The canonising of Rosas danst Rosas began after Beyoncé, staggeringly obviously, lifted whole sections of Thierry De Mey’s film of the original 1983 quartet. Rosas’ response was to open-source the choreography and set up a website where anyone could post their own variation. To date, there are 700 versions, some of which were looped and shown at Chaillot.

Since then, the question of how to keep Rosas’ repertoire alive—and pass the torch to new generations of dancers and audiences—has been writ large on the company’s to-do list.

The young dancers supplanted the original movements with their own interpretations of truculence, complicity and ennui.

SUPERCAST Rosas danst Rosas assembled 50 youngsters of different backgrounds, aged 5 to 21, under the eagle eye of company rehearsal director Clinton Stringer. It follows the horizontal, seated and vertical structure of the original, but is designed to have audiences journey through the site in which it is set. Clad in bright blue, the young dancers lay draped over the stairs before beckoning us into the immense Foyer de la Danse, overlooked by the Eiffel Tower and bordered by red plush benches. Here they performed the famous seated sequence, supplanting the original movements with their own interpretations of truculence, complicity and ennui. For the final section, the 50 kids joined hands to swarm and spiral through the space, winding up in a free-for-all to the music of Jean-Marie Aerts.

The passage of time remains unfathomable — at once familiar, bewildering and bewitching. Seeing it embodied across five generations in MULTICAST Rosas danst Rosas, for some of us, d’un certain âge, is like seeing your life flash before you. In Paris, Michèle Anne De Mey, absent in the Brussels edition, condensed the more frenetic passages into static suspensions, entirely in keeping with the choreography’s construction and spirit.

The emblematic baring of a shoulder—whose reading runs from knowingly coy to defiant depending on the performer—was De Mey’s signature contribution to the original choreography. Standing still at the front of a cluster of other dancers, she captures the whole gamut of moods within a single stare.

The pivotal eye of the spiral

At the end of this dizzyingly energetic day, down in the underground Salle Firmin Gémier, ‘Hoketus’ seemed strategically placed as the pivotal eye of the spiral. Louis Andriessen’s eponymous music was the original inspiration for Thierry De Mey and Peter Vermeersch’s score for ‘Rosas danst Rosas’. Jointly created by José Paulo dos Santos, Lav Crnčević, Johanne Saunier, Boštjan Antončič and De Keersmaeker for the Brussels jamboree, the Paris ‘Hoketus’ was a pared-down version performed to recorded music, with two human metronomes, Saunier and Antončič, keeping count on either side of the stage.

Without the live musicians flanking the space, attention could be laser-focus on dos Santos and Crnčević’s phenomenal dancing. From mock-menacing each other with staccato stamping, shoulder-shoving, chin-jutting and near-miss head-butting, they slip into Gene Kelly-ish swaggers, graceful jazz slides, then back again to boxer bounces. Their movements are threaded to the music that javelins chords from one side to the other in crescendoing counterpoint.

Having spent the day watching the different declinations of ‘Rosas danst Rosas’, and even joining Solal Mariotte’s open-to-all workshop, the patterns and rhythms were magically starting to relate and make sense to me across everything I’d seen. ‘Hoketus’ can be perceived as the masculine incarnation of ‘Rosas danst Rosas’. It builds a similar physical response in the audience—but as exhaustion floods the dancers, they hop ever higher and lighter, and their playful, boisterous energy stays scrupulously contained within a circle and a compressed 35 minutes.

The older adult in me recalled with nostalgia how vibrant and full of potential the ’80s were for culture, and especially dance.

Despite the slight sense of overwhelm—similar to a child’s on entering a theme park; there’s even a photobooth where you can snap yourself and your friends sitting on battered wooden chairs—the older adult in me recalled with nostalgia how vibrant and full of potential the ’80s were for culture, and especially dance. Contemporary dance was in a rebellious and intensely creative phase: we could almost say its teenage years. It seems quite natural that it should now be preparing its legacy.

‘Chaillot Expérience Iconiques’ must have cost an arm and a leg but, with admission free for all (bar for MULTICAST), it also felt like a snook cocked at the looming threat of subsidy cuts in France and a precious reminder of the value of culture, and of how attractive and accessible it can be made given the means.

‘Muliticast Rosas danst Rosas’ is to be seen in Bruges on September 29 & 30 in Concertgebouw Brugge. https://www.dansinbrugge.be/agenda/multicast-rosas-danst-rosas