It was his 'debut' at just twenty-four years old for the company Ultima Vez and with only the artistic experience of being a performer for the polysemic Jan Fabre. What the Body Does Not Remember, a performance from 1987, which earned the Flemish choreographer Wim Vandekeybus the Bessie Award, the prestigious New York performing arts prize, not only marked the author's future path but also that of the history of dance, which found in him an innovator of movement, thrown forcefully into the sphere of ‘anything is possible.’ An experimenter who traverses the body like video, cinema, and photography, moving from very musical works with nieuwZwart to intimate solos of a man in front of a film (Monkey Sandwich), to the choral analysis of mythology (Oedipus/Bêt noir) or the concept of a photographic snapshot (booty Looting), “a privileged way - he claims - of fixing the form,” Vandekeybus created a unique and unmistakable genre, the reverberations of which can still be seen in subsequent generations. Physicality pushed to the extreme with grips and falls at the limits of risk, an adrenaline-fueled, unrestrained, overflowing staging that confronts multidisciplinary scenarios and original music developed in rehearsal alongside the movement, signed by contemporaries Peter Vermeersch, Thierry De Mey, David Byrne, Marc Ribot.
It is therefore not surprising that Vandekeybus wanted to return to his roots - in line with many authors of his generation who have remounted historical pieces - resurrecting this debut work with a new cast after more than five decades.
In What the Body Does Not Remember (Ciò che il corpo non ricorda) lies the essence of his poetics: the dynamics of couples and groups oscillating between attraction and repulsion, the continuous tension towards the uncertain, the confrontation of the body with music, the mystery of life as a temporal journey between birth and death, the bold use of objects that generates awareness of risk. What interests him - he explains - is always “the intensity of the moment when you have no choice, when events decide for you, like in falling in love or in the moment before an unforeseen occurrence. A paradoxical challenge considering that the theatrical event is repeatable and controllable. But perhaps, when everything has been said and done, the body no longer remembers the events that occurred and is left only with the subtle illusion of lack, which helps to define and exhaust the game.”
