BERLIN, Sept. 9 - In her new work, "insideout," the choreographer Sasha Waltz forces viewers to make choices, and in choosing, they must miss something. The audience strolls through the dance as if through a museum, some chatting or drinking water.
During a recent rehearsal here on a two-story set built in a cavernous theater stripped of seats, a dancer in one room changed into her mother's traditional dress and told of her immigration to London from Hong Kong. Simultaneously, another dancer, in a lighted box one-story high, moved slowly, wearing a black-and-white herringbone suit and a shroud around the face. A small man stared up from a display case, where he was stuffed upside down, his breath whitening the glass. A sign said he was born in 1983.
The work will have its premiere at the Helmut List Halle in Graz, Austria, on Sept. 18 before returning here in October. What a viewer sees is visually stunning, viscerally charged and at times difficult to absorb. The wildly ambitious work reflects Ms. Waltz's hybrid roots: German dance theater blended with American postmodernism. "We want to invite people in," Ms. Waltz said after a recent rehearsal here, where she is based. "The dancers are like sculptures and I want a sort of exhibition you can go back to in case you miss something." Ms. Waltz, 40, has received mixed reviews in the United States. Many German critics consider her the most significant German modern-dance choreographer to emerge in the generation after Pina Bausch. Since 1999 she has been the choreographer in residence and the heart of the resurrection of the legendary experimental theater Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz here, where she always fills the house.
"The Schaubühne was in a desperate situation financially and had to start over completely four years ago," said Rüdiger Schaper, a theater critic at Der Tagesspiegel, a Berlin-based newspaper. "It was a moment in German theater history where she needed the theater and they needed her. The Schaubühne would not have been able to make it without Sasha Waltz."
She "just went into a monstrous space and conquered it with her dances," Mr. Schaper said, adding, "Berlin is very critical and open at the same time as an audience, and she has always been loved here."
Sometimes audiences go to see Ms. Waltz and expect to see Ms. Bausch's prodigy, which she is not, and so some have come away baffled. "Sasha was very well received" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November, Joe Melillo, the executive producer at Brooklyn Academy of Music and a longtime fan of Ms. Waltz's work, said in a telephone interview from London. "But we
did get some bewilderment. Europeans don't make dance like Americans. A large number of Americans who are formalists are looking for beautifully constructed dance - like Twyla Tharp and Paul Taylor."
Ms. Waltz does not make lovely dances. The American choreographers she most admires are postmodernists like Steve Paxton and Trisha Brown.
Ms. Waltz's "insideout" is about many things, but families and the personal histories of her dancers are central. Graz is helping to finance the behemoth piece. Twenty dancers and 10 musicians will move within many rooms as well as pose in boxes resembling display cases or cupboards, as 200 audience members also wander through the eccentric theater.
During one of the work's first rehearsals this summer, Ms. Waltz ran from room to room, alternately harried and focused, dressed in a black sweater and red sweat pants, bouncing her baby, Sophia, on her hip; around them, dancers improvised. They argued good-naturedly as they leaped, ran and slammed themselves to the floor. They danced in rooms of all sorts - refrigerated, ventilated with a lighted floor, dark with a pitched roof, modernist with full-length plastic curtains that had peekaboo circles through which dancers could be glimpsed.
"What I have been completely sensitive to is the fact that Sasha is working in the dance-theater genre, but has her own voice," Mr. Melillo said. "She is not derivative of Pina Bausch. What was challenging was trying to explain to my colleagues at BAM the fundamental difference." The company plans to return to the Academy in 2005.
Ms. Waltz's work can be bare within a contained set, and then suddenly veer into sheer spectacle, full of acting and visual imagery, occasionally indulgent, ferociously charged, at times lyrical and erotic and at other times dehumanized or abstract. Critics often ache for more dance-making and less self-indulgence.
Ms. Waltz was pregnant with Sophia and did not attend the United States premiere of her "Körper" ("Bodies") last year in Brooklyn. "Körper" is part of a trilogy on the body, which includes the works "Nobody" and "S." "Körper," which is seen frequently in Berlin, is dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust and was created in the then-empty Jewish Museum in Berlin.
In one significant vignette several bodies move eerily, evoking a liquid quality, like blood traveling under a microscope, as the dancers undulate in a cramped, lighted box. Wearing white underpants, tightly packed bodies ooze from position to position. The effect is oddly calming, like watching a river roll, yet it certainly hints at death.
In "insideout," Ms. Waltz has her dancers shout out a brand name - like Adidas, Prada, Gucci or Nike - as they shake in a ragged, maddened way. Then she asks them to try again, whispering the brand until the body seems to internalize the sound. Still unhappy, she asks her dancers if they are trying as hard as before. "She has her own vision," Mr. Melillo said. "She's a caretaker in a very motherly, familial way."
Mr. Schaper said: "There is nothing cold about her work, no matter how esoteric it gets. The temperature is always warm." Outside the theater, after a summer's day of rehearsal, Ms. Waltz nursed Sophia at the Schaubühne Cafe while her 5-year-old son, Laszlo, ran around the brick walkway at Lehniner Platz. Her husband is Jochen Sandig, who shares the title of artistic director of dance at the theater with her.
"With `insideout' I want to somehow confront issues like value systems and identity," she said. "But I also want to emancipate the public, to be a mirror for them and make them feel they are making their own piece. I want a total experience for them, something quite rich."
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