The first thing we hear in Sasha Waltz’s production of the “St. John Passion” (“Johannes-Passion”) is not the mournful opening notes of the sacred oratorio, written by Johann Sebastian Bach in 1724, but rather the whir of sewing machines.
Eleven dancers bend over a long table as they mechanically stitch together modest frocks. The chorus enters, with lacerating cries of “Herr, unser Herrscher” (“Lord, our Sovereign”), while the dancers slowly carry the billowy white garments that they have just made downstage, their naked bodies bathed in a golden glow. In a recent phone interview, Waltz referred to these frocks as “the shift of life, the cloth that represents, in a way, your own life, from birth to death.”
Over the next two hours, the dancers repeatedly don these white gowns, slip into other, colorful garments, or perform in the nude as they bring Bach’s magisterial music to life, their movements enhanced by shimmering nocturnal lighting. For the most part, the set remains bare throughout the performance; the few props include wooden poles, blocks and planks, rope and mirrors.
After springtime performances at the Salzburg Easter Festival in Austria and the Opéra de Dijon in France, the production is to arrive at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris in early November. Waltz, 61, is perhaps Germany’s best-known living choreographer, and the latest director of many who have been drawn to Bach’s two surviving passions — grand musical settings of the crucifixion of Jesus.
“I think it’s very, very theatrical,” Waltz said of the “St. John Passion.” “It’s maybe the oratorio where Bach comes the closest to opera, I would say. And I love the rhythmicality of the turba choirs,” she added, referring to the highly charged crowd scenes.
She was speaking days after receiving this year’s German Dance Award. The jury statement praised her “artistically unique and disciplinary-bursting oeuvre,” which has ranged from works staged in museums to operas, such as Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser.”
Waltz is an ardent admirer of the “St. John Passion,” a work that has often stood in the shadow of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” premiered in 1727, brought back into the spotlight by Felix Mendelssohn in 1829 and then acclaimed as a masterpiece.
There is also a longer modern tradition of staging of “St. Matthew,” stretching back at least to the American choreographer John Neumeier’s 1981 production, which is still performed in Hamburg, Germany, to the opera director Benedikt von Peter’s 2022 production in Basel, Switzerland. But interest in putting “St. John” onstage has been rising. Shortly before Waltz’s production, another high-profile staging of “St. John,” mounted by the German director Ulrich Rasche, debuted in Stuttgart, Germany, in 2023.
In his production, Rasche set the chorus and soloists on a constantly moving turntable. “My wish was to stage the ensemble as a community performing the Passion of Christ,” he wrote in an email. “I had images of monks praying and singing in the cloister in my mind’s eye, only here we were not in a monastery but in an opera house.” In his production, the precise coordination between the music and the choreography magnified the work’s ritual energy to explore the power that archaic ceremonies still hold in secular society.
“St. John” is the first large-scale religious work Waltz has choreographed in a career that goes back four decades.
“I wanted to do something very bare,” she said, adding that theatrical grandiloquence would have been out of place. “It’s a Protestant piece, you know,” she explained. “I didn’t want to go in, like, with big scenography or creating some sort of realistic environment. I knew that the music should stand in the center.” This required close collaboration with the conductor Leonardo García Alarcón and the members of Cappella Mediterranea, the Baroque musical ensemble that he founded and that performs in this production.
Pared down without being bare bones, Waltz’s production comes to life through carefully judged movements, simple costumes and props, and focused lighting. The show has an intimate feeling, thanks to the blurring of traditional boundaries, seen in the graceful interplay among the dancers, musicians, chorus and singers. At times, musical soloists play from the stage or, in the case of the violinist Yves Ytier, even join in the dancing.
“Sasha uses dance to be expressionist,” said Michel Franck, general director of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, which co-produced “St. John” along with the Opéra de Dijon and Sasha Waltz & Guests, the German choreographer’s troupe, which is based in Berlin. He stressed that Waltz always insists on the primacy of dance even as she works across disciplines and genres. “She always uses the body,” added Franck, who has run the company since 2010 and steps down at the end of this season.
“St. John” will be Waltz’s fourth time working at the Parisian theater, where she has directed two contemporary operas by the French composer Pascal Dusapin, as well as Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” whose scandalous premiere occurred there in 1913. Franck pointed to her strong artistic identity. “It’s obvious that she has a kind of signature,” Franck said, adding “It’s like, you know, if you see a Chagall or a Picasso, you know who they are.”
In an interview, Nikolaus Bachler, artistic director of the Salzburg Easter Festival, which hosted the world premiere of the “St. John Passion” in March, praised Waltz’s “amazing artistic curiosity.”
“I think why the ‘Johannes-Passion’ was so special is because it brought so many things in her artistic life together, because it has a lot to do with theater, it has to do with opera,” he said.
“And of course, it’s all transformed into, and I would not say only dance, into movement basically,” he added. “It was thrilling how she could tell not only the story of the ‘Johannes-Passion,’ but much more of European culture.”
One touchstone for Waltz in devising the production was the Isenheim Altarpiece by the singular 16th-century German painter Matthias Grünewald; midway through her production, the dancers, framed between wooden panes, create a series of living tableaux that allude to Grünewald’s tryptich. “I wanted to work with an altar image that becomes alive and falls apart and tells stories, kind of through association, also through art history,” Waltz explained.
The American director Peter Sellars is perhaps the only artist who has staged both “St. John” and “St. Matthew.” His semi-staged productions, which Sellars has described as ritualizations, were performed by the Berliner Philharmoniker, conducted by Simon Rattle.
“It’s quite a devastating work,” he said in a phone interview. He paused before adding, “If you’re working on the crucifixion, and it’s not devastating, something’s wrong.” What sets “St. John” apart, he added, was Bach’s ability to show the roots of violence, human savagery, and remorse.
“We’re all completely part of this culture of violence and cruelty,” he continued. “You have to take the things that you believe and you’re worried about, or you should be worried about, and put them into your own body as a spiritual exercise and as an exorcism. And I think this piece is both of those things.”
Although Waltz references Christian iconography through representations of the cross and allusions to the Grünewald altarpiece, her production feels both timeless and contemporary.
“For me it needed to be very universal,” she said, explaining that she didn’t want the Christian imagery to be “very obvious.” Instead, Waltz wanted to create a space where “we can connect with our pain and our conflicts,” among them the various cataclysms endured by humanity in the three years since she started working on “St. John,” including the Covid-19 pandemic and the wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine. She began rehearsing with the dancers on Oct. 8, 2023, the day after Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel.
“We were all under shock,” she recalled, adding that the need for consolation that they all felt that day “actually set our tone” for the staging.
Near the end of the show, dancers run startled into each other’s embraces; some fall to the ground and are raised up gently or with a fitful struggle. “The last scene, it comes really from experience, also that we wanted to comfort each other, and really a reaction to this massacre that happened,” Waltz explained.
“It’s so human,” Waltz said of Bach’s music, “it’s so uplifting and giving something that we need in this time.”
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