Körper

Sasha Waltz is a leading figure of German dance, the heir apparent of Pina Bausch. She is renowned for appropriating historical sites, for dissecting events, for angrily revealing, in almost burlesque fashion, the failings of reality. Körper, an impressive piece for thirteen dancers and a turning point in her body of work, lies at the very edge of abstraction. There is no narrative and there are no characters, but rather a wall of flesh, a living metaphor for the turmoil and turbulence of this world. Anatomical bodies, bodies manipulated this way and that – scientifically or surgically, or for mercantile reasons, or bodies become victims of genocide. This is a universe on the verge of surrealism and the absurd, shifting from the epic to the intimate, from the dramatic to the comical in a proliferation of striking images that burst forth from the merely clinical body. And the stark space, stripped to the bare essentials, offers no refuge to the naked, exposed human form. Lending itself to all sorts of metamorphoses, the body is a receptor and a symbol of myriad violations and affronts, a subject/object for all purposes, a depository and creative force for the projected imagination. A magnificent work!