Dialogues in Presence: Sasha Waltz

Sasha Waltz is one of the most original and celebrated choreographers of her generation. She has continually rolled back the frontiers of contemporary dance, bringing a broad assemblage of avant-garde disciplines, a revelatory sensitivity to architecture and an expanded lexicon of improvisation.

Upon settling in the young German capital in the nineties, Waltz created iconic dance works such as the Travelogue and Körper trilogies, which traveled the world. Her company Sasha Waltz & Guests, founded with Jochen Sandig, has collaborated with architects, filmmakers, designers, writers and composers from over 60 countries. She and Sandig were instrumental in establishing spaces for performance arts in Berlin, including Sophiensæle in 1996 and Radialsystem in 2006. During the pressures of lockdown, Waltz gave rise to the ingenious piece In C, an open-source system of choreographic figures set to accompany Terry Riley’s revolutionary minimal music piece, a democratic social sculpture that has been adopted by professional and amateur communities across the globe.

Herself the daughter of an architect, Sasha Waltz has developed a series of works in which architecture is much more than a container for performance, becoming instead a principal protagonist and essential reference in the pattern of movement being expressed through human sinew. In this interview with Slowness, Waltz discusses her most recent turn towards a set of practices that allows her and her dancers to access the invisible material that underpins the visible world, turning performance into a rite of mutual contact between inner worlds.

AURORA SOLÁ After decades in dance, performing, and choreography, you’ve come to a unique approach that you used in for the time being and now again in Dialoge — Reethaus. You call it a collective practice of experiencing the moment. Your two main sources for this work are Pauline Oliveros, the legendary pioneer of Deep Listening as a contemporary art practice, and the perhaps lesser known Mary Starks Whitehouse, who danced with Martha Graham and Mary Wigman but then got interested in the ideas of Carl Jung and created Authentic Movement. How did these two streams combine for you? 

SASHA WALTZ I first encountered Authentic Movement in the United States thirty years ago, but I never went to a regular practice. For me it was last year, when I was in a recovery process and it was part of the healing process. We went with the very basic practice of just one mover and one witness, and the two of them exchanging verbally about what’s taken place. It was quite exceptional what happened in that space. And then we began to add more people. So from one to one, it became a group. We started to develop our own practices, for example, bringing in the scores of Pauline Oliveros, which are so simple and work for non-musicians. We began proposing our own scores, our own questions, our own tasks and exercises. So we are somehow anchored in the practice, but I also don’t call it “Authentic Practice” because we are taking it to another place and melting it with all of our experience.

We are trying to practice listening to each other, to our inner voice, our inner space, where we are in the moment. We are listening too to the space around us, the architecture, the material of everything, but a larger sense of space too: what is the energy of the space? We are sensing, heightening our sensitivity to the textures that are there.

There is definitely a place you can reach if you’re very open. I think it has something to do with maturity. You allow things to really come up so it becomes really truthful. It is not movement as decoration.

AS What changes in this kind of work where the dancers, rather than being vehicles for the vision of a choreographer, become authors themselves, or at least their own autonomous channels. Does this touch the audience as being more intimate? How have the dancers responded to this invitation from you? 

SW I think the dancers love this environment where they can explore themselves and their own language, with help too from the other dancers. And I’m also there to hold it and direct it to where I think it should go. So they are very free. I’ll give them feedback or navigate them, there’s a bit of a score, but it’s a very, very light score and they love that. 

They always love exploring new spaces. There’s a lot of creativity rushing in when you are encountering a new space.

Reethaus in particular has such a beautiful variety of sensations. It is meant for experiencing architecture in a different way. If you really let the architecture arrive in you, what does it do to you? How does it calm you down? In a way, the architecture is opening the door of awareness by using all these different textures.

It’s wood and concrete and glass. Through the use of glass, you also get to sense the space outside. It’s not only inside space; the outside and inside are fluently influencing each other. The spaces are somehow inside but already outside. There is a tree there and you are in contact with the tree. We also use the roof to dance outside, staying connected as well with the rest of the Reethaus. All of these are influences on the dance.

AS The dialogue between the inside and outside space of the architecture is paralleled by the inside-outside work that the dancers are doing within themselves in the performance. Do you find that it requires more bravery from the dancers to work under this modality? There can be a vertigo in freedom as well.

SW I invited people that I have collaborated with a lot into this piece, so we have a history, a language. A lot of them have been doing these practices with me for for the time being. But that’s a stage performance, and at Reethaus, with all its different spaces, I thought to activate the whole house with more dancers and invite them into this liberty. I would not ask a very young dancer or one I haven’t worked with before to do this, because I also want to trust what I’m seeing.

You know how it works, specific spaces trigger memories. Lisa Densem and I have been dancing together for over 25 years, and something about the concrete brought back a memory of when we did a Dialoge at the Jewish Museum by Daniel Libeskind in 1999. It’s a very, very different space from Reethaus, a puristic space with stark architecture, but somehow we were brought back to that.

AS It reminds me of something Pauline Oliveros wrote, that quantum listening is attention to a point, an all-or-nothing focus that then changes that point forever. And it changes you along with that point. That intensity of attention can create a deep anchor in memory. Is the purpose for you in drawing from such deep places purely artistic or is there some other aim that goes beyond art for you in these practices?

