Where do the images come from, where do the commonplaces come from, where does that which lie deep down as a feeling and, triggered by events or images, come to the surface: Saar Magal tries to find images, moving images for this.

Some of them hit, worry.

On the gigantic stage in the Big House of Drama, with a wall that makes the world of dancers and performers narrow in an almost Kafkaesque way, a new pull unfolds. You haven't seen it for a long time.

Eva Maria Magel

Senior cultural editor of the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Dance is back in drama, is the slogan.

That was already the case last December, when the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company performed in the Big House with choreographies by their director Jacopo Godani.

There was hardly any dance left on the municipal stages when the Frankfurt Ballet was abolished in 2004.

Artistic Director Anselm Weber has now commissioned a choreographic interdisciplinary work from Magal.

Topic expanded to include racism

"Dance" doesn't quite capture the essence of "10 Odd Emotions", although a good dozen dancers from Godani's company are there and do their thing wonderfully in this mix of word, dance, spatial performance, video, light, music.

Weber wanted a piece about anti-Semitism, Magal had let it know in advance.

A topic that has already interested her in earlier works.

Probably also reflected in the Documenta debate, Magal, who is in great demand internationally and has worked in Germany at the Munich and Berlin State Operas, among other things, added racism to the topic and came with her questions and a few guests from the Frankfurter Schauspiel- Ensemble Sarah Grunert and Andreas Vögler join in and speak the texts that Magal brought with him.

The music stops just as little as the movement on stage - but what sometimes tips into too much is acoustically outstanding: jazz pianist and composer Omer Klein sits on the grand piano, together with drummer Silvan Strauss he has created a soundtrack that you can even listen to then listens enthusiastically when his cacophony of deafening gun salvos makes the seats tremble.

A somewhat worn-out effect that is familiar from choreographies associated with the Batsheva Dance Company, for which Magal also worked.

Scenes like those in which Adaya Berkovich, one of the famous guest performers that Magal brought along, sings her song, literally carried by the ensemble, are much more effective.

But one wonders, in view of the text fragments and mood changes, whether the juxtaposition of justifications by Israeli parents and the order to exterminate the Hereros are really not being relativized as they are written there.

So in the manic and increasingly aggressive exercise of the dancing soldiers, who gradually fall over and disappear, in the large and very artful pictures, only the not exactly new finding remains: There are traumas of violence, of those done and suffered, that still linger over us will shape generations.

10 Odd Emotions, Schauspiel Frankfurt, Großes Haus, 15 other performances from January 23rd to February 25th.