In a stunning Edinburgh debut five festivals ago, the young Berlin-based choreographer Sasha Waltz piled bodies high, squashing them naked against glass like a jar of wriggling squid. The piece, Körper, was unforgettable. This year she returns on a gentler note with a performance set to five Schubert piano pieces and four songs.
The nine segments of Impromptus (premiered in 2004) run through just over an hour with smooth assuredness, sculpting flesh into cool elegance, but contradictorily earthy form. As notes ripple from Cristina Marton's piano, and a red-haired beauty (Judith Simonis) in a long white dress sings mezzo-soprano, Waltz's choreography catches every shape of the rich, minor keys.
Less showy than Körper, this seamless composition nevertheless employs characteristic Waltz tactics to lighten the northern European air. A pair of dancers amusingly squidge in wellies full of water. Three women bathe. Dripping paint makes expressionist signs on set. Schubert's music paddles in streams, blows gentle breezes in our ears. Now Waltz's water plays on our eyes.
Never neglecting her audience, Waltz searches out surprise, humour and special viewpoints. She improvises with Schubert's compositions, and discovers abstract beauty, grace, emotion and even godliness in the animal nature of humanity and its relationships. Often, she simply chooses a space and fills it with limbs. Her neat company of seven pose, allowing us to examine the complex, painterly still lifes they have created. Balancing on each other, weightless, they slowly rotate into the Pièta, the three graces and other classical and tribal formations with ease.
Set in the spare, sculptural landscape of three huge rhomboids (designed by Waltz and Thomas Schenk), this collaborative crew of several nations and body types telescopes the elements of Waltz's world into a show of strong, athletic and quietly awesome proportion.
