CCB, 2 e 3 de Março de 2007
Dido & Aeneas, um dos grandes acontecimentos do ano,
enquanto decorre outro, A Valquíria no São Carlos.
DIDO & AENEASCOMPANHIA
SASHA WALTZ & GUESTSAkademie für Alte Musik Berlin -
Vocalconsort BerlinProdução:
CCBDIDO & AENEAS
Ópera em três actos e um prólogo
Música
Henry PurcellTexto
Nahum TateA partir do IV canto de Eneida de Virgílio
Cantores
Aurore Ugolin,
Reuben Willcox,
Deborah York, entre outros.
Coreografia e Direcção
Sasha WaltzDirecção Musical/ Reconstrução
Attilio CremonesiCenografia
Thomas Schenk,
Sasha WaltzFigurinos
Christine BirkleLuz
Thilo Reuther
World premiere 29.01.2005Sasha Waltz is a breaker of boundaries. In a geographical sense, she has exhibited this in her own life, with extended periods spent abroad - in Amsterdam, New York and elsewhere. Berlin has become her home, but having been out in the world, the world now comes to her.
Her company is marked by vibrant internationalism: Germany, Australia, Japan, Portugal, Israel, Canada - all (and others) are represented in Sasha Waltz & Guests.
Like any great choreographer, Waltz celebrates the fact that her language - the language of dance - is blind to nation, colour and creed. In another sense, Waltz relishes testing even the conventions of her own idiom. Tanztheater has a rich history in Germany but today the term can too often be loosely applied to anything that seems to flout the older choreographic order and embraces speech, gesture and general good fun. Waltz’s version of this form is specific: her dance is rigorous, frequently athletic, always inventive; her theatre - or rather her sense of theatre, as she would never claim to be a stage director per se - is quirky, ironic, eyecatching. Anyone who has seen part or all of her trilogy - »Körper«, »S«, »noBody« - will remember the stunning mix of epic imagery and intimate human connections conjured up. Indeed, to call her a magician of sorts is no overstatement: her notably visual imagination pushes in to the spaces where she works - whether on stage, in a disused building or in a church undergoing extensive reconstruction - jokes, tableaux and trompes l’oeil which you cannot forget.
In »Körper«, dancers were squashed together and wriggled around behind a glass screen, like a shoal of fish making love. Individuals shared anatomical secrets with us, or played with anatomy - in one of my favourite moments, a pile of plates became the removable discs of a human spine. In »S«, company members slithered, merged and parted, naked, as if rising from a primal sludge; later we were treated, amongst many extraordinary dance-pictures, to an illustration of the Kama Sutra, blissfully funny, compellingly sensual. In noBody, performers engaged in a mid-air tussle with a huge, inflated bubble which then rolled around threatening to gobble them up.
A startlingly beautiful image, it came, when let loose in the courtyard of the Palais des Papes in Avignon in 2002, with an extra edge of risk: would the Mistral blow it where it wasn’t supposed to go? It mattered little. Her dancers knew what to do - were able to blow, can always blow, with the wind. Controlled danger is part of Waltz’s agenda. Sasha Waltz is an explorer. Her territory is the body, and the body in space. At the Schaubühne, she’s focussed on our essential condition, on who we are in a material way: the question thrumming through everything has been, Can you see, do you understand our physical body-systems? The phrase, »body-system«, is hers. The result in the trilogy, a witty probing of the body’s very engineering, resembled a scientific inquiry. Then, there is the architecture, the physicalisation, of space: Waltz wants to make a human map of it. How does space become different with, say, ten living bodies in it? How do anywhere and anything inanimate become altered by contact with a person in studied movement? Such were the questions that underpinned work Waltz engaged in in 1998, in the then empty Jewish Museum in Berlin, which led directly to »Körper«. Of this she has said: »There was a more historical aspect here, linked inevitably to the problematic of German-Jewish history. This came into »Körper«: we worked for five weeks in the museum and it greatly influenced the piece. It’s enough, I think, to be German somehow to work through some of that history…« Breaker of rules, explorer, inquirer into history: Waltz is also a storyteller, and has found her most immediate material in those with whom she works - her dancers. Thus it was that in her most radical piece to date, insideout (Graz and Berlin, 2003), she encouraged 19 of her performers to look into, and talk about, and express, themselves. »There are so many different cultures represented within the company,« she said at the time, »that I wanted to explore the idea of biographies. So the work is based on generations and where each person belongs, and what their individual, personal, detailed, isolated stories are.«
»Insideout« marked another new departure, which this new »Dido & Aeneas« reflects: for the first time, Waltz collaborated with musicians playing live. In a set that was a cross between crazy Corbusier house and fairground labyrinth, we wandered at will and »choose« our scene, our story. One woman paced around conducting a monologue with a photo of an ancestor. Nearby, another, her face covered in sticking-plasters, said she’d always liked pretending to be an animal - and we saw her do just that.
