A city where two virtuosos live

This year's Easter Festival "Macht.frei/leben" opened with an audiovisual suspense piece by Yui Kawaguchi and Aki Takase. It is night, a city is to be built with some big bangs. It is supposed to glow metallic and provide space for life. Since humanity has decided to live in cities, it is to point a bit to the future. The city, built of sound and motion flows. Aki Takase disassembles the grand piano and pulls out the sounds, its building blocks. (Later she fishes metal bowls out of the belly of the instrument). The point of departure and always the point of retreat is the sensuality of the Chaconne, the 16th-century Spanish dance with which J. S. Bach honored his late first wife, Maria Barbara. But a city also hurries, noises, cries and laughs, says Aki Takase, and lets fingers and elbows crash onto the keys. The dancer and choreographer Yui Kawaguchi moves into the pulsating sound building of the 40-year-old composer and pianist. That is, she rises from a feather-light metal pile (stage design: Kazue Taguchi). Still puppet-like, she lets the body parts explore the new spaces. Nor does she let a chord throw her to the floor. But the dancer becomes a curious inhabitant, pulls a string from the patient grand piano, spins her own paths through the city. And cheekily flails the pianist between the keys. So nimble feet, so nimble hands. What the two Japanese artists show here is inventiveness and virtuosity. You can't get much more captivating at an Easter festival than last Friday at Salzlager Hall. The high hall with its stone pillars provided an exciting setting for the dance and music duet "Chaconne - The City at the Piano IV." The work is the fourth collaboration between Yui Kawaguchi and Aki Takase and was created in 2011 by the Berlin-based theater company Nico and the Navigators for the "KlangZuGang" concert series. The project offers artists space to explore the dialogue between musicians and performers. New ways of exchange are to be explored. In "Chaconne" dance and music meet at eye level, there is no subordination here. Their dialogue is a transfer of power. The city, which develops from the interplay of sound and movement in the mind, has an inherent pensiveness. Utopia is born in the gloom. Dancer Yui Kawaguchi, wearing a hood and playing with shadows like a Gothic novel heroine, is responsible for the chills. But what is a city without light. Fabian Bleisch plays with this and stages shadows, the colors red, black, metal and white. Explosion, fading out. Silence. Applause. As a bow, another lively excerpt from a ballet lesson.

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