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DANZ QUARTERLY Issue 18
January, February, March 2010
REVIEW
Sasha Waltz & Guests in Melbourne Arts
Festival October 2009
Medea & Körper
Reviewed by Jennifer Shennan
With such a name what else would you do but dance? In fact Berlin choreographer Sasha Waltz, daughter of an architect and a gallery director, did not initially pursue dance training. Her early interests were in an undefined area of art, but an encounter with Contact Improvisation convinced her that the movement of human bodies would become her métier.
The opera, Medea, is driven by the abhorrent notion of a mother killing her children. The choreographed production traces the Greek myth and simultaneously reduces the theme to a contemporary situation.
Dancers in chorus-like groups make a powerful frame and commentary for the searing performance by solo soprano Caroline Stein. The thought, that opera would benefit by absorbing dancers into the emotional centre of the work, comes to mind. (India’s Kathakali dance-drama does something very similar, to profound effect.)
Waltz’ curiosity to discover the effects of movement on stage in group situations is marked, and results in layers of meaning and metaphor throughout her works. Inside Out (not performed in Melbourne) has the audience shifting about amongst the performers, encountering them in
confined spaces, and by definition taking away only a highly personalized experience of the performance.
Körper uses many inventive and unusual stagings with dancers, most of the time only minimally clad, so that skin, torsos, limbs and proximities between people soon become the subject matter and focus of the work. Human folly and tenderness are depicted by turns, and at times the huge if silent power of unseen forces mysteriously makes its presence felt.
Lisa Densem, New Zealand dancer with Sasha Waltz & Guests, has earned a reputation as an enigmatic performer who always seems deeply absorbed into the heart of her performance. There is an aura of calm around her exquisitely sculptured body lines, none of which are for appearances sake.
In 1986 I choreographed Apollo in Wellington (to Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagete) and Lisa, then a student at NZ School of Dance, danced the lead role. Even then she took everyone’s breath away. Some time later she confided her intention to go to Germany and find “a remarkable woman whose work I really like. I want to work with her. Her name is Sasha Waltz.” The rest is a slice of dance history.
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