Or I did. Others who saw the show will recall myriad different moments and images, such was insideout’s ingenious plurality - a kind of choreographic Cubism.
Her latest Schaubühne piece, Impromptus, is calmer, more painterly, more content with the single bodily surface of things. Choosing for the first time a classical score - Schubert’s eponymous piano cycle of 1827 - Waltz lets her seven dancers act out measured, lyrical dance-sculpture: though that subversive wit (squelching gumboots,
a mud bath, mutual body-painting) is never far away.
The same humour is present in this Dido and while choreographing Schubert was in some ways groundwork for Purcell, choreographing opera is another broken boundary for Waltz. Of course, in an authentically historical sense, it’s right to have dance in Dido, as most pre-Romantic operas were as much about dances as arias; Dido was indeed first staged in 1689, in what was then the small village of Chelsea, by a London dancer and choreographer called Josias Priest. Still, a late-17th-century English composer would not in his wildest imaginings have foreseen his stately drama refashioned by a sparky 21st-century German choreographer whose dancers cross-dress, shout, contort and generally perform with all the vivid self-consciousness characteristic of modern dance, and of Waltz’s in particular. But why not? For one of Europe’s most innovative choreographers, staging an antique work like »Dido & Aeneas« surely marks the acquisition of rich, new artistic terrain.
James Woodall
Choreography
Direction
Sasha WaltzMusical Direction
Reconstruction
Attilio CremonesiStage
Thomas SchenkSasha WaltzCostumes
Christine BirkleLight
Thilo ReutherDido
Aurore Ugolin Song
Valeria Apicella Dance
Michal Mualem Dance
Aeneas
Reuben Willcox Song
Virgis PuodziunasDance
Trainofaeneas
Luc Dunberry Dance
Manuel Alfonso Pérez Torres Song
Belinda
Deborah York Song
Sasa Queliz Dance
Second Woman
Céline Ricci Song
Maria Marta Colusi Dance
Narrator
Charlotte
Engelkes Sorceress
Fabrice Mantegna Song
Juan Kruz Diaz de Garaio Esnaola Dance
Xuan Shi Dance
First witch
A sailor
Eberhard Francesco Lorenz Song
Takako Suzuki Dance
Second witch
A spirit
Michael Bennett Song
Jirí Bartovanec Dance
Ascanius
László Sandig Song
Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin
Violine
Georg Kallweit (Konzertmeister)
Stephan MaiKerstin ErbenUta PetersBarbara PaulsenVerena SommerGabriele SteinfeldNadja ZwienerAlbrecht KühnThomas GraeweErik DorsetSusanne KanisViola
Anja GraewelAnette GeigerLothar HaasClemens Nuszbaumer Johannes PlatzBassvioline
Jan FreiheitInka DöringViola da Gamba
Hartwig GrothViolone
Robert SagasserMiriam ShalinskyTheorbe
Barockgitarre
Jakob LindbergBjörn ColellOphira ZakaiCembalo
Raphael AlpermannPerkussion
Michael MetenerVocalconsort Berlin
Sopran
Anette GeißMaria KöpckeSusanne WilsdorfCécile KempenaersAlt
Dorothee MerkelAnne-Kristin ZschunkeMartin van der ZeijstUwe Czyborra-SchröderTenor
Sebastian LippKlaus-Martin BresgottOliver UdenMarkus SchuckBass
Martin SchubachFrank SchwemmerMartin BackhausRené SteurA production of
Sasha Waltz & Guests and Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin in co-production with Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Grand Théâtre de la Ville de Luxembourg and Opéra National de Montpellier.
Supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.
