The house was always filled with music. Thierry and Michèle-Anne’s father worked as a representative for a record company.

Michèle Anne caught the dance bug while taking part in the festive activities put on in the school’s parish: singing in choirs, folk dancing, majorettes, etc.

These kind of activities call for huge enthusiasm and generosity: they teach amateur performers how to share and put others first when, thoroughly absorbed, they instinctively take pleasure in pleasing their indulgent spectators.

Michèle Anne’s parents, of modest means, did what they could for their talented daughter by enrolling her in an inexpensive dance class, run by Annie Flore, where she learned the basics of ballet, modern dance and tap. It was here, at the age of thirteen, that she became lifelong friends with Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, who was also her classmate at the Lilian Lambert School and with whom she was to share, two years later, the experience of studying at the Mudra dance school, which her brother, Thierry, had attended three years earlier.

Keen to break down barriers, Maurice Béjart had decided to turn his young dancers into well-rounded artists: dancers, actors, singers, etc. This gave rise to the new contemporary idea of the performer who can do everything, including create.

Fernand Schirren, rhythm professor, and Alfons Goris, professor of dramatic acting, were the tutors who oversaw this training. Michèle-Anne De Mey and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker appeared in their first show together at this school: La Lettre, which was followed by many other collaborations, choreographed by the latter (Fase, Rosas, etc.) or the former (Ballatan, Face à face, etc.).

Both of them feel they complement each other: Anne Teresa is more interested in the structure of the musical composition, Michèle-Anne in the drama and the story, the former is more headstrong, the latter more contemplative.

The two women, one Flemish, one French-speaking, dreamed of a unique utopia, a shared theatre company governed by a principle of alternation.

These two communities caused them to part ways.

Then came the offer from the Théâtre Varia: the triumvir Sireuil/Dezoteux/Delval invited her to sit alongside them on the artistic board and develop her productions there for four years, with a research and rehearsal space, the Studio Saint-Josse. This led to the ambivalent essay in joint management at Charleroi Danses: five years of successful and interesting experiments, followed by six nightmare years of misery, which she prefers not to discuss.

A new life began in 2011 with a studio which aimed to combine dance (Michèle Anne), theatre (Transquinquennal) and film (Jaco Van Dormael). Daniel Cordova gave them carte blanche at Manège.mons: the result of this was first Kiss and Cry, then Cold Blood (2015) and the forthcoming Amor, but the main outcome was the formation of an interdisciplinary collective alternating periods when “everyone gets involved in everything”—including scenographers, video makers and lighting designers—with periods when everyone refocuses on their own speciality. Everyone again works together on the whole production when it comes to the home straight.

The general consensus is that this process has resulted in the invention of a new language.  This includes “nano-dance”—the live, magnified projection of the tiny movements of certain parts of the body, like the fingers—and involves, in particular, an innovative, intensely complementary interaction between film techniques and the presence of the live performer on stage.

Picture by Gaspard Pauwels