Sasha Waltz & Guests: Travelogue I -Twenty to eight

'San Francisco International Arts Festival
May 27, 2009
Cowell Theater, Fort Mason, SF
http://www.sfiaf.org/

S

What a show! Here's the recipe for an event that take place in the
'kitchen." Take a large helping of silent movies, melodrama and grand
guignol (theater to delight and chill the audience), add a large
quantity of contemporary post-modern acrobatic and effective dance
technique marvelously performed and a highly skilled cast of five, mix
well with a set that looks simple - table, chairs, two doors, a window,
a fridge, striped walls climbed by dancer Davide Campiani, and a
pull-down bed for dancer Edivaldo Ernesto…and Voila! You have Sasha
Waltz & Guests at the SF International Arts Festival.

It was certainly the funniest, well-executed dance/theater/mime work
seen here since SF Performances brought Inbal Pinto to YBCA. This is
more complex, more 'dancistic', combining dramatic satire on daily
life, Pinteresque irony, sexual aggression and desperation and just
plan fun
Waltz says, "The simple events of daily life with comic turning points
build the contrast to the dramatic and emotionally loaded parts. I
concentrate on detail and the subtlety of gestures and action to create
an intricate and rhythmic picture of our time."

After a short film interlude, (Waltz: "This piece started our passion
for movies and their stars,") we meet dancer Mamajeang Kim talking on
the phone in Korean, a perfectly ordinary daily life moment. After a
fairly conventional dinner scene, the race goes into high gear; there
is a door slamming dance between Kim and Florencia Lamarca; Lamarca
dances a leg-twining sexy tango with Ernesto (probably the hit of the
show); a chicken is grabbed from the fridge by Campiani and Yael
Schnell displays various stages of teen-age isolation, including a
bottle jumping exercise. One event follows another so fast, the
audience can hardly finish ingesting what has happened when they're
besieged with the next.

Sasha Waltz has been seen in San Francisco and Berkeley in previous
performances, but none has been so effective as this at Cowell Theater.
She works best in the small space Cowell provides and with this
extraordinary cast. She is one of the directors of Berlin's Schaubühne
Theater, has produced the opera and most recently music-theater, namely
Medea and
Romeo et Juliette. Although Travelogue I - Twenty to eight was
produced first in 1993, Waltz' theater sense seems sharper in this
production here than
in previous Bay Area offerings. Her program note includes a poem
entitled "The Kitchen" as well as the following: "Cliché and
stereotype transform the characters into caricatures of themselves. The
music is a driving force in the creation of my pieces. For Travelogue,
the music is an original composition by Tristan Honsinger."

For this viewer, the driving force is the concentration and detail of
kinetic energy and the dramatic projection of the dancers: Campiani,
Ernesto, Kim, Schnell and Lamarca. Thank you, Andrew Wood for the SF
International Arts Festival, the successful negotiation of visas for
all and especially for Sasha Waltz & Guests.

Joanna G.Harris