Sasha Waltz was born on March 8, 1963 in Karlsruhe. At the age of five he took his first dance lessons with Waltraud Kornhas, a student of Mary Wigman. During 1983-1986 he studied at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, followed by a year of internship in New York. He collaborated with visual major artists, musicians and choreographers, including Frans Poelstra, Mark Tompkins and David Zambrano. In 1993 he founded his own company - Sasha Waltz and Guests, together with Jochen Sandig, together with which he opened a space for experimental theatre and dance in central Berlin - Sophiensæle. Here he created the plays - Allee der Kosmonauten (1996), Zweiland (1997) and Na Zemlje (1998). In 1999 she was appointed, alongside Thomas Ostermeier, Jens Hillje and Jochen Sandig artistic director with Schaubühne . She created Körper (2000), and after that S (2000), Nobody (2002), insideout (2003), Impromptus (2004) and Gezeiten (2005).
After completing her five-year mandate, she revitalized the company together with which she continued her projects and world tours.
In no Body (2002), panic is the drive for the action speeding up in a space growing narrower and narrower. Dancers run trying to save themselves, to go beyond the limits of a suffocating area. In Sasha Waltzs performances, the body is shrunk by successive threats which become within the construction both physical and mental barriers, imaginary or actual fences. Waltz radicalizes panic and creates installations starting from one theme.
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The dancers suddenly intersect with each other, fall, become crutches for each other, and then a huge balloon covers the stage like a light bubble. The body of a woman lies on the material in motion. The area in itself gets motion capacities that are induced on the body. A motive related dependency is set between body and space, each compelling a movement formula onto the other. Reference to space involves internalizing it, corporalizing the tension in it. Next to the bubble, a fragile absorbing object, bodies become fluid, lose density and borrow the nature of the space centre of mass. A woman's body, eyes closed, is carried on the arms of two dancers. The head of a man lying on the floor is covered with strips of a red t-shirt. The bodies of the dancers lie on the floor, waiting for an impending end.
In Improptus, she relies on the extreme force of improvisation, creating modules of spontaneity, axes of dispersed motion. From the perspective of freedom of expression, of the lack of a logical cause and effect linear-narrative, Imprompus is the most radical play of the choreographer. On music by Franz Schubert, seven dancers abstract their movements interrupted by handling objects. The dancers ran back and forth, gather in symbolic circles, jump, and perform acrobatic duets form in which athletics and stylised gestures are in counterpoint.
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In Dialogue 06, Sasha Waltz articulates a system of organic musical relations between the body and the instruments activating it. The juxtaposition of various means of expression: dance, music, and text, in different locations, give the performance a dimension of installation which places attention in multiple points. For Waltz, the installation is the favourite manner of structuring the choreographic material, allowing her to build her plays in layers and redefine the fundamental principles of contemporary perception.
Sasha Waltz works with typologies of correspondences that, although performance frame involves a collage of seemingly disparate sequences, are found in a common narrative. Sounds and movements are read in the mirror. The drum has a corresponding rhythm in touching a knurled bar. Uttering figures and the on score played on a violin entail a system of textual-musical interference working only in associations. Sasha Waltz invents spaces of bodily-acoustic broadcasting that require such both a fragmented analysis, as well as a unitary one. Each piece of the body and music is found, actually, in the unity of all the bodies inserts that the choreographer employs.
On high heels, a man and a woman walk, very slowly, on rocks. The slowness of their advance is blown up, in a different room, by the quick confrontation between another man and another woman who walk barefoot, embracing and repeatedly rejecting each other. The body of the women in high heels is covered top to bottom in stones, a cruel and symbolic-poetic image of the burial of a still living body, of the death biting out of life. Nothing visible remains of the body, except for the hardly visible movement of rocks, slightly lifted in the rhythm of breathing.
