Arts & Events

As part of Cal Performances Berkeley RADICAL 2018/19 season, a special series entitled Women’s Work focuses on the cultural expression of women artists. This past week, German choreographer Sasha Waltz has come to Berkleley to revive her revolutionary 2000 staging of Körper, which premiered at Berlin’s Schaubühne Theater. Here in Berkeley, Körper received two performances at Zellerbach Hall: Saturday, October 20 at 8:00 and Sunday, October 21 at 3:00. Sasha Waltz also gave a talk on Thursday, October 18 at Stephens Hall on the UC campus. In this talk, emceed by Sabrina Klein, Sasha Waltz spoke at length about the genesis of Körper. Interestingly, this work grew out of an earlier project focused on architect Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. Before the Jewish Museum was even open to the public, Sasha Waltz was asked to produce a dance event inside the new museum. According to Sasha Waltz, what struck her most about Libeskind’s revolutionary architecture was the existence of a central void. In response to this void, Sasha Waltz created the choreography for a solo dancer, which was performed in the central void of the Jewish Museum in 1999. (The Jewish Museum in Berlin only opened to the public in 2001.) 

Sasha Waltz’s next project was Körper, a work for 13 dancers in which she expanded her examination of the human body. (Körper means Bodies in German.) A highlight of Körper occurs when 10 bodies occupy a void-like structure. The dancers’ bodies assume many different positions and configurations. Some dancers kneel, others lie supine, while others stand upright. Several dancers seem to hang suspended across the top of the fifteen-foot high void-like structure. All the dancers move in slow-motion within this void, some squirming, others climbing slowly upward, and still others slowly sinking downwards from the top. It is somehow hypnotic. 

In Körper, the focus is unrelentingly on the human body, and it is the body stripped bare or wearing only the most minimal clothing. Attention is given to body measurements, appendage by appendage. At one point quite late in this nearly two-hour-long work, dancers inscribe chalk circles around their bodies, thus evoking Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing of a man with arms outsretched circumscribed within a circle, a drawing which gave rise to the notion that Man is the measure of all things. Only in Sasha Waltz’s work, it is women who inscribe their bodies in a circle, as if to say, Woman is the measure of all things.  

There are quite a few whimsical moments in Körper. For example, bodies are conjoined in strange, whimsical combinations. One man faces the audience while a second man, hidden by draped clothing, provides the legs, which, however, face backwards, away from the audience. As this combined figure moves, strange spatial dislocations appear, the upper torso facing and moving one way and the legs facing in the opposite direction.  

At one point in Körper, a large section of wall collapses and comes crashing to the floor. Because Sasha Waltz produced this work in Berlin, we immediately think of the Berlin Wall collapsing. One might expect, therefore, that what we see after the collapse of the wall will be strikingly different from what we saw before the wall collapsed. Disappointingly, this is not the case. Körper just goes on as if nothing happened. Indeed, it goes on and on and on, almost becoming tedious. As we neared the two-hour mark, I began to think that Körper would have been great at half the length. In the course of this work, several individuals tell stories about themselves and their bodies. Some of the dancers did not speak loudly and clearly enough to be heard in the vast recesses of Zellerbach Hall. Others were heard but their stories seemed beside the point. Only one story had a real impact, and that occurred when a dancer named Luc told of visiting a doctor to complain about several symptoms, and ended by shouting a terrified, “Do I have cancer?“  

Music for Körper was composed by Hans Peter Kuhn, who provided an electronic score full of snaps, crackles and pops. The best one can say about the score is that it is ingeneniously coordinated with the dancers’ movements. Costumes, mostly skimpy, were provided by Bernd Skodrig. Lighting was by Valentin Galié and Martin Hauk.  

Sasha Waltz and her artistic partner, Johannes Öhman, will assume the direction of the Berlin State Ballet in 2019, thus expanding their already multi-faceted exploration of modern dance, choreographic opera, and danced responses to architecture. One has every expectation that Sasha Waltz & Guests will soon take the ballet world by storm just as they have taken everything else, including Berkeley, by storm in their creative whirlwind.