Niannian Zhou and the rest of Sasha Waltz and Guests will perform CONTINU at BAM December 4-5 (photo by Sebastian Bolesch)
NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
December 4-5, $25-$75
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.sashawaltz.de/en
“I decided to call my music ‘organized sound’ and myself, not a musician, but a ‘worker in rhythms, frequencies and intensities,’” French composer Edgard Varèse once noted. “Indeed, to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise. But after all what is music but organized noises? And a composer, like all artists, is an organizer of disparate elements.” He could just as well have been talking about the work of German choreographer Sasha Waltz, whose Continu is centered around Varèse’s 1927 orchestral piece, Arcana. Waltz is also “an organizer of disparate elements”; she calls her company Sasha Waltz and Guests to incorporate an ever-growing list of collaborators in music, dance, the visual arts, and other disciplines. Waltz is back at BAM with Continu, which has a too-short two-performance run at the Howard Gilman Opera House on December 4 and 5; she was previously at BAM with Körper (Bodies) in 2002, Impromptus in 2005, and the mesmerizing, metaphysical triptych Gezeiten (Tides) in 2010. Continu is a triptych as well, consisting of three sections that were born out of site-specific commissions she created for the 2009 inaugurations of David Chipperfield’s Neues Museum in Berlin and Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI in Rome. In Continu, more than twenty dancers run energetically around the stage, with an occasional couple and individual breaking away from the pack to fight for their own identity. Varèse’s Arcana is bookended by works from Iannis Xenakis (the percussion solo “Rebonds B” and “Concret PH”), Claude Vivier (“Zipangu for 13 Strings”), and Mozart (in addition to snippets of Varèse’s “Ionisation” and “Hyperprism”) as Bernd Skodzig’s costumes go from black to white. The consolidation of a decade’s work, Continu, a dance-theater dialogue between space and bodies, order and chaos, “original violence” and peace, involving archaic choreography, gets its name from how it continued to develop over the years, culminating in a final version that premiered in 2011 in Salzburg. Waltz’s work is always overflowing with wonderful surprises, so don’t miss this all-too-rare opportunity to see her company, once again back in Brooklyn.