“Are people slaves to their environment? Or can they call themselves free?” This is what Sasha Waltz asks with his show presented at Teatro Argentina on Sept. 13 and 14 as part of the Romaeuropa Festival, bringing to life the question Beethoven posed in 1812 with his Symphony No. 7.
The performance is inspired by this very symphony, as is the interpretation by contemporary composer Diego Noguera that punctuates the first part of the performance and choreography, only to give way in the second part to Beethoven’s original.
In both parts that made up the show this question kept occurring in my head. Both when the stage was populated by the alien creatures in the first part and the dancers in the second, and when the music was an electronic composition or the more traditional and well-known sounds of Beethoven. The overlapping of different relational levels shape the perception of the scene.
We have the relationship of the body to the stage, the neutral but unavoidable area in which the dancers take their place. Within this it is the performers themselves who build the second level: it is that of the relationships between the bodies, which stimulate each other in the form of co-dependence. Attracting and repelling each other, joining in a single choreography or dividing into small autonomous groups; the bodies shape the identity of the stage space through the relationships they form within it. The haze, which in the first part of the performance erases the spatial references of the stage, reinforces this aspect.
The last, the largest and most important, is music, the element that governs the instance of the performance and gives life to the relationships that constitute it. Starting from it, everything is organized, shaped and coordinated. Bodies, subjected to this law, take their place in the design of the spectacle and adapt to their role. Those who fail to be part of it, like the alien at the end of the first part, are doomed to succumb.
Every element of the performance resonated with the question posed by Waltz and Beethoven’s composition, which took on an increasingly somber tone, suggesting that it was inevitable for the dancers to submit to the rules posed by the elements of the performance.
However, to my amazement, some of them managed to escape from this system for a few moments. In some brief interludes, dominated by silence, in an atmosphere of intimacy, two performers come out and dance together. You can hear the rustle of feet sliding on the creaking stage boards, the labored breaths. Small moments of respite from the grand choreography. Just movements, just bodies. A brief sigh before re-entering the grand design of the choreography studied on Beethoven.
Giovanni Bernocco, September 13 2024
images (all): Sasha Waltz & Guests, Beethoven 7, Edivaldo Ernesto, Clementine Deluy, Sebastian Bolesch
Sasha Waltz & Guests, Beethoven 7, Romaeuropa Festival 2024, Teatro Argentina, Rome, 13 – 14.09.2024
The article by Giovanni Bernocco is part of the Intraspaces editorial project, the sixth edition of Backstage /Onstage, born from a partnership between the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome, Romaeuropa Festival, and Arshake to bring, since 2018, a group of students from the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome behind the scenes of the Romaeuropa Festival. Each year a different editorial project has emerged to flow into the dedicated page that grows as one big archive. The 2024 edition, Intraspaces, ventures into the intrastitial spaces, that is, all those places of connection that connect technologies, artists, space, spectators, sometimes even extending to the territory, where the different institutions that this event manages to involve are located. In the 2024 edition, Giovanni Bernocco, Daniele Bucceri, Stella Landi, Lidia De Nuzzo, Francesca Pascarelli, and Anton Tkalenko participated. Visit here the project’s homepage and the archive of past editions.
