Princess of ‘Tides’

The city has welcomed an abundance of European dance this fall, giving us all a chance to experience a sampling of the extensive contemporary dance scene over there. Since the season began, we’ve been able to see companies from France, Belgium and Romania, and now the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival is once again hosting one of Germany’s most important troupes, Sasha Waltz & Guests, performing 2005 work Gezeiten (Tides).

Be prepared for a visceral, unsettling experience. While it opens with relative calm—dancers in varied street clothes gradually assembling and slowly exploring cantilevered lifts as selections from Bach’s cello suites are performed—it soon moves into dire and desperate territory. The enclosed room with distressed walls may first seem to be a refuge where the 16 dancers escape something unknowable taking place, but before long, horror and destruction invade the space, and Gezeiten explores the sequence of reactions with which this community copes.

“The initial impetus was to comment on our situation of crisis and catastrophe, “ Waltz says shortly after arriving in town from Berlin, where her troupe is based. “We participate through the media so much with everything that happens around the world—how do we deal with it? How can we comment on it?” She says she began to shape a work to explore “how we deal with the different crises that we face as a society [and] as an individual and how we work with the trauma afterwards.”

As she was preparing to confront these questions and issues, Waltz’s own family found itself in its own dire circumstances during a trip to Corsica. The village where they were staying was threatened by a fire, essentially trapping them for two days. “It was quite traumatizing. It’s a village on a mountain, and fire was coming up from the valley, and it encircled the whole village. We could not move anywhere.”

Waltz describes Gezeiten as being “in three blocks. It has a very abstract side, and a very theatrical part, and it’s kind of surrealistic.” The dancers are called upon to be fearless, even reckless, and at times use their voices as well as their bodies. “I feel that all the parts are supporting each other, to make the intensity also the moment of fear, and claustrophobia. To emphasize that, somehow the voice was important for the situation of miscommunication.”

The work has toured steadily, most recently to Korea, in the five years since its creation, although its expansive scope can’t make that easy. “It’s huge, and it’s intricate” Waltz acknowledges. “I think it’s the piece with the most props I’ve ever done.”

Gezeiten was the last work Waltz made while she and Jochen Sandig (with whom she co-founded her company in 1993) were at the Schaubuhne am Lehniner Platz, a leading Berlin experimental theater. While in residence there, her company had access to all the resources of the theater. “I would say it was a turning point. On one side, it was saying goodbye to the Schaubuhne, still using all the possibilities. I still used all the facilities, and I started to work with a new group of dancers. I had some of my old dancers, but I wanted to rejuvenate the company, so there are also a lot of younger dancers in the piece. So it’s very much a transition piece.”

Both of the earlier Waltz works seen at BAM—Krper in 2002 and Impromptus in 2005—were created during her Shaubuhne period. New Yorkers have yet to see what she has been up to since moving on, including several choreographic operas and, most recently, a world premiere by Pascal Dusapin in Paris last month. “My work has gotten more involved with research into the musical world, because I started to work in opera, and more and more with orchestras. So music has pushed itself more into the foreground,” she says. Gezeiten’s score combines the Bach music (performed live) with a sound score by Jonathan Bepler.

Since 2006, Waltz and the company (a dozen permanent dancers, plus numerous guests according to the requirements of each project) have been based at Radialsystem V, a former water pumping station that she and Sandig have transformed into a center for contemporary music, visual arts and political conferences, as well as dance. Her work has branched out in new directions since the move there, but New Yorkers will just have to wait for a future visit to experience those.

Gezeiten

Nov. 3,5,6, BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, 30 Lafayette Ave. (at Ashland Pl.), Brooklyn, 718-636-4100; 7:30, $20 & up.