In this piece by Sasha Waltz, the choreography is pretty muddled.
What a disappointment after the choreographer did a fantastic job of turning Terry Riley's music "In C" into dance.
"Sym-Phonie MMXX", which has had to be postponed since 2020 due to Corona, seems as if the movement styles of Mary Wigman, Hofesh Shechter, Sharon Eyal and of course Sasha Waltz herself had been digitized with a little Butoh and entrusted to an artificial intelligence.
Instruction: show what you can do.
So the dance gives it their all, twenty-one dancers turn up so much that they look like twice the number of later followers of the Laban movement choirs.
Strangely predictable is this vocabulary of diagonal martial arts attacks, piles, lifts, running backwards and in circles, tossing, lying around, hugging, carrying each other, running behind one's outstretched arm, and the like.
They are often short-sighted reactions to the music.
Many movements are very banal in themselves and only have an effect through the force of the unison.
Other movements, on the other hand, do not become more interesting by repeating them endlessly.
More silly than thrilling
Waltz, while choreographically striving for the really big, the sublime and meaningful to the composition commissioned by Georg Friedrich Haas, like a late descendant of German Expressionism, sometimes involuntarily touches on the comic.
When the ensemble stamps their feet in sync and jerks their heads forward in a strange way, it seems more silly than thrilling.
A huge golden wall structured by small square elevations initially stands close to the portal like a Klimt background.
After the opening image, in which the dancers slide around each other in transparent skin-colored leotards, the wall slides back to reveal the empty State Opera stage for other dancers dressed in black.
Halfway through the ninety-minute work, the golden wall disappears behind a black notice, then silently reappears on the left, slowly moving to center stage, and finally, while moving all the way to the right, clearing one of the groups off the stage like skittles from a bowling alley.
At the end, as one almost expected, the wall descends from above like a ceiling like in a horror film.
In what feels like an eternity, the dancers gradually flee from underneath.
The music of Georg Friedrich Haas often lets menacing or siren-like sounds rise and fall in the first half, as if the orchestra were an accordion that you are slowly squeezing.
In the middle, the music pauses for a long time.
In the second half, the orchestra again reminds of a harmony of individual groups of instruments instead of electronics, one smells the Stravinsky morning air and is happy about the original use of the percussion.
Later, ghost music sounds in the dark, which the composer loves.
As beautifully and interestingly as Haas formulates it, it is as disturbing as in dance, an emotionality that shoots up out of nowhere and then totally overdrives, which leads nowhere.
And so one is forced to ask oneself:
How can a piece be completely overloaded and deadly boring for long passages at the same time?
What a disappointment.