L’Après-midi d’un faune
Eleven years after creating one version, Sasha Waltz decided to rewrite the piece on the iconic music »L`Après-midi d'un faune« by Claude Debussy. She imagined a video work and collaborated intimately with the finnish artist Tapio Snellman. For the filming the dancers went to untouched nature, a small creek with dead trees, mudlands at a river edge, a colourful meadow with a field of purple lupines. A clearing in the midst of a forest, silvery leaves left from last season. Sensations on our bare skin underwater, the smell and sunned shadows and sounds of rustling branches, leaves caressing legs, gave way to a physical vocabulary and a dramaturgy of the fauna. Being nature, being embraced and seduced by nature, becoming and feeling freedom in this pristine state of a naked body, without social status, inhibition or guilt.
How does a body move that is not limited by the ban of shame? Is innocence conceivable, to hallucinate a pure erotic field, is this paradise or delusion? Gender does not exist when you enter this sphere of freedom, attraction is infinite in the heat of a summer afternoon, insects buzzing and a cracking lingers in the air, childlike simplicity inhabits the fields, the animalistic state of pure unbound desire sweeps us away to imagine the realm of fauna and flora. A contemporary take on an impressionistic painting of music that lets us daydream beauty.
The dramatic structure follows the experience throughout a day in nature and is counterpointed and ironically broken by fragmented classical ballet vocabulary. It evokes paintings of Nijinsky’s dancing, without ever referring it directly. The images are mirroring up from underneath the subconscious waters, as collective imagination unveils the ever-provoking figure of a Faune.
World premiere of the new version on 27 June 2024, Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Berlin
World Premiere on 26 October 2013, Staatsoper im Schillertheater, Berlin
