- Description:
- DVD - Region free. viewing copy. 3 videodiscs of 3.
- Notes:
- Thierry De Mey, born in 1956, is a composer and filmmaker. An instinctive feel for movement guides his entire work, allowing him to tackle and integrate a variety of disciplines. The premise behind his musical and filmic writing is the desire for rhythm to be experienced in the body or bodies, revealing the musical meaning for the author, performer and audience. He has developed a system of musical writing for movement used in pieces where the visual and choreographic aspects are just as important as the gesture producing the sound, such as in MUSIQUE DE TABLES (1987). This collection brings together some of his best and well-known works.
Titles
+ Prélude À La Mer
- Director:
- De Mey, Thierry
- Production Co:
- Charleroi/Dances; Sophimages;Eroica productions; Rosas
- Running Time:
- Short. 19 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - Dolby
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- Belgium
- Year:
- 2010
- Language:
- French language
- Genre:
- Dance, Performance, Experimental / Avant Garde
- Notes:
- "The Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun," set to Claude Debussy's music and a Stéphane Mallarmé text, is a sublime musical poem about the ephemeral, absence, and disappearance. The idea was to pair De Keersmaeker's choreography, performed by Marc Lorimer and Cynthia Loemij, with the harsh setting of a site of catastrophe: the disappearing Aral sea.
+ Ma Mère L’oye
- Director:
- De Mey, Thierry
- Production Co:
- Eroïca Productions; Charleroi/Dances
- Running Time:
- Short. 28 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - Dolby
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- Belgium
- Year:
- 2010
- Language:
- French language
- Genre:
- Dance, Performance, Experimental / Avant Garde
- Notes:
- This short was originally a commission from Rouen Opera. For Thierry De Mey, the experience led to the unsuspected discovery of Maurice Ravel's world. A fairy-tale cinematographic work in a dream world, "Ma Mère l'Oye" involves some sixty dancers and choreographers in the phantasmagorical world of the forests of Brussels and Salzburg. All portray in sensitive and unexpected manner a mythological creature or fairy-tale character, a personal reincarnation by which the ineffable individual more readily presents itself to the camera.
+ Valse, La
- Director:
- De Mey, Thierry
- Production Co:
- Eroïca Productions; Charleroi/Dances
- Running Time:
- Short. 15 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - Dolby
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- Belgium
- Year:
- 2011
- Language:
- French language
- Genre:
- Dance, Performance, Experimental / Avant Garde
- Notes:
- La Valse is dance a film by Thierry De Mey based on the choreography created for Maurice Ravel’s La Valse. Made as part of the triptych Equi Voci, the film La Valse exists in versions for one or three screens. It has also been presented with a live orchestra.
+ Counter Phrases
- Director:
- De Mey, Thierry
- Production Co:
- Charleroi/Dances
- Running Time:
- Feature. 61 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - Dolby
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- Belgium
- Year:
- 2004
- Language:
- English language
- Genre:
- Dance, Performance, Experimental / Avant Garde
- Notes:
- When dance and music meet, it generally takes this approach: a choreographer chooses to dance to existing music. Counter Phrases came from the desire to produce the reverse approach by offering images and dance movements to a number of composers in order to inspire and create a musical composition.
Ten shorts by Thierry De Mey set to music by ten composers with ten danced phrases choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and performed by Rosas. These ten films encapsulate the best of De Keersmaeker and De Mey's collaboration: twenty years of assiduously practicing variation, of perpetually inventing algorithms, filters, and formulae that twist movement and space according to the capricious mathematics of pleasure.
+ Rosas Danst Rosas
- Director:
- De Mey, Thierry
- Production Co:
- Charleroi/Dances
- Running Time:
- Feature. 57 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - Dolby
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- Belgium
- Year:
- 1996
- Language:
- English language
- Genre:
- Dance, Performance, Experimental / Avant Garde
- Notes:
- In his film Thierry De Mey opts for a heavily "inter-cut" version in which, apart from the cast of four dancers from 1995 and 1996, he also has all the other performers from the long history of the show dance along. He makes maximum use of the geometrical and spatial qualities of the Van de Veldes building. Incidentally, the building was thoroughly renovated straight after the film was made, making it one of the last testimonials to the original architecture. The film was shown on all of the major European television channels and also had a cinema career in the "art house circuit".
