Sasha Waltz, Kreatur

Ahead of the 25th anniversary of her company, Sasha Waltz returns to her roots in her artistic work. She has always sought dialogue with other art forms. In the past ten years, with the development of the choreographic opera, she focused particularly on music. Compositions from the Baroque to the present formed the basis of Sasha Waltz’s choreographies; she utilized radically different musical formats, from chamber music to a full orchestra. The theme of strong, mythical female figures runs through her work, which led her to concentrate on rites and rituals, and the relationship between the individual and the group.

Kreatur is the first collaboration of Sasha Waltz with Iris van Herpen, Urs Schönebaum and Soundwalk Collective – all four of them do interdisciplinary work and seek exchange across artistic and academic fields.

The Dutch artist and fashion designer Iris van Herpen combines traditional craftsmanship with innovative digital technologies to produce her visionary art. Her sculptural creations, which are simultaneously organic and technological, sometimes appear to combine with the body like a second skin, at other times cover the body like a suit of armour or a shell.

“The strong physical and emotional shifts between power and powerless were intensively feelable for me when watching the rehearsals of Kreatur,” Van Herpen said. “Sasha and her dancers inspired me to translate these hallucinating shifts of energy, to create moments where the dancers move frangible in balls of energy, expanding their bodies outwards to oppose a dark and aggressive shelter of spikes that seductively move from power to powerless.”

With his light designs, Urs Schönebaum creates spaces for theatre and opera productions, exhibitions, performances and installations around the world for Marina Abramovic, Robert Wilson, Michael Haneke and others.

The international art and music trio Soundwalk Collective (Berlin/New York) combines anthropology, ethnography, psycho-geography, the observation of nature, and explorations in recording and synthesis in their genre-bending sound compositions, for Kreatur e.g. from Berghain Berlin and the Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. The Collective is currently part of the Documenta 14 in Athens/Kassel, their recent work among others features a collaboration Patti Smith in their acclaimed album Kreatur. Their new album Before Music There Is Blood featuring Max Loderbauer will be presented in a Record Release Concert on 12 June 2017 at Radialsystem V.

For Kreatur Sasha Waltz with her 14 dancers examines the phenomena of existence against the background of a disrupted society: power and a lack of power, dominance and weakness, freedom and control, community and isolation.

© Sasha Waltz & Guests