Going Outside the Circle

Even if you’re an artist--maybe especially if you’re an artist--spending all your time with your peers can limit you.

“I felt very much I was isolated in the artistic world,” choreographer Sasha Waltz said in a recent interview from her Berlin home. “Everywhere you turn around, you run into your own. I felt, as an artist, there are other things that are more important and to face that.”

Finding something “more important” was her motivation for creating “Allee der Kosmonauten” (“Cosmonaut Street”), a 1996 hourlong dance-theater work about life in a former East Berlin housing development, to be presented tonight and Wednesday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

To get her material, Waltz spent half a year interviewing residents of a high-rise.

“I felt like a beggar sometimes,” the choreographer said. “I went to people’s doors and asked, ‘Do you want to speak to me?’ Only a few people accepted it. That was their choice.”

An increasingly important voice in the German dance-theater movement developed by Pina Bausch in West Germany in the 1970s and ‘80s, Waltz shares her concerns about male-female and social relations and, like Bausch, creates work with nonlinear structures. But Waltz, born in 1963 in Karlsruhe, Germany, also emphasizes pure movement.

Her work was so important that last year she was appointed co-artistic director in tandem with Thomas Ostermeier of the Schaubuhne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin, the first choreographer to be chosen an artistic director of the city’s most prestigious theater.

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Writing for the newspaper Scotland on Sunday, Christopher Bowen described the move as a “cultural coup [that has] shaken the very foundations of Berlin’s theater community.”

Once Waltz decided to pursue a work connected to real people, she first had to deal with prejudice--hers included--about the people who lived in such housing.

“If you think about high-rises in France or in the United States, you relate to maybe older [buildings] and [the] poor, or more criminality,” she said. “That’s completely not the case here.

“It’s a very socialistic high-rise area. It was an area that was utopian, a special place. The living situation in the old houses was very, very bad. In the high-rise, there was a certain luxury, such as central heating. They had a mix of people in there--academics, workers and everything. It was not like a ghetto.

“It can change, and will change. It will get to be a ghetto if the social structure changes a lot.”

After some residents let her inside, she found that although each apartment was laid out in a standard floor plan, each family filled the space differently. But common to all of them was a sofa in the exact same spot. Around it, all social gathering took place.

“I took that as the center of my piece as well,” Waltz said. “The work is really about a family structure with different generations, and I try to confront that in this really refined or closed space.”

To add further dimension, however, she included filmed documentary material about the building and its environs, and incorporated a surreal or “dream level” of action to which the characters occasionally can escape.

Waltz began her work using improvisations. She first established the characters of the piece--a small girl, a mother, a father and some neighbors.

“Then we improvised around certain possible meetings among these people. Through that, movement gets generated. Then I choreograph it and I fix it. I worked very strongly through character.”

Waltz was sensitive to the charge that she was exploiting real people to make art.

“That was a danger, definitely,” she said. “But it was their choice to speak with me or not. Also, I did not take these exact people for the piece. That was my ground, and on top of that I started to work with our dancers, using our own biographies and memories of family. The company is very international and made up of dancers of different cultures.

“I can speak about my work,” she added, “but it’s always hard to explain it. This is more about process. If you make a work, how do you transform it into a dance-theater piece? That was the question for me also.”

“Allee” was the first of three works that deal with people and their social condition. After it came “Zweiland” (“Dual Land”) which dealt with the reunification of Germany, then “Na Zemlje,” (“On the Soil”) which brought German and Russian dancers together to explore each other’s cultures and the relationship between culture and nature.

“It became a kind of trilogy, but I didn’t compose that like that,” Waltz said. “That was actually the end of my more narrative pieces and also my look on society. Then I started to look at the body only.”

In fact, her first work for the Schaubuhne, in January of last year, was titled “Korper,” which means “Bodies.”

“Narrative was left out,” she said. “There’s much more abstract research on the body and different aspects of the body.”

Waltz plans to bring “Na Zemlje” to New York in a year or two, but is amused by the fact that U.S. presenters tend to want only her older pieces.

“They are interested in my new work,” she said, “but they book so far ahead. . . . They have to catch up. I hope someday to see them book one I just did.”

Chris Pasles can be reached at (714) 966-5602 or by e-mail at

chris.pasles@latimes.com.

SHOW TIMES

Sasha Waltz’s “Allee der Kosmonauten,” Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. Today and Wednesday, 8 p.m. $26 to $30. (Half-price tickets available to full-time students.) (949) 854-4646.