"Impromptus"
Sasha Waltz & Guests
Cal Performances, Zellerbach Hall
Berkeley, CA
October 24, 2014
by Rita Felciano
copyright © Rita Felciano, 2014
The German choreographer and her international cast are rare guests in the Bay Area. Sasha Waltz brought "Zweiland" some fifteen years ago; "Allee der Kosmonauten" in 2001; and, courtesy of the SF International Arts Festival, "Travelogue I--Twenty to eight" in 2009. Now, she returned, in her only US appearance -- what's the matter with our presenters? -- with the delightful 2004 "Impromptus." Those who expected another of Waltz's probing and socially grounded dance theater pieces, might have been disappointed. (At BAM, where I first encountered the work, some people walked out.) For the rest of us, "Impromptus" offered a rather extraordinary co-existence of music and dance. The piece revealed its translucent facets like a hard diamond under the light. And yet "Impromptus" was so evanescent that you didn't dare to breathe.
Sasha Waltz & Guests in "Impromptus." Photo © Sebastian Bolesch
I must be forgiven -- I do live on the West Coast -- for thinking of Thomas Schenk's set of two barely overlapping platforms as tectonic plates, dominated by a huge suspended wall that threatened to drop any minute except that it turned to be so light it could be set gently swinging by the touch of a finger.
Perhaps most wonderful was Waltz's and the dancers' response to these so well-known Schubert piano pieces, miniatures on one level but major in the way they lead us through their nuanced shifts of moods and tones. Rarely does the choreography descend into literalisms, such as scurrying steps in answer to runs in the piano, or adding more bodies to musical crescendos. Instead, the dance created an independent response to the score. The whole work sounded like a series of conversations between dancers and musicians (the crystalline pianist Cristina Marton and mezzo-soprano Ruth Sandhoff) who sometimes absented themselves. At one point, Marton even closed the lid to the piano before marching off.
In the opening section, for instance, Schubert suggested a dramatic give and take between the right and the left hand. Yet Waltz had surprised us with anticipating the music by starting in silence. Xuan Shi fell and stumbled across the stage as if fighting a tornado. With Juan Kruz Diaz de Garaio Esnaola joined in, Schubert finally started. With another duet for Michal Mualem and Luc Dunberry as a response to their colleagues, the section made for a kind of trio between music and dance. In the "Impromptus" final part, danced by Shi and Zaratiana Randrianatenaina, Schubert went back and forth between wistful intimacy and an almost operatic contentiousness. The music finally petered out, leaving it to the two dancers to break up in silence as they faded into the dark.
What's so wonderful about "Impromptus is that despite this not being one of her theatrically more pungent pieces, Waltz hasn't given up on presenting us with her vision of the human condition and how we respond to it. It's one couched in language that takes inspiration from the sharing of weight, a sense of flow and above all an egalitarian relationship between the sexes first promultgated by contact improvisation. Yet she spins these runs and walks, lifts and falls the way a confectioner pulls sugar in any and all directions. When one man stands rooted to the ground and swings his arms like a pendulum, he is joined in no time by companions to fill out the empty space around him into a delicious perpetuum mobile.
Music is all-important, but then so are the silences it suggests. Waltz uses this dichotomy to excellent effect. At one point the seven dancers are spread across the stage, walking, running, standing, constantly changing directions. When the music finally returned it felt as though they found their footing. In another section, a contentious romance gone wrong -- the songs are full of them -- of turning, drifting and leaning between Yael Schnell and Niannian Zhou you only heard their bodies connecting. It left the smaller woman bereft. But then Mualem stepped up, bringing the lyrical Schubert with him for an encounter that was intimate, wispy, with their hands exploring each other without touching.
While "Impromptus" partakes in the melancholy so prevalent in Schubert, it also shares lighter mood though with a rather peculiar sense of humor. The dancers stumped around in galoshes and used its water to finger paint their bodies. In one male female duet, the woman peering between her partner's legs looked like a clown. And I think the bathing scene, probably, served as a kind of amuse bouche or palate cleanser between courses.
Perhaps one my favorite moments came with The Doppelgaenger, whose lyrics I didn't know. One dancer looked like a somnambulist who finally found his double in a dancer whom he rolled and twisted onto himself like a second skin. (The English translation of "Doppelgaenger" as wraith or ghost is inadequate) Schubert's music rose to pain and terror. Waltz's choreography did anything but.