SW That’s an interesting question, and it was always a question for Mary Starks Whitehouse. She didn’t know which world she belonged to. I think there is no reason to even divide the two, because all art can be healing and some of the healing practices can become art. So I’m trying not to position myself either way. The process does have a very transformative feeling to it. We always feel it when we enter into the space, truly. And I mean, the group is not even. There are people that have less experience in the practice, and there are people that have a lot of experience in the practice, and there are people that are younger and there are people that are older. It’s also a generational piece in a certain way, which for me is important. I enjoy experienced dancers so much, with all the knowledge of the body and of life that is talking through them. That is very touching for me, particularly in this practice. At the same time, it’s beautiful to have the energy of a younger dancer, with the urgency to move and discover. They each bring different qualities to the evening.

AS I’ve heard you refer to this as a ritual, which is also a word that some of these women have used. I’m curious about what ritual means to you and how you’ve come to recognize and cultivate this form in your life.

SW There are aspects of the practice that feel very ritualistic in the way that archetypal experiences can come up. We experienced it a lot in the collective practice. The music helps us get into another state together, so that it really feels like we are traveling somewhere, and we never really know where it is going. I cannot explain it, but we have had really strong experiences with that. We have also tried to find ways for it to become a personal ritual. How can I enter into the state? What are my methods? I mean, we have been practicing the method for a long time. We went into the studio every day to practice together. It was really intense. We had a break after the premiere and further performances, and now we have come back together for Reethaus, and we really felt, wow, how much we missed it, you know? And here we are again together in another space.

AS Showing up every day to do the exercises together, that is a devotional practice all on its own. Your partner Jochen Sandig said that one of things you would be listening for here, besides other people, the birds, the trees, the architecture, is the concept of slowness. Can you say more about that?

SW When you slow down, your awareness heightens. It is much harder when everything is racing to be conscious. The space invites that. But we also want dramaturgy, so I’m not excluding energy and dynamic outbursts. I’m not saying everything has to be slow. That wouldn’t be truthful to what might appear. What appears appears. But the practice itself has a slowness to it, which sets a tone.

AS You also speak about the dancers drawing from a shared source of living imagination. It’s a very Jungian phrase. For you, is this shared source something that exists already, or is it something like an egregore, a group spirit that has to be established and developed when you start working with a group of dancers?

SW For a lot of these dancers, they’re using that already, but it has never been so explicitly pointed out, so extracted and focused on. For some it’s new material, they have more to explore. For me, with the focus on embodied imagination, it’s amazing what world we arrive at. We are always completely amazed by what happens to us. Sometimes it is a big leap, from practicing in the intimacy of the studio to a performance stage. We had to go step by step, learning to let people watch us go through this process. One of the baselines of this work is that it’s non-judgmental, and if you go into performance mode, suddenly the question is there: am I good? Am I not? What is happening? To shut that up and still stay connected with your inner self is really much harder. I’m not saying that we are there all the time, we shift in and out. Which also doesn’t mean we aren’t present or aware, we might just not be quite so deep inside ourselves. It helps the basic practice to close the eyes and allow the outside to vanish.

AS Yes, that’s why it seems to me that it requires courage to be so transparent with an audience. But then, as you’re saying, you also require a kind of faithfulness, a discipline to stay connected to something subtle when you have people all around you bringing different projections to the space.

SW Yes.

AS Have you noticed a personal evolution in the dancers as you’ve invited them again and again into these practices?

SW Absolutely, and not only in terms of a specific form. That’s really what we’re trying to avoid. We’re trying to let things pour forth and find a new form every time. But the ability to enter in, the ability to connect, the ability to create these spaces together — all this we get better at the more we practice.

You know, there are different levels going on. There is a body sensation that you can follow. There is imagination that you can embody. There is very strong emotional material that can come up, like memories. And then it can shift into connecting with the others and sharing that experience, and something new happens. You are still in your experience, but you’re connecting with another universe, and the two are communicating. So that is also very fascinating. All this is happening. It goes in and out and you lose it and you have it. When you can enter into your inner self, your inner imagination and fantasy, it’s such a source. You really end up wondering where these things came up from.

AS It’s like a dream. A daytime dream that then you dance.

SW Absolutely, yes.

AS I’ll ask one more question in closing. In this journey of applying deep listening, have any new questions been born for you?

SW All the time. Like really, all the time. This is why we have just kept unfolding this, because the practice has so much discovery in it in terms of what is happening to your mind. It’s an awareness practice. You can also say it’s an embodied meditation. With the discovery of the mind, there are endless questions. So we always get together after the practice and talk about what is happening. We try to formulate exercises. The practice evolves and grows. We have developed so many new things that I’m also trying to teach to other dancers so that we can broaden the group that can share in this.

Pauline really helped us open up our awareness, to heighten our sensitivity in improvising together. Her idea of focal and global attention is also very useful, focusing on something very small and then focussing on the all. I want my dancers to really feel where they are. But I also want them to have a sense of where everybody else is. And that’s a challenge. You have to really open up and see what you can catch — where are the others? And when you switch spaces you also immediately enter into another world.

AS If we could visualize what’s happening to your attention as you dance and move through the performance, it would be astonishing I think. It’s your attention that is becoming very sensitive and taking these different shapes.

SW And that is the dialogue.