Sasha Waltz is one of the standard bearers of the dance world's avant-garde. Just one look at the poster for her company's performance this weekend at the National Theater in Korper and you will know that she's not your average modern choreographer.
Half-nude bodies of men and women, trapped and pressed under what looks like a large sheet of glass — it's clear that audiences should not expect to be seeing something light and airy. But that's not to say you won't have fun; it's just that the sillier, lighter moments are mixed in with the disturbing, if not downright grotesque.
The Karlsruhe-born, Berlin-based Waltz founded her company, Sasha Waltz and Guests, in 1993, with Jochen Sandig, who is her partner out of the theater as well. It's an unusual dance company; while there is a small core of dancers and associates who have been with her for years, there have been more than 150 guest artists around the world who have danced for her. Hence the name.
PHOTO COURTESY OF NTCH
Waltz began dancing as a child, studying with a teacher of the German expressionist school and then later at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam. A one-year stay in New York exposed her to some of the big names in American modernism. She disavows the oft-made comparisons of her work with that of countrywoman Pina Bausch, citing Americans Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown as her main sources of inspiration, especially Brown, whom she labels "one of her heroes."
But her works can also be seen in the linage with other contemporary Europe-based choreographers such as Vim Vandekeybus of Ultima Vez in Belgium, or Lloyd Newson of DV8 in London, who have incorporated theatrical traditions, scripts and sometimes film clips into their productions as they seek to challenge and inform audiences about the human condition and modern life. Those who saw Jerome Bel's company at Novel Hall in June in the Frenchman's self-titled work will probably also see some similar images in Waltz's work — the selling of body parts, the emphasis on the skin and its movements.
Korper was the first in a trilogy (it was followed by S and noBody) that examine the human body, its architecture, its various bits and pieces, and its mortality. But Korper is also Waltz's attempt to come to grips as a young German with the legacy of the Holocaust, both for Germany and mankind in general.
She has said that she was very influenced by Daniel Liebeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin, where she did a series of choreographic sketches while working on Korper, especially the void he created in memory of all the people who died.
"As a German, this is our historical pain [the Holocaust], but there are still other such pains today," Waltz said at a press conference yesterday.
"It is something about being human beings ... something that dance can talk about in a very deep sense, almost a subconscious sense."
The 13 dancers are clad almost exclusively in flesh-colored briefs. The occasional black-garbed figure becomes an almost disturbing exception. Though sexuality is certainly a key element of the human body, Waltz said that this was not the reason for the near nudity. She wanted to strip away the outer layers that humans use to conceal themselves, to distance themselves from one another.
"I didn't want to distract people with costumes, with clothes of a certain period," she said. "I wanted just the body itself but without a sexual view, almost like a doctor's [perspective] I hoped."
The skin is also the largest organ of the body, she said, and its elasticity, its movement, was what intrigues her.
Waltz has frequently been cited for her use of space and the architecture of her pieces, which perhaps can be traced back to her architect father. The set for Korper centers around a 10m-plus black wall, which doubles as a blackboard, but whose main feature is a huge window with a Lucite pane that becomes a display case for the dancers' bodies. First one woman alone, then a flood of others, who wiggle, spill, overlap, moving about on an almost invisible latticework of thin wood strips. This wall later crashes to the floor to become a sloped platform.
Sasha Waltz and Guests is a fitting finale for the National Theater's Made in Germany festival, which has succeeded over the past four weeks in giving Taipei audiences a taste of the best that modern Germany has to offer.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and