splintering. Today, this upheaval seems more topical than ever. In today’s complexity of choices, in the intangibility of what happens to us, the question of our physicality, our mortality, is once again central.