In Rosas danst Rosas, the repetitiveness of music and movement initiated in Fase is developed even further. The music by Thierry De Mey and Peter Vermeersch was created simultaneously and in interaction with the choreography. Rosas danst Rosas consists of four dancers in rapport with one another and five chapters full of intense physical energy. The drive in this body machine is tempered by a series of ‘very familiar, everyday movements’: the abstraction then changes into a series of small, concrete emotional narratives which the spectator recognizes and is moved by.
+ Fase
- Director:
- De Mey, Thierry
- Production Co:
- Avila; Sophimages
- Running Time:
- Feature. 58 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - Dolby
- Color:
- color
- Year:
- 2002
- Language:
- English language
- Genre:
- Dance, Performance
- Notes:
- Fase is a film based on the first work made by De Keersmaeker in 1982. Four movements to the music of Steve Reich, this performance that launched Rosas on the international dance scene. The film, like the choreography, is in four parts, each shot in different locations. Nearly twenty years on from the date of the original stage creation, film director Thierry De Mey succeeds in reiterating its powerful essence in a film whose distinctive aesthetic identity remains independent and unique unto itself.
+ Barbe Bleue
- Alternate Title:
- Bluebeard
- Director:
- De Mey, Thierry
- Production Co:
- Charleroi Danses; Eroïca Productions
- Running Time:
- Short. 25 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - Dolby
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- Belgium
- Year:
- 1999
- Language:
- French language with optional English subtitles
- Genre:
- Dance, Performance, Experimental / Avant Garde
- Notes:
- Fifty-five men, of all ages, most of them recruited via ads on the radio, succeed one another before the camera, with quick-fire editing; each speaks a sentence, or just a word . . . telling the story of Bluebeard, faithfully following Perrault's text.
The famous tale is doubly celebrated: for its exceptionally pure literary quality – undoubtedly, one of the most perfect models in the French language – as well as for its narrative power. Here it is questioned, playfully, via the use of cinematic editing.
+ Barbe Bleue Clips Rouges
- Director:
- De Mey, Thierry
- Production Co:
- Charleroi Danses; Eroïca Productions
- Running Time:
- Short. 8 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - Dolby
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- Belarus
- Year:
- 1999
- Language:
- English language
- Genre:
- Performance, Dance, Experimental / Avant Garde
- Notes:
- Bonus clips of Thierry De Mey’s film, Barbe Bleue.
+ One Flat Thing, Reproduced
- Director:
- De Mey, Thierry
- Production Co:
- MK2TV; Arte France; Forsythe Foundation; The Forsythe Company
- Running Time:
- Short. 26 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - Dolby
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- Belgium
- Year:
- 2006
- Language:
- English language
- Genre:
- Performance, Dance, Experimental / Avant Garde
- Notes:
- The director of a dance film is inevitably confronted with the task of 'translating' from one medium to another. If it's a case of filming a "cult" choreography that pre-dates the film, the additional challenge is the "duty of recall" since the film of the choreography will carry with it, into some future time, the memory of its theatrical representation. One flat thing is rightly considered as one of William Forsythe's major works, in which the virtuosity of the performers rivals the ingenious complexity of the choreography (to the extent that this production has come to be known as "William Forsythe's olympics"! The film adopts a subjective approach, not exhaustive, a perspective that gathers and predetermines the sequence of production choices.
+ Musique de Tables
- Director:
- De Mey, Thierry
- Production Co:
- Sophimages
- Running Time:
- Short. 8 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - Dolby
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- Belgium
- Year:
- 1999
- Language:
- French language
- Genre:
- Performance
- Notes:
- Three percussionists, each with only a little table as an instrument. The positions of the fingers and the hands and the rhythmic patterns are codified in a repertory of original symbols employed in the score. Musique de tables sets out to explore the delicate line between music and the movement that produces sound.
