Re-enactments are tricky beasts; they come loaded with the cultural and symbolic baggage of time, with problematic discussions surrounding site, performer and most importantly, context. They forward discussions on authenticity, ownership and historical narratives. It’s no accident that Tate Tanks have chosen to launch their new performance spaces with a particular kind of live blockbuster: one of Flemish choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s earliest pieces, now considered canonical and giving rise to the development of a particular dance language that understood postmodernism to function on different structural and affective terms.

What makes the re-enactment of Fase: Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich different than, say, Lucinda Childs Dance Company’s 2011 performance of Dance at the Barbican, a collaboration with Phillip Glass and Sol LeWitt, whose pungent minimalism and esoteric structural and formal discourse made it a problematic piece of living history devoid of context, is its consideration of site, history and language. De Keersmaeker, in her collaboration with Michelle Anne De Mey, returns to this work not only with a highly refined dance vocabulary, but also an interest to consider and appropriate the problematic processes of contemporary adaptations. In that way, Fase is both a living history, and a contemporary conversation. It responds to its dominating site with dramaturgical precision, and refracts across the choreographer’s career with an interesting filter.

In the vast volume of one of the two major circular Tanks, its grey concrete floors and walls precisely arranged to appear as exposed as possible, a stage naturally emerges between the four structural pillars. The space is bare, lit only by four rows of neon lights that engage, in different structural combinations, with the movements within the piece. This was certainly not the site for the original performance of Fase; yet it becomes a likely home, the movement’s energy, pathos and surgical architecture slicing through the volume of the space. A tank that imposes an iconography of power, almost imperial in its heightened functionality, becomes fluid, timid with time, as the movement expands outwards, its equal yet affective precision growing into the space. De Keersmaeker’s choreography and dancing are stunning- and they echo an intriguing, if not problematic by association, lesson in dance history as well as make visible the nature of this newly opened institution so intent on leaving Theatre out of performance- but that’s a different conversation.

Fase takes its cue from a set of four pieces from Steve Reich’s early career; Piano Phase, Come Out, Violin Phase and Clapping Music . The performance is composed out four movements, each titled by the name of Reich’s respective piece, with distinct identities yet similar structural motifs. Fase is concerned with contradictions- allowing such minimalist and deconstructive music to dictate movement, yet at the same time responding through precise, gestural, energetic and nuanced work.  De Keersmaeker introduces into the dialogue an architectural element, whilst at the same time creating dances that are emotive, dramatic, packed with folk references and character, but at the same time modernist and restrained. Fase is calculated pathos- and in this re-enactment, an entire dance history become visible.

Fase contains three duets, performed by the choreographer together with Tale Dolven, and one solo- Violin Phase, one of De Keersmaker’s first works choreographed in New York on completion of her training at NYU’s Tisch School of Arts in 1981. As dictated by the music itself- with its key repetitive underscores yet a strong folk element and a timid narrative- Violin Phase  is a progressive series of movements that build up without ever becoming collective, maintaining the central motif as structuring presence, made of loops and spins. De Keersmaker circumnavigates a circle which she divides into an image- which we never see, making visible not only the principles of construction but also the dramatic layers of the piece. In one particular moment, De Keersmaker lifts her hand and mimes smoking a cigarette, poking fun at the precision of her spins and introducing a character element to great effect. As De Keersmaker spins around an axis, turning in various momentous gulps of energy, referencing the sensuousness of Spanish folk dances, different spatial angles begin to emerge. The swinging of the legs, the pivoting, construct the idiom of the piece. In its presence as part of Fase, Violin Phase references works from De Keersmaker’s canon, in particular Rosas danst Rosas, holding that same pathos, energy and feminity in the context of a cold, detached and algorithmic minimalism.

If Violin Piece is a stunning solo whose language feel central to the rest of the performance, the duets create intriguing contexts and narratives in these architectural equations. Piano Phase, which was the last piece conceived chronologically, but which opens the show, deconstructs a rhythmic pattern to the staccato music, playing on the increase and decrease of tempos; the dancers perform like two pendulums, at times in sync and at others in dissonance, creating an elasticity to the space itself, moving away from the bare neon lighting. They move in lines, but the lines travel across the space. Suspension- a central element in De Keersmaker’s work- provides interludes, and the personal nature of the dancing brings a strong, affective element. Coming Out functions in relation to this, to the music out a deconstructed set of uttered words; the dancers sit on two chairs that become their axes, expanding and contracting to the suspension of arms and the jerky movement of the upper body, attacking and then candidly caressing volumes with particularly evocative hand and head movements. The women, here dressed in in trousers and shirts- unlike Piano Phase, where they are wearing white, fluid dresses- are both characters and bodies in this narrative.

Fase finishes with Clapping Music, a duet that holds more caricature and humour than the rest of the pieces, an almost brief and playful intervention that completes this algorithmic cycle. It’s a strong statement in relation to what De Keersmaker claims to be Reich’s cool abstraction, and a nod at the characterless minimalism of postmodernists such as Childs or Trisha Brown. There’s a strong sense of the urban  as the two women use their knees and upper bodies in a phase-shifting dialogue; one body creates a  movement which the other echoes and distorts. It’s a play on shadowing and responsiveness, but also a makes a complete circle with a minute geometry that more easily occupies the entire space, with a different restrictive quality.

In its geometrical precision, Fase feels- and is inherently is- a response to modernist discourses in music and architecture, placing emphasis on the authority of ideal shapes- the circle, the square, the straight line. This minimalist feels as conceptual as its historical canon dictates, yet in tandem and contrast with the characterful, nuanced and almost imprecise introduction of folk and popular elements as well as the exploration of character, it’s easy to see how Fase feels like a forward-thinking piece of postmodernist dance. Reminiscent of work from auteurs such as Pina Bausch, De Keersmaker’s choreography is elegant, surgical and momentous, very much informed by the an identity politics which postmodern art generally displaces, and in an intriguing conversation with the wider cultural landscape of eighties New York.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Fase returns to the beginning with the experience of time; it engages with the overwhelming confidence of Tate Tanks, but it does so with a developed abstraction that tends to the dramatic and even the romantic in its beautiful, undulating suspensions, loops and structural phases. Although Steve Reich’s music leads the dance, it never dictates or dominates, and the dialogue between body, volume, sound and image becomes highly developed and shyly theatrical. This is also an intriguing curatorial endeavour from the Tanks, whose collection so far tends to side with the dominant art historical performance narratives emerging from visual arts rather than theatre, and in doing so creates an odd cultural vacuum, questioning the role of an institution that dedicates itself towards historical narratives with a certain degree of carelessness.  Either way, Fase is an important re-enactment, beautifully historical and intriguingly contemporary, capitalising on a networked history of live art, dance and popular culture echoing through the vast volumes of the Tanks. If these urban concrete structures resonate so well with works like this – the precise, clean, and canonical – it will be interesting to see how more trashy and subversive material will sit within them.