Circumscribing a Gesture: War, Breath and Memory in De Keersmaeker’s Staging of Rilke’s Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke

This article closely reads Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's 2015 engagement with Rainer Maria Rilke's prose poem Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (1899; 1904; 1906) in a dance piece by the same name. De Keersmaeker's piece sheds new light on Rilke's often-dismissed early prose poem and its neo-Romantic medievalist as well as modernist poetics. I focus on two entangled motifs: the use and representation of air and the repeated gesture of a vertically outstretched right arm. By bringing De Keersmaeker's piece in conversation with Anselm Kiefer's performances of the Nazi salute, I show how her work critically engages with the text's afterlife in the Second World War.