L’eco dell’acqua

It is not just time that slips away. According to Goethe, a man’s soul can slip away, just like water. Always according to a reciprocal alternation. Between earth and sky, «man’s destiny» is repeated continuously. And the body? Sometimes bodies rain on the fields like the heavy clouds of dust described by Goethe in one of his most beautiful lyrical poems: Gesang der Geister über den Wassern (Song of the Spirits over the Water).

This work by Goethe and an episode where a civil aircraft was shot down in the Ukraine by a military missile are the inspiration behind L’eco dell’acqua, a new choreography by Philippe Kratz for Aterballetto.

In the first part, it is the unknowing crowd that congeals into complex symmetries the idea of exposure to confusion, to disorder. A floating figure in the background suspended by invisible supports foreshadows the news of the fall. An impending idea of instability that becomes a nightmare when the entire company returns to the set. The images encapsulate the intention of the movement and comply with the dynamic decisions that the dancers are forced to take, maintained by music that is exclusively functional to the bodies on scene. During the final phrasing, which at its centre features a subject that insists on the verticality of its space, the plurality of the group is freely added to the number of this multitude, destined to no longer follow a linear logic but to perhaps develop into evolving flows as if they were spontaneous self-organisations. The reflection on the destiny of man, associated with the image of unaware bodies falling through the air, has the feel of an allegoric warning.

It is impossible to reach any harmony with the world, for those taking part unaware, driven by greed and without love, to the contingency or incompleteness of existence.

Stefano Tomassini

Philippe Kratz is ‘Member of the stARTacademy of Bayer Arts & Culture’.