SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- “My Obsession with Hamletmachine” is an evening-length dance performance that is the result of the choreographer’s long fascination with the German playwright and theater director Heiner Müller’s play, Hamletmachine. It is a play that toys with the themes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a way of commenting on the corruptive pull of power and the lengths people will go to hold onto it.

The original play by Müller has a history of international productions and interpretation, including one by Robert Wilson, the famed experimental theater director and playwright. Müller when talking about it said he thought of Germany as Hamlet and that like Hamlet, it could not make up its mind and therefore was always making the wrong decision. Yet he also saw the play as “his most American” and “as a pamphlet against the illusion that one can stay innocent in the world.”

Lewis’s obsession with the work began in college and culminated in an exhaustive six-degrees-of-separation map she made from all of the references in Hamletmachine over the course of a decade. References that manifest in “My Obsession” include but are not limited to Stalin’s daughter Svetlana who memorably fled to the United States and ended up on the cover of Life Magazine in 1967, architect Frank Lloyd Wright and his wife Olgivanna, and the culture critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin who after seeing and purchasing the painting Angelus Novus by Paul Klee declared that he saw it as an angel unable to use its wings because of a storm, and thus was being blown backwards into the future against its will.

By sheer coincidence to the timing of this run of “My Obsession,” Klee’s painting which has rarely been seen in public, was put on display Bodes Museum in Berlin in May of this year to commemorate the 80 years that have passed since World War II. This rare public appearance by the painting drew the attention of among other outlets, The New York Times, who notes its impact on artists, including Wim Winders and his film Wings of Desire, Laurie Anderson’s The Dream Before as well as Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.

As a choreographer Lewis is drawn to working with music, text and historical materials in the pieces she creates. Which makes sense since her relationship with text and books and history is also mirrored by her secondary work outside the studio as a librarian with the San Francisco Public Library.

It was after seeing a production of Hamletmachine in college that she found herself obsessed with the text and over a ten-year period read every book on the play she could find. “Hamletmachine is very short, only nine pages, but it is packed with references to people and historical events and literary works, so from all these books I made a map that connected all the references and people in the play so I could understand it better. From that map of references I began to form a script that wasn’t Hamletmachine, but instead reflected my obsession with it and its themes.”

“My Obsession is a wordy, dense, narrative stream of consciousness piece of dance that features music, text, and movement on a range of concepts, dilemmas and decisions, most of them historical, but some closer to home that fit the over-arching theme of bewildering decisions. With all of that in the mix, what could go wrong? Well, we will see. All I know is I had to make it.”