Work / Travail / Arbeid, by dancer-choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, has as its point of departure the simple question: what would it mean for choreography to perform as an exhibition? The implications unsettle both how contemporary dance and the art exhibition are conventionally thought, constructed and experienced. In response, De Keersmaeker has taken Vortex Temporum, her choreography to the eponymous musical work by French composer Gérard Grisey, which premiered on stage in 2013.

She reimagined it in relation to the radically different temporal, spatial, and perceptual conditions of the museum. In the process, the Rosas dancers and the Ictus musicians do not simply bring a dance performance into a new kind of space, but rethink dance as a nine-day exhibition, accessible to the public as an exhibition is and unlike any experience of it in the theater. The original length of the choreography is here expanded in cycles of ten hours, with each hour offering another part of the choreography and another combination of dancers and musicians in the Galerie Sud of the Centre Pompidou. The result is an exceptional collaboration between the Paris Opera and the Centre Pompidou in a project that transforms the very material and conditions that have long been essential to dance, and in particular the rigorous choreographic écriture for which De Keersmaeker is known, into an entirely new form.