In C

We’re in luck because it’s a very rare occasion to be able to enjoy Sasha Waltz’s work in Madrid. The first time her work was performed here was in 2011 with the mystical piece Körper at a previous Festival de Otoño and two more times at Teatro Real in 2016 and 2022 in its more majestic setting. Their production is enormous and diverse in formats and themes and has come a very long way since the 1990s, just as Berlin was finding her identity after the world-changing event of the fall of the Berlin Wall. She founded her company Sasha Waltz & Guests, together with Jochen Sandig in Berlin. Since then, Sasha Waltz & Guests has become a publicly funded cultural institution that contains a contagious spirit of ingenuity, creativity, and bonding. Sasha Waltz is a woman who never works alone (hence why she has included “& Guests” in the company name), but always creates beautiful partnerships in the pursuit of creating amazing performance art.

In C is an experimental, constantly evolving process that once again reconceives and refines Sasha Waltz & Guests’ long-standing approach as well as the dialogue between dance, music, and space, both digitally and in real life. This is their first piece that incorporates the digital arts and has its roots set in the times of COVID-19 restrictions and lockdowns. Waltz asked herself the question: How can the theatre be reinvented in the digital era? Having regained freedom after the pandemic, the piece ended up being transformative, colourful, and luminous. The question remains as to whether the performing arts admit any kind of renewal encapsulated on a screen, contravening their essence.

Terry Riley’s In C (1964) forms the work’s musical foundation, an open composition that was revolutionary at the time and is generally considered the first piece of minimalist music. Based on this milestone of music history, Sasha Waltz and her dancers developed choreographic material that follows a similarly variable structure and is deliberately designed not to be a finished stage piece. In C is made up of 53 cells and can be played by any combination of instruments and voices. Riley created a truly free composition. It welcomes performers from a vast range of practices and traditions, from classical to rock to jazz to non-Western due to its ability to multiple musical interpretations. Every performance is a unique expression of musical freedom. It is like the freedom of the individual, which ends when it harms another member of the group. As Sasha Waltz points out, it is about being an individual in the group, not an individual without a tribe. It is a metaphor for democracy. The result is an experimental system of fifty-three movement phrases for a structured improvisation with clear rules and laws. The length of the piece remains variable, as does the number of musicians and dancers. The result is as hypnotic as the music itself, a kind of trance into which one dives, enjoying these colourful pieces moving on a bare stage.

The movement is also a search for meaning and answers: How to open the arts up to everyone for free participation? How do we find each other in our communities? How much space do you take up and how much do you give to the people around you? How can you follow others and, at the same time, generate new momentum? How do you cede and lead at the same time? How do you enjoy freedom without having a negative impact on others? The glorious mania of asking questions should never end, just as In C is not a piece that has an end but is presented as a work in progress. It is an improvisation subject to certain rules, a dynamic and modular system that aspires in the future to be danced by professionals and amateurs, by young and old, indoors, and outdoors. Sasha Waltz states: “[It is] a tool for dancing together and bridging generations, art forms, dance styles, social classes or national boundaries.” Sasha Waltz’ interdisciplinary Dialoge projects, which first showcased in Berlin in 1993, are powerfully creative fields for her work. These encounters between visual artists, musicians and dancers are celebrating the inspiring moment of creation - the free spirit of improvisation and the pure delight of experimentation. Sasha Waltz has dialogued with many guests and created many pieces. The short but very intensive encounters between musicians, artists, dancers, and choreographers take place in very specific places and display her interactions with theatre, with cinema, with opera, with museums, with children, with streets, with the disadvantaged, with foreigners, with the past, with the present and with the future. We are in luck, because we can be part of a continuous dialogue that takes the Festival de Otoño to new heights.