A love-hate affair with dance.

My Belgian cabdriver approvingly nods hi s head after I give him my destination: Van Volxemlaan 164. He says, "So, you are going to Rosas." No, he has never seen a performance of the company, but, in a voice ringing with hometown pride, he asserts that "they are very good and they are very famous." Indeed, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, founder and artistic director of Rosas, has accomplished a remarkable feat. In a country with little modern dance activity, she has created, seemingly out of thin air, this phenomenon of Belgian postmodern dance. Other artists have followed her lead -- Wim Vandekeybus and Michele Anne de Mey come to mind -- but it is De Keersmaeker who has put Belgium on the postmodern dance map.

Rosas, founded by De Keersmaeker in 1983 as a company of four women, was in 1992 appointed resident company to La Monnaie, Belgium's national opera company, which coproduces many of Rosas's works. With a budget of slightly over $1.5 million (40 percent of which the company earns through touring) and a permanent staff of close to thirty, Rosas is doing well.

In 1995 the company moved into the kind of quarters that most American companies can only dream about. Home is a former factory that, it is rumored, was once a commercial laundry responsible for the "royal wash." Handsomely refurbished, the building now houses several large, skylit studios and contains ample space for rehearsal, production, videotaping, and administration offices; there's also a separate turn-of-the-century building for a fully subsidized child-care facility. PARTS (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios), Rosas's two-year-old professional performance school, is situated in a separate wing with its own kitchen that serves macrobiotic food. For once it appears that a prophet is being honored in her own land.

Looking at De Keersmaeker, a small woman with intense brown eyes, nursing her six-month-old daughter in Rosas's imposing conference room at dusk, one finds it difficult to imagine her as the creator of the brutally physical Rosas Danst Rosas which infuriated, bored, and thrilled New York City audiences in 1986. The work subsequently earned a Bessie award, and the film version by Peter Greenaway received the 1992 Dance Screen Award in Vienna. Rosas is still in the repertory and serves as training ground for new dancers, since it epitomizes the rigorous physicality for which the company has become known.

De Keersmaeker's voice is soft but focused as she recalls that she always wanted to make her own work. She had been encouraged as a child by a "young teacher who not only taught ballet, but also modern dance and improvisation." Of her first work, Asch, a site-specific duet for a dancer and actor, done while still a student at Maurice Bejart's Mudra, was about the "numb amazement of a small, self-willed girl and a tall, wounded pilot" in which she beats herself, ... collapses, and gets up again.

From the beginning she has chosen a controversial vocabulary. It has earned her work such assessments as "chaotic," "self-indulgent" "aggressive," and "anarchical," but also "formalist," "powerful," "emotionally tough," "stringently structured," "lucid," "gripping," and "honest." De Keersmaeker simply shrugs her shoulders at these contradictions. "What I [was and still] am trying to do," she explains, "is to practice economy of means, to create the maximum with the minimum."

The earlier pieces in particular are not easy on either the eye or the ear. Her dancers have been known to scream at the top of their lungs, as if haunted by some primeval fear or fury. Whether in heels, boots, or running shoes, they fling themselves into space with a fierceness that makes one worry for their joints. Clad in short black dresses and white socks or clingy sheaths, these child-women collapse to the floor only to rebound. Their physical abandon and pugilistic stances can make some audiences very uncomfortable. Her women have been called dancing machines. But ironically it's at their point of exhaustion, looking at us through stringy wet hair and panting in sweat-drenched clothes, that they reveal their frailty, their humanity, their aloneness. And underneath all that chaos and aggression one senses a tight control, a formalist fervor that is quite in contrast to the surface appearance of her work.

Two of De Keersmaeker's trademark devices are unison and repetition. "I have a love-hate relationship with them," she admits. "In some pieces I use them a lot; in others I don't. What I like about them is the way you can make one thing more emphatic, but also how you can point to small distinctions when different bodies execute the same movement." Fase, four movements on the music of Steve Reich, a work started during her 1981 stay in New York City, was inspired by the music's tiny shifts in inflection and rhythmic variety. She describes Fase as "a search for what's identical in what's different and for what's different in what's identical."