+ Wall Work
- Director:
- De Mey, Thierry
- Production Co:
- En-Knap
- Running Time:
- Short. 6 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - Dolby
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- Belgium
- Year:
- 1999
- Language:
- English language
- Genre:
- Performance, Dance, Experimental / Avant Garde
- Notes:
- A performance featuring wires, ropes, and intense music. De Mey captures movements with inventive angles, building on the chaos and tension in sound.
+ Love Sonnets
- Director:
- De Mey, Thierry
- Production Co:
- Eroïca Productions
- Running Time:
- Short. 6 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - Dolby
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- Belgium
- Year:
- 1994
- Language:
- French language with optional French or English subtitles
- Genre:
- Dance, Performance
- Notes:
- A film about love and dance, Love Sonnet couples together seven sonnets signed by those who dance them.
Sonnets where words are swapped for movement.
Sonnets whose rhythms embrace Scarlatti's sonatas for harpsichord and traditional aria from Southern Italy.
Sonnets where rhymes, numbers and verbal colors seek consonance with what can be seen as a cinematographic melodic line.
+ 21 Études à Danser
- Director:
- De Mey, Thierry
- Production Co:
- Astragale asbl
- Running Time:
- Short. 24 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - Dolby
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- Belgium
- Year:
- 1999
- Language:
- French language with optional French or English subtitles
- Genre:
- Performance, Dance, Experimental / Avant Garde
- Notes:
- In musical terminology, the term "study" designates pieces to approach a specific problem: study for arpeggios, for the left-handed etc. The question here is how to merge dancing footage with elements of fiction. What is the right tone, the golden proportion to tell/dance the stories without resorting to techniques of a musical or a ballet? Twenty-one micro fictions by four Cie Michèle Anne De Mey dancers in which the educational aspect of experimentation soon gives way to the pleasure of joyful poetics.
+ Floréal
- Director:
- De Mey, Thierry
- Production Co:
- Lucifer Films
- Running Time:
- Short. 15 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - Dolby
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- Belgium
- Year:
- 1985
- Language:
- French language
- Genre:
- Performance, Experimental / Avant Garde
- Notes:
- “Floréal” is the name of a garden city in a district of Brussels (Boitsfort). Hundreds of small houses with black and yellow woodwork, in streets named after flowers. This garden city was a first attempt to solve the problem of workers’ housing after the First World War. The director, who lived in Floréal until he was 18, filmed his “encounter” with this neighborhood. A double portrait of its inhabitants and its architecture, sometimes reduced to abstract motifs, punctuated by the minimalist music composed by De Mey.
+ Tippeke
- Director:
- De Mey, Thierry
- Production Co:
- Rosas
- Running Time:
- Short. 18 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - Dolby
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- Belarus
- Year:
- 1997
- Language:
- Dutch language with optional French or English subtitles
- Genre:
- Performance, Experimental / Avant Garde
- Notes:
- The protagonist, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, tells/sings/dances an old Flemish nursery rhyme about a little boy who does not want to go home. The story reveals a recursive sequence of nine threats one after the other : a little dog who does not want to bite Tippeke, a stick that does not want to hit the little dog, a fire that does not want to burn the stick etc. reaching the point where all the domino pieces have fallen and it starts again in reverse order: yes, the little dog does want to gobble up the mouse, and the mouse does want to jump on the rope and gnaw it, and the rope wants to jump on the cow and tie it up etc.
For each key word there is a corresponding danced movement; for each concept a harmonic colour deduced from "multiphonic" nodes selected on the low strings of the cello; for each type of discourse in the nursery rhyme – affirmative, questioning, negative – there is a way of executing it, a way of associating different sound data: voice, cello and the sound atmospheres in the film.