Medea

Dance performance Medea by Sasha Waltz & Guests, programmed in Holland Festival 2009.
Following her first opera staging (Dido & Aeneas, Holland Festival 2006), Sasha Waltz has based her second choreographic-musical production on the opera Medeamaterial (1991) by the French composer Pascal Dusapin. Heiner Müller’s libretto reduces the plot to its essence: a woman exploited and excommunicated, sees no other way out than the murder of her own children. The opera is one extended solo for coloratura soprano, accompanied by a twentyvoice choir, around which Sasha Waltz drapes her sixteen dancers. Waltz’s appoach tones down the characterization of Medea as a vengeful savage and child-killer. ‘One leaves the theatre as though exiting visualauditive therapy.’ (Der Tagesspiegel)