After the modern pap at Berlin Gallery Weekend, it was high time for high art to balance the diet. Sasha Waltz’s interpretation of Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas has been in occasional circulation for a number of years now. “Together with her ensemble dancers and musicians, choristers and soloists Sasha Waltz developed the opera »Dido and Aeneas«. The complex emotions of Purcell’s opera form the thematic starting point of her choreographic work. Waltz focuses on the two main characters of the plot – the Carthaginian queen Dido and Aeneas who escaped from Troy – and their tragic love story that ends with the death of Dido.”
Berlin’s most visible dance company worked with the Berlin Academy of Ancient Music and the Berlin Vocalconsort, both specialists in baroque music to realise this production. Die hard opera fans might pick at the the staging of the work as an opera, and will even struggle to follow the narrative – but Waltz’s contemporary take on Purcell’s baroque composition talks to an audience that’s geared towards dance theatre. So let go of the story, and the sound and sink into a rather incoherent but visually saturated feast.
More information and tickets here at Staatsoper im Schiller Theater, Berlin. Tonight – 15th and 17th May.
