Kreatur is about the human body. Isolated or attached to a community, it becomes distorted under pressure. The show’s based on the ideas of taking or losing power, of thinking about otherness or looking at oneself, of loving or hating oneself. And in visiting a former Stasi prison in Berlin, Sasha Waltz and her dancers found memorial and sensitive points of reference to work on the inhuman confinement that forced people to stay forever upright and awake. The choreographer alludes to a world in which physical and physiological constrictions force us to stay in movement. The body becomes the symbol of a struggle, caught as in a vice between concrete sensations of imprisonment and feelings of a freedom still to experience. To find our respective parts of light and darkness, she wanted to work with great artists to design the costumes, the space and its reflections, the metallic and concrete sounds of the show… All of it comes together to create a minimalist world in black and white, in which only the skin, the living, create colour, and where the creatures we see are images from a potential future, at once familiar and unknown.
Sasha Waltz
After training as a dancer in Amsterdam and New York, Sasha Waltz founded the company Sasha Waltz & Guests. In 1996, she inaugurated her production centre for theatre and modern dance, Sophiensaele, with the show Allee der Kosmonauten. She was also a member of the artistic direction of the Schaubühne from 1999 to 2004. That same year, she created her first opera, Dido & Aeneas. Sasha Waltz’s dance is at once carnal and abstract, and she conceives the scenography of her shows as an aesthetic challenge. She has received many European awards as ambassador for the arts, and in 2019 she will become co-director of the Staatsballett Berlin with Johannes Öhman. At the Festival d’Avignon, Sasha Waltz has already presented Na Zemlje et Zweiland in 1999, noBody in the Cour d’honneur of the Palais des papes in 2002, Impromptus in 2004, and Dialoge 20-13 in 2013 as part of the programme Des artistes un jour at the Opéra Grand Avignon.
With Liza Alpízar Aguilar, Jirí Bartovanec, Davide Camplani,
Clémentine Deluy, Peggy Grelat-Dupont, Hwanhee Hwang,
Annapaola Leso, Nicola Mascia, Thusnelda Mercy,
Virgis Puodziunas, Zaratiana Randrianantenaina,
Yael Schnell, Corey Scott-Gilbert, Claudia de Serpa Soares
Choreography Sasha Waltz
Artistic collaboration Davide Di Pretoro
Costumes Iris van Herpen
Lights Urs Schönebaum
Sound Soundwalk Collective
Dramaturgy Jochen Sandig