Out of the darkness it begins to shine, groping, initially shy sounds. Bach's Chaconne still very close, the soft singing lines. The accompanying counterpoint tastes the free. Aki Takase, all in red opens the space. Kawaguchi in analogous pianissimo of movement answers opposite, in black. The common play begins. Here the strings vibrate in the body of the piano, there the dancer sounds in the room. The relationship overcomes the space effortlessly, as if there were two extremities of one body visible and audible. Oratorical concentration in the E-Werk. The music leads, visibly. Yui Kawaguchi is surrendered to the music. She succeeds in letting herself dance, in synaptic real time to Aki's playing she can dance individual fields of her body as if they were autonomous, from foot to knee to eye, into the electrified fingertips. Her dance sparkles brightly. Is she dancing the music, or is the music dancing the dancer? Quickly, the beauty of what emerges clarifies that the question need not be answered to let this intensity shine. Takase plays a wide-breathing tension that grows organically as if from within itself, gently tightening and maintaining the concentrated tone throughout the evening. This basic tension carries over the hottest clustercliffs and doesn't allow itself to be upset by external irritations, such as when Yui briefly puts on a playful noose, or teases from the invisible. With the emergence of shimmering, flowing light reflections from Kazue Taguchi's transparent sculptures, which lay a moving allover the space, a media triad is completed. Kawaguchi's dance conquers and reconfigures the space, cuts the levels, bundles the energy, there it is, the city in the piano. In the imaginary reenactment of the movement, the map emerges. After successfully making contact with the master of sounds, she begins to draw. A wide net emerges from thin bright thread lines, loosely spinning the stage space, a clear outline of a fantastic city. She takes its beginning tenderly from the open wing and expands the tension structure by a third swing. In explosive micro-figures the temperament of the players flashes, here in the fiery they meet. Takase's hot thunderstorms, erratic runs and Yui's frenzy are related in their precision. This allows the beauty of the jointly created third, always unique quality of improvisation to blossom. The heat discharged again with humor in a light-footed comic encore that grew silver blossoms from within the wings. Spellbound and enchanted by a brief dream of communication, the applause began to rise tentatively only.

Objects in motion produce sounds. The piano string is the most obvious example. Human bodies differ little from other objects in this respect. Except that their vibrations are called dance rather than music, and when they make music, the movement recedes into the shadow of the instrument. How much escapes such categorizations, how little the music merely accompanies the dance, and how musical a body in motion is, is shown by Yui Kawaguchi and Aki Takase in "Chaconne". Seen in the Sophiensaele in Berlin. The room, which Kazue Taguchi has equipped for this piece with only a grand piano, a few glittery things and many small light sources, demonstrates another physical truism: objects in the light produce reflections. Some less, some more. And the latter, when also made to vibrate (i.e., sound), create a constantly changing, multidimensional space that is more than a stage. A whole city of objects and sounds, bodies, movement, change, light. "City in the Piano" is aptly called in the subtitle. The two Japanese performers populate this city very cautiously at first. Almost as if in slow motion, each explores the possibilities that her own body offers to fill the space. Here a few notes from the belly of the piano, there a cautious step into the light, a turn on its own axis. Joint test. Establishing contact. The virtuoso pianist Takase gains a foothold more quickly, allies herself with the keys and challenges her instrument by plucking at strings, preparing them with objects and eliciting quite unfamiliar sounds from the piano in the process. Kawaguchi, meanwhile, stalks as if remote-controlled. It doesn't seem to be her body that is actively dancing, rather it is something else that moves it and strikes her. Something like a hiccup that wants to get out and therefore throws her across the stage in ever larger orbits. She surrenders to this something with her characteristic comedy and makes her own what it seems to dictate to her. A bit of tap dancing, a bit of Schuhplattler, a pair of shoes finds its way to her feet, eventually everything about her dances - right down to her eyeballs and the ends of her hair. The clapping on Kawaguchi's body, her feet on the floor, and her breathing blend into the soundscape. Takase's exertions on the keys complement the choreography. The light installation, which in the finest ZERO tradition creates ever new whimsical forms from the simplest of means, conjures up playmates of light and shadow on the walls for the two every now and then. From the very beginning, the audience is connected to the action in the room by the all-flooding light concept. It becomes even more literally connected when Kawaguchi knots a line, from the piano string, around a chair leg, a column in the room and - of course - his own body, until a net stretches through the room, shimmering and vibrating in the light, like the piano strings. Or like the power supply line of a nocturnal poetic city.