De Keersmaeker talks about that year she spent in Manhattan in impressionistic terms. Not interested in studying at any of the well-known schools or studios, she seems to have floated through her time in the city. "Stuart Hodes had accepted me, and Larry Rhodes was the head of the dance department at NYU. But I took classes in experimental theater, theater history, performing arts. Things that interested me." She calls the experience "a real kick. because so much was going on, not just in dance but in what was happening in the streets." But the city didn't hold her. "I wanted to go back and do my own work."

Beginning in the mid-eighties, De Keersmaeker has averaged one work a year, freely borrowing from herself, often reusing music and rearranging choreography. The 1987 Mikrokosmos, for instance, the first piece in which she used a male dancer, incorporates a section from the 1986 Bartok Annotations. The explosive and at times humorous Achterland (1990), in which live musicians provide a dramatic, often funny counterpoint to the dancers, incorporates parts of the quasi-hysterical confrontations of Stella of the same year. More recently, for the stunning Kinok (1994). De Keersmaeker reworked Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, Op. 133, which she had already used for Erts (1992). In addition, she used material from the Greenaway film to create a third, completely new, section; yet -- like all these creations -- it looks integrated and works.

Woud ("Forest") -- the piece she toured last fall in the U.S. and probably her most lyrical and seminarrative work to date -- makes a clear nod to ballet. Gus Solomons jr found its BAM performances "choreographically inventive, artfully structured, kinetically vivid, and visually rich" [Dance Magazine, January, page 102]. Its central section is based on the original string sextet version of Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht. In 1995 she had presented the same score in its orchestral version and with a larger ensemble on a double bill with Erwartung at the Monnaie. De Keersmaeker finds such recycling on a grand scale organic: "I think it's very natural. One piece grows out of another. There is a language that progresses from piece to piece." But she also points to the fact that each new piece destroys the power of the one that preceded it.

Since the early nineties, De Keersmaeker has increasingly focused her attention on the relationship between music and dance. She credits her musical adviser, Georges-Elie Octors, director of the contemporary music ensemble Ictus, in residence at PARTS, for helping her mine the scores she wants to work with. The 1993 Bach is a tight formal exploration of several Bach works for one man and four women. Erts explores string quartet writing; in addition to the Grosse Fuge, De Keersmaeker gave herself the challenge of setting such insistently modern pieces as Webern's Five Movements for String Quartet and Schnittke's String Quartet No. 2.

Might has fallen, the baby has been returned to her nurse, and now this intense and reticent artist becomes remarkably eloquent on the subject of music: "It has always been my first partner.I learned to choreograph from music, and it is the starting point to trying to find the generating vocabulary, for learning how to make phrases, to create a syntax. There are many different ways in which movement and dance can relate to music of all kinds and types. There are Bach, Beethoven, Ligeti, Monteverdi, Reich. Mickey Mouse-ing is one way; the way Cage and Cunningham did it is another. But for me it's the idea of developing strategies that interests me very much."

Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, considered by some the supreme achievement in string quartet writing, is the centerpiece of Erts, in which music, dance, and video portraits of the dancers combine to explore male-female relationships. Assisted by Octors, De Keersmaeker analyzed the music measure by measure and then decided that in this case each instrument would be assigned to one dancer, with the cello and the viola double cast. "This is a work with extremely sophisticated counterpoint," she explains, "and I needed to find a choreographic answer to it." Her dancers establish a close dialogue with the score's individual voices, sometimes going with them, other times moving against them, thus creating a counterpoint of their own. How did she teach the movement? "I don't teach," she corrects the questioner. "We find phrases together."

Musical training, with weekly sessions in analysis, singing, and rhythm, is also integral to PARTS. In addition to music and dance (both classical and contemporary, taught by former Trisha Brown, Pina Bausch, and Merce Cunningham dancers), students are taught improvisation, composition, movement analysis, history of dance-theater, and -- in alternating cycles -- sociology, anthropology, philosophy, plastic arts, and history of art and film.

The school came out of De Keersmaeker's experience as a student at Bejart's school. "Mudra was so special at that time," she recalls. "It was more an artist's place than a school. It was gery open, full of Bejart's spirit. People came from all over the world. It was not only about dance; it included theater and music, and had a larger vision of what dance could be. I want PARTS to be a place where I would have liked to go, a place where the past and the future come together in an intensive, focused physical training combined with the kind of intellectual and challenging training where dance has a very strong connection with music but also with theater." A visionary project for a Visionary artist.

But first things first. De Keersmaeker stands up. "I have to go," she says. "My daughter is crying."