Rosas: A Love Supreme

A Love Supreme, a dance quartet created by Salva Sanchis and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, is based on John Coltrane’s eponymous album. This collaboration, started in 2005, constitutes a meeting between two choreographers who share the same fascination for an iconic piece of music, A Love Supreme. Moreover, this is De Keersmaeker’s first project that treads the unpredictable ground of dance improvisation.

For this 2017 version, featuring an added prelude, revised choreography, new costumes and lighting design, Sanchis and De Keersmaeker rewrote their 2005 piece to be danced by four young, male dancers. Their energetic interpretation embodies and mirrors the continued vitality of Coltrane’s music, whilst heralding the freedom and choreographic challenge provided by music.

Legendary Coltrane

In A Love Supreme, Coltrane and his musicians, pianist McCoy Tyner, double bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones, deployed a compelling and deceptively simple musical structure to allow for a complete freedom of improvisation, continuously pushing the boundaries of every musical register. This freedom of creation, i.e. improvisation, allows an entrancing and literal translation into dance: for this performance, the choreographers took on the challenge of blending improvisation and composition into a seamless choreographic whole.