Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, with her company Rosas, is one of the most significant contemporary dance artists working in the world today.

Since the early 1980s, this Flemish artist has consistently delivered intelligent, understated and uncompromising choreography that spectacularly combines powerfully released energy, free flow and riotous dynamism with stunning spatial and musical precision.

De Keersmaeker is known as a choreographer of pure dynamics, presenting abstract forms of energy, shape and space with rare finesse and truthfulness. The clear-cut movements of her surging, spinning or neatly positioned dancers can contain profound emotional and spiritual meaning while remaining entirely nonrepresentational.

In Once, audiences are treated to several rare departures from the artist's usual stringent creative approaches. Not only is de Keersmaeker, now 46, returning to the stage after several years' absence to perform this solo work herself. She unashamedly uses it to express both her own fierce individuality — as both a dancer and a woman — and a deep universal yearning for such monumental human ambitions as courage, freedom of expression and peace. This work is an ode to human, perhaps feminine, strength and reveals a woman of truly remarkable qualities.

In this work, De Keersmaeker takes the audience, in some respects, on a journey through her childhood and adolescence. Beginning in silence, she wriggles awkwardly in and out of the set positions of classical ballet — a child learning to dance, a human soul working her way, obsessively, into her body, her instrument. She lurches across the stage in fierce bursts of energy, then balances, one hip all twisted and "wrong" as a little girl does, and thrills with genuine virtuosity and natural human grace. She removes her clothes, approaches the audience up close, backs off, and negotiates before our eyes the explosive cocktail of stage, space, speed, the viewed and the viewer.

The bulk of the work is set to a series of songs from an emotional live concert recording of Joan Baez, in itself a bold choreographic choice, and another notable departure from De Keersmaeker's regular use of more brisk or arcane classical music ranging from Bach to Steve Reich. She responds to the songs in various ways, sometimes singing along or miming the content of the words. "This is my favorite!" she interjects before one song. Often her dance rides over the songs with her signature complex and superbly timed phrasing, creating rhythmic counterpoint.

During the performance, De Keersmaeker brilliantly deconstructs and establishes her own austere aesthetic. Clothes come off, hair is loosened, she speaks, laughs, gestures, snuggles into a blanket and arches and roars with ugly pain along to the ringing voice of Baez. At the same time, she gradually takes hold of the space, marching around and across it, traversing it with brisk diagonals, landing here and there in striking balances, one leg cocked up or back, addressing the audience and the cluster of lamps at stage right that shine into her private world.

Both the emancipation and the discipline of dance are superbly expressed in this work, as De Keersmaeker moves between finely cut states and shapes and actions, her body acting as territory for battles of will, freedom, laws, protection and awkwardness. With childlike leaps and twists, head thrown back, jaw open, she is petulant and proud. A moment later she is womanly and soulful as she sits and listens. Raw, shocking and fabulous, this engaging performer reaches out and touches the space with her body and presence.