A ’laboratory of mixed emotions’. The uncanny world of Meg Stuart’s dance pieces. A small, cumbersome figure wrapped in a heavy robe of layered quilts, her mouth stuck in a grimace, each foot shackled to a sack of bricks as if about to be drowned. A picture that hurts, even if there is no story to accompany it - no tragedy, not even a scream. Arranged into this staticlooking image, the dancer and choreographer Meg Stuart drags herself across the floor in her latest work Sketches/Notebook (2013). At the other end of the room, costume designer Claudia Hill, who dressed Stuart beforehand, strips her back down to her thin, naked skin. Designers and live musicians are often seen on stage as performers in Stuart’s productions. The entire first part of Sketches belongs to Hill. Again and again, she readies the dancers for a brief photo shoot before tidily hanging all the props back on the clothes racks. These are acts without consequences, anti-processes like eating fast food, writing job applications, fruitless shopping trips. In Blessed (premiered in 2007 at Berlin’s Yolksbuhne), it was Jean-Paul Lespagnard who dressed the dancer Francisco Camacho (soaked, like the cardboard palm tree and swan props, by the artificial cloudburst on stage) in a beach towel and a death mask. The scene may be paradise or a typhoidinfested swamp, but at least the issue of style has been taken care of. Asked whether her tendency to turn the stage into a dressing room points to a hidden Marie Antoinette complex, Stuart answers: ‘So not!’ Instead, she explains her need for designers by saying that ‘individualities are incomplete’. The artist herself
is without makeup, in a brown vintage pullover, her bleached blonde hair tousled. The last two years have been restless
but highly productive, with shows as different as the excessive VIOLET (premiered at PACT Zollverein, Essen in 2011), the eternal lottery of Built to Last (premiered at the Kammerspiele in Munich in 2012) and now the choreographic journal, Sketches/Notebook (premiered at Berlin’s Hebbel-am-Ufer in 2013). Damaged Goods, the company