“DANCE” in Berlin

The Great Fatigue

**On Sasha Waltz’s 100th performance of Dido & Aeneas at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin**

Opinion by Klaus Dilger

It is one of the more peculiar myths of the German dance and opera circuit that Sasha Waltz’s Dido & Aeneas is regarded as an “iconic” fusion of Purcell and contemporary dance — a work said to have established new standards. Yet anyone watching the production today sees above all this: the spectacular lack of invention in a choreography that hides behind grand images.

The oft-repeated claims — the “breathless bodies,” the “dissolution of boundaries between opera and dance,” the “archaic visual language” — have long become worn-out clichés that crumble under closer scrutiny. Waltz stages atmospheres, not necessities; she arranges bodies, but she does not think choreographically. The movement vocabulary is caught in decorative self-repetition: waves, impulses, formations — polished surfaces without inner development. Even the magnificent possibilities offered by the vast water basin in the opening scene remain largely unused; beyond a few suggested ballet exercises and various “dives,” Waltz has no real choreographic idea for it.

That this pictorial framework was so often mistaken for artistic depth has much to do with its monumentality and very little to do with choreographic substance. The images overwhelm — and in doing so, conceal the conceptual emptiness behind them.

DidoAenaeas_Sasha-Waltz©Sebastian-Bolesch

A production that smothers Purcell rather than touching him

Waltz’s Dido & Aeneas is less an engagement with Purcell than an aesthetic filter that turns the music into a continuous emotional wash. Where the score demands clarity, the staging produces atmosphere; where it offers dramatic force, Waltz supplies visual sedation verging on soporific monotony. Where Tate’s libretto calls for precision and concision, Waltz and dramaturge Jochen Sandig inflate it into empty discursiveness.

The much-vaunted “integration of singers and dancers” ultimately results in an oddly parallel coexistence: the bodies illustrate rather than articulate; they embellish rather than sharpen. Dance becomes a decorative ornament to the music — and in doing so loses all friction, all necessity.

A performance that shies away from risk

Dido & Aeneas is a work about upheaval, choice, and the impossibility of happiness. Waltz, however, opts for the smooth surface: beauty without abyss. Her choreography avoids conflict — and thereby avoids precisely what defines dance as a movement of thought.

The result is a work that seeks only to please itself, a proposition that never risks becoming one.

The sorrowful climax

Anyone who has seen Clémentine Deluy in Pina Bausch’s Café Müller — that quivering, fragile being within Purcell’s sonic space — must have felt their heart break to see the same dancer here subjected to banal gestures, mechanical group dynamics, and perpetual atmospheric haze. The contrast could hardly have been more brutal: there, Bausch’s existential precision, choreographic thinking etched in lines of pain; here, the ornamental filling of a space that has nothing to say.

Conclusion

This Dido & Aeneas is not the visionary Gesamtkunstwerk for which Sasha Waltz was celebrated for years. It is an aesthetic museum piece: grand, gleaming, hollow. The dance stands still precisely where it ought to begin. And the images are unable to conceal what is choreographically absent.
Instead of choreographic truth, the audience in the sold-out Staatsoper Unter den Linden encounters above all one sensation: the great fatigue that sets in when genuine artistic precision is replaced with visual spectacle.