A small, semi-circular room with a domed ceiling. Between angular sandstone columns lie semi-circular alcoves. In these alcoves, one female and two male dancers move themselves up the walls by supporting themselves laterally and on the bricks of the masonry. Their black clothing stands out in the bright room. The three dancers are part of a seventy-member ensemble consisting of musicians, singers and dancers, with which Sasha Waltz chose to celebrate the re-opening of Berlin’s Neues Museum in 2009. Bodies in motion explore and survey the building from the 19th century, which was destroyed in the war and rebuilt and redesigned by British star architect David Chipperfield.
Over the years, Sasha Waltz has treated a whole series of impressive works of architecture – starting with the Jüdisches Museum by Daniel Libeskind in Berlin, to Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, all the way to Waltz’s performance of Dialog in an abandoned colonial-era palace in Calcutta. The performance venues used regularly by Sasha Waltz & Guests, the company she founded in 1993, meaning initially Berlin’s Sophiensæle, and then later the Schaubühne at Lehniner Platz and Radialsystem V, all have their very own special architectural histories. As Sasha Waltz describes it, the vastness and size of the Schaubühne, where she served as artistic co-director from 1999 to 2004, made it appear to her like a cathedral.
With her pieces at the Schaubühne, the aesthetic of her works also changed. For instance, in the trilogy Körper, nearly naked dancers survey the enormous room enclosed in bare cement walls with their bodies. Stacked on top of one another, lying in a triangle or adorned with long sticks that recall insect antennae, the bodies appear at the same time tiny and vulnerable as well as large and ready to defend themselves in these arrangements. These timeless, puristic choreographies, which can also be found in Waltz’s international opera productions, came to replace the shrill, slapstick-like works of her beginnings as an artist – those door-opens/door-shuts scenes, the patterned sofa and the colourful costumes with which she conquered the charmingly run-down Sophiensæle in Allee der Kosmonauten in 1996 for instance.
Allee der Kosmonauten is a story that covers three generations living in a pre-fab high-rise apartment development. It treats a subject of great importance for Sasha Waltz: the family. One can also see her company, in which dancers from the very first years are still active today, as a family. Waltz’s own family is also always involved in realising her productions. Her husband Jochen Sandig works (in addition to many other roles) as the company’s managing director, her sister Yoreme collaborates as a dramaturge and her children Sophia and László have danced in various of her productions.
Although her parents – her architect father and gallerist mother – are not directly involved in the creative process, they too are integrated by Sasha Waltz in her work. In her piece insideout, pictures of her parents as adolescents are tacked to a wood wall. In between the photographs, hands and arms reach from behind through holes in the wooden wall, carrying a dancer, holding her and directing her motions: a strong and ambiguous image for family.
Striking images like these stick out time and again in Sasha Waltz’s productions. For instance, that of the two dancers that merge into one creature with a twisted lower body, or bodies that are housed in cocoons made of hair, sticks and cloud-like sculptures, or the dancer that sinks into a giant white air cushion and is pulled away henceforth. Thus, it seems only logical that the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM) in Sasha Waltz’s hometown of Karlsruhe has been exhibiting fragments of her works as installations and performances since 2013. In Berlin, her creative home, Sasha Waltz is assuming the role of co-director of the Staatsballett in 2019.