We started exploring a while back the various collaborations between fashion designers and dance companies. The trend is not just continuing, but it is becoming a modern tradition.
After creating in 2013 the costumes for choreographer Benjamin Millepied's "Neverwhere" for the New York City Ballet and working again last year with Millepied on his ballet "Clear, Loud, Bright, Forward" for the Opéra de Paris, Dutch fashion designer Iris Van Herpen recently designed the costumes for "Kreatur", a performance by internationally renowned, Karlsruhe-born choreographer Sasha Waltz.
Premiered at Berlin's Radialsystem V in June, the piece - with music by the Soundwalk Collective, a band famous for their work exploring themes like anthropology, ethnography, psycho-geography and the observation of nature in their performances and concept albums, and lighting design by Urs Schönebaum, better known for theatre and opera productions, exhibitions and installations - is currently on during the 29th international festival Tanz im August in Berlin.
In "Kreatur" Waltz and and 14 dancers explore aspects of human existence and social reality: through gentle moves or sudden violent explosions they mark the relationship with the space surrounding them, tackling key life dichotomies such as power/powerlessness, dominance/weakness, freedom/control, community/isolation, social interactions/social violence, democracy/oppression.
The performance is therefore characterised by a series of liminal themes mirrored in the costumes: at times the dancers move in light cotton candy-like ethereal white cocoons; in other cases their bodies are transformed, morphed and distorted by screens or they struggle in the arms of anonymous nightmarish figures sprouting long and dangerous spikes from their bodies.
The costumes feature Van Herpen's trademark semantic codes: the cocoons protecting the dancers' bodies, representing light balls of energy, remind of her 3D printed bubble-shaped garments; the screens distorting the dancers' bodies, call to mind the seventeen optical light screens (OLF) that duplicated and morphed the models' image on Van Herpen's A/W 16 runway in a mesmerisingly alienating way.
The laser cut costumes revealing the dancers bodies evoke instead the designs from the S/S 17 collection and the creations from "Aeriform" with their wave-like patterns and the interplay between shadow and light.
The performance works rather well mainly because both Van Herpen and Waltz could be considered as multidisciplinary artists: the former moves indeed quite well between fashion, science and technology, while Waltz's choreographies have always been suspended between dance and other art forms and the choreographer often collaborated with other artists.
In this case fashion interacts with the dancers, in the same way as in previous performances artworks were turned into the co-protagonists of the piece: dance aficionados may remember how in her large-scale "Wolke" (Cloud; from "noBody", 2002), part of the exhibition "Sasha Waltz - Installations Objects Performances" (at the Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany, 2013), a dancer in a white dress seemed to be engulfed by an inflatable structure that hugged, lulled and swallowed her.
In that performance the cube occupied the space, mutating its function with its volume and becoming a new element in the same way as the water basin became one of the protagonists in "Dido & Aeneas" offering the dancers an innovative space within a space in which they could move, swim and dance.
In "Kreatur", a piece set at the boundaries between dance, image, fashion and social comment, the costumes offer the chance to dancers to alter their personal spaces, they are indeed to be interpreted as armours, cocoons, shells or wombs that protect them and help them surviving their struggles, but also as alien structures that alter and reconfigure their body movements.
Sasha Waltz will be at Berlin's Tanz im August with "Kreatur" and with another performance entitled "Women" (world premiere on 30th August at the St. Elisabeth-Kirche), about women exploring rituals of femininity.
Dance and fashion fans who are going to miss "Kreatur" in Berlin (tonight at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Schaperstraße 24), can still catch up with it during the European tour - the performance will indeed be heading to Barcelona and Rome in September, Lisbon in October and Dijon and Brussels in January and February next year, two performances that will mark the 25th anniversary of the company. For further information about dates and tours you can check out the calendar page on Sasha Waltz's site.
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