BERLIN.- “I started in the deep lockdown,” said German choreographer Sasha Waltz. “Everything was closed. And it was in the winter. It was gray, and everybody was depressed. And we said, we have to keep working. We cannot go on like this.”

Waltz, 59, was talking about “In C,” a dance she choreographed during the pandemic with her Berlin troupe, Sasha Waltz and Guests. The hourlong work, set to Terry Riley’s 1964 composition — a milestone of minimal music — will be performed Thursday through Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Waltz and company performed frequently before the pandemic.

In a recent interview before a performance of “In C” in Berlin, Waltz said she was drawn to the fundamentally nonhierarchical structure of Riley’s score, in which an unspecified number of musicians perform 53 short musical fragments against a pulsing C note. “It’s very simple, and it has an incredible freedom for the musicians,” she said. “There are all these different constellations that happen differently every time, so it has an incredible variety and openness.”

It was important, she said, to find a way to reflect that openness in her dance. She worked out the choreography by translating Riley’s musical fragments into 53 different sets of what she called movement figures. They form not so much a choreographic score as a blueprint for how to perform the piece. The result is choreographed improvisation that gives the dancers tremendous freedom. “There are all these different constellations that happen in performance,” Waltz said. “Every day it’s different.”

Waltz, who worked in New York in the 1980s and whose postmodern approach to Tanztheater has roots both in German expressionist and postwar American dance, is often seen as a successor to Pina Bausch, the great German choreographer who died in 2009. But Waltz said she thought her work was “closer to the American line than to Tanztheater, even though I have this theatrical mix.” Still, she understands the comparison to Bausch. “There is this, let’s say, heritage somehow,” she said, “but I don’t feel that my language actually relates so much to her.”

Instead, Waltz cites Judson Dance Theater and Trisha Brown as major influences. “Trisha’s work had a very strong impact on me as a young dancer,” she said, especially how Brown, “in her idiosyncratic movement,” found “a way to use improvisation and then also to set it.”

Berlin was hardly a mecca for modern dance when Waltz moved here on an artist’s grant in 1992, but the newly reunified city provided fertile creative ground for her ambitious and wide-ranging artistic experiments. “It was such an incredible energy,” she said. The influx of young, creative people from all over the world and the abundance of cheap space — for living, performing, working — helped make Berlin the ideal place for Waltz, a native of Karlsruhe, in southern Germany, to establish her career.

“It was a very fruitful time, but also wild because there was not really any organizational control,” she said. “There was no state money. Everything was kind of self-motivated, which was very alive and very creative.”

Much of that wild, anarchic artistic energy was short-lived, but Waltz has been a rare artistic bulwark in the city since she arrived here.

“She has been working continually, often on a large scale, since the ’90s,” said Gabriele Brandstetter, a professor of theater and dance studies at Freie Universität Berlin and currently a visiting professor at New York University. “Generally speaking, it’s because of the immense broadness, openness and flexibility in her choreographic work. She has a sense of the question of how to move and change in a constantly changing or transforming world.”

In addition to her company, which she founded in 1993 with Jochen Sandig, her husband and artistic collaborator, she has established two important performing arts spaces in Berlin, Sophiensaele and Radialsystem, where we met for our interview. She has also held leadership positions at the Schaubühne, one of Berlin’s main theaters, and more recently at the Berlin Staatsballett, where the announcement that she would replace Nacho Duato in 2016 was heavily criticized as politically, rather than artistically, motivated. More than 5,000 people, including dancers from the Staatsballett, signed a petition to protest the appointment of a modern dance practitioner to lead a classical ballet company.

Waltz’s tenure as half of the artistic directorship of the Staatsballett ended suddenly in early 2020, when her co-director, Johannes Ohman, the former director of the Royal Swedish Ballet, returned to Stockholm.

“We had the dream to bridge the contemporary and the classical and to also transform the institution,” Waltz said. “I think the institution is not ready for a true contemporary vision.”

A few months later the pandemic hit, and all her company’s performances, including plans to go on tour, were canceled. Away from the studio and physically cut off from her troupe, Waltz said she felt the urge to work and provide her dancers with artistic stimulus. “We needed to be creative because otherwise it was so depressing,” she said.




It was Sandig who proposed “In C” as a score that might be a good fit, both on a formal level and philosophically, for life during the pandemic. Waltz’s troupe had been dispersed, with dancers returning to their home countries, including Greece, Israel and Portugal. To reach these far-flung performers, Waltz put together video tutorials to teach them the choreography.

In the first tutorial, “Shoulder,” Cuban dancer Joel Suárez Gómez explains how to execute an eight-bar phrase by rolling his right shoulder back and touching it to his chin. At the start of “In C,” dancers twitch their way in unison through “Shoulder,” which corresponds to Riley’s first musical figure, before, one by one, breaking off into different movements as further melodic fragments emerge.

“It’s very, very challenging, because it’s an ongoing beat and the dancers never stop,” Waltz said. “The choices are happening in the moment, so for me, it’s kind of the marriage between a choreography and an improvisation.”

“It really happens in front of your eyes,” she added.

Because of pandemic restrictions, the “In C” premiere, in March 2021, was performed to a prerecorded soundtrack, without a live audience.

“This is almost like a dance that is similar to a football game,” Waltz said in an introduction to the livestream. “You have certain strategies, you have formations. You have practiced, you have trained. And then it’s up to the performers to apply all this knowledge in the moment.”

It wasn’t until the end of last year that it could be shown before a live audience, with onstage musicians. The performances at Radialsystem in December featured Bang on a Can All-Stars, the ensemble that accompanies the performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

As pandemic responses evolved, so did Waltz’s choreography. “I’ve been changing it and adding also physical contact,” she said. To date, roughly 50 dancers have learned the “In C” choreography and how to implement Waltz’s 53 movements in various configurations, “like in geometric forms or on the ground or in physical contact,” she said.

Kenny Savelson, executive director of Bang on a Can, said, “Essentially the dancers are all starting together on phrase one, and then people just move on and are basically making their own free decisions that you could call improvised decisions — how long to repeat and then to react to certain things each night.” That allows the musicians to play the piece live, he said, “just like we would whether we are with the dancers or not.”

The open and fluid structure of Waltz’s choreography for “In C” also makes it particularly suited to pandemic-era performance. Shortly before our interview, a dancer in that evening’s performance had tested positive for the coronavirus. “This is not a problem,” she said, “because I have many people and the knowledge is in the whole group. Everybody can do it.”

Waltz is devising new formats for the piece, including outdoor performances for a mix of professional and nonprofessional dancers. The first is planned for August in the Marl, a town in North Rhine-Westphalia. “It starts in different quarters of the city and it comes all together on the marketplace,” she said.

“In a couple of years, I want to make a kind of an event where it will be presented at the same time in different parts of the world,” she added excitedly. “Basically, it’s an organism that grows. Almost like a positive virus.”

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'In C'

Thursday through Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn; bam.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.