Dina Goder. Given me a body

I have been given a body - what should I do with it?
German choreographer Sasha Waltz showed her “Bodies” to the Moscow public

Dina Goder

Publication date: March 26, 2004

From the beginning - a few words about the history of the issue. Several years ago, one of the main theaters in Germany - the state-owned " Schaubühne ", formerly headed by the general of the psychological theater Peter Stein - was given over to the power of two very young people who had become famous only recently. These were theater director Thomas Ostermeier and choreographer Sasha Waltz. Both new artistic directors of the reputable Schaubühne were considered avant-garde artists who loved to scandalize the public. In European theater circles, this decision was perceived as revolutionary, but it quickly became clear that the calculation was correct: the theater again began to gain points in the opinion of sophisticated theatergoers and receive invitations from prestigious festivals. Sasha Waltz, who was soon dubbed the heir of the great Pina Bausch , was known in Russia even before that: she came with productions, and in 1998, with Russian dancers - participants in Gennady Abramov's "Expressive Plastic Class" - she even made the play "On Earth".

So, the first performance that Waltz staged when she entered her new position was “Bodies”, which seemed to be a manifesto of the new direction of “Schaubühne”. This was in 2000. “Bodies” became the first part of the Korper/S/noBody trilogy, dedicated successively to the Body, Sex and Soul. The last part of the trilogy, made in 2002 by order of the Avignon Festival and danced in the open air in the Court of Honor of the Papal Palace, came to St. Petersburg not long ago. The first part, which at one time caused a stir at the Edinburgh Festival and won the Grand Prix at the BITEF festival, has only now arrived in Moscow, thanks to the Berlin Days in Moscow.

Waltz speaks of an alienated body, a body beyond the control of man and even hostile to him. Reflection on the topic “my body is not me” is, of course, not new and has been sufficiently discussed not only in academic studies. Even Grishkovets had a fragment about this in “Simultaneously”: “I lay down on my right side, and my right nostril was blocked in my nose, and then I turned on my left side - my right nostril was released, but my left was blocked. This means that something is flowing inside me, Something is happening in me, some kind of communicating vessels. And I have no control over it, I can’t manage it."... And so on. Everyone is shocked and amazed anew: “ A body has been given to me - what should I do with it , so united and so mine?”

Some Waltz dancers appear on stage in black clerk costumes, while others only wear trousers, panties, or are completely naked. But there is no sensuality in this nakedness - it is cold and dispassionate, it represents itself as a product in a window or an object in an anatomical theater. People constantly come to the fore to talk about themselves (in the morning I wake up, go brush my teeth, then go to the kitchen...) or about their organs (my stomach, liver, etc.), while they themselves persistently point their fingers at some then completely different places, brushing your teeth at the level of the stomach or finding the liver in the forehead. At the end of indifferent descriptions - suddenly, desperately: “Do you think I have cancer?”

Two naked girls paint each other's internal organs with red paint and stick huge tags on them with prices in euros. The prices are not low. There are a lot of people on stage, sometimes everyone suddenly starts moving fussily and saying something. There's something going on in every corner. In the depths, one after another, the girls are lifted on outstretched arms - the inscriptions on the board light up: “Claudia - 49 kg.” The sluggishly indifferent naked body of a man dangles in the hands of a jacket clerk, who “squeezes” him and tilts him, as if removing a cork from his sides and knees: streams of water pour directly onto the floor. Other clerks quickly wipe the floor, busily placing a bucket under the stream. "Something flows inside me..."

Funniest episode: "Centaurs". Incredible creatures come out: the torso is a woman and a man, and below the waist, each has a man’s butt and legs, turned “knees back,” and something like a black train stretches behind their back. So they walk in front of each other, bow, sit down, and the woman, reclining, flirts languidly, dangling her “legs.” Moreover, both legs have a kind of life of their own, they do not always obey and force themselves to be persuaded (at this moment people with bodily problems, disabled people come to mind, for whom every movement is accompanied by habitual difficulties, in our opinion insurmountable). And at some point the black plume falls differently, and the “centaurs” become creatures with two torsos connected in the center, like a playing card. And then, by the same miracle, in the shapeshifter, the female torso is replaced by a male one, and the “centaur”, having thrown off the old sex, like used skin, is removed with dignity. That is, my gender is also not me, but something external.

What is the human body, Waltz is trying to understand, if not just a case for an expensive liver? Is it different from the bodies of other animals, fish, insects? In the darkness behind the glass, naked people slowly crawl into a brightly lit aquarium. They crawl from the sides, from above, from below, with their “paws” unnaturally turned out, like some kind of lazy underwater living creature stretching towards the light, like sleepy beetles in a jar. They slowly swarm, crawling under each other, “floating” up and spreading out on the glass - it’s beautiful and disgusting, and then just as gradually they creep away. Here are the cheerful “clerks” dragging naked people around the stage like puppies, grabbing them by the folds of skin on their backs. It turns out that this is possible.

There is no music in the play - there are noises and creaks, the screeching of mechanisms and the sounds of dripping water. Naked bodies become parts of machines - they are built in rows and fall apart, like the converging and diverging teeth of a machine, rotated by gears, folded into neat stacks, like finished products, like bags of human skin. Emotionless, but cheerfully turning bodies lie in lines (a familiar art critic admiringly recalled the famous contemporary artist who laid out inscriptions in public squares using naked bodies). Is the body a means, a building material?

To a noise similar to the muffled hum of a factory and the sound of the heart, amplified by medical equipment, people tirelessly and harmoniously lie down and get up, unanimously change positions and lie down again, then discord begins, as if, suffocated, the whole body is rushing nervously: people are pounding in the black wall, and from under their hands the chalk lines of a cardiogram run. Maybe it’s the other way around, even though my body is not me, but every organ in my body has its own self, its own desires and character?

I'm afraid that it is completely impossible to describe this performance in words. It draws on as if remaining cold. He's not trying to win anyone over, but the energy of his tragic metaphors of death and human helplessness is breathtaking. Its intellectual tension is much higher than that of most “verbal” representations. Here I probably won’t even find any analogy.

Do you know what I somehow remembered after the performance? Recent performances of the former St. Petersburg, and now German group "Tree", in which I, with tenacity worthy of better use, searched for at least some kind of theatrical meaningfulness. Did not find. Against the background of the amateur plasticity of “Tree,” which has no other purpose than boastful self-demonstration, it became especially clear what Sasha Waltz’s movement, full of meanings, is worth. However, the performances of the “new Pina Bausch” do not need advantageous comparisons - they are already good. I just want to see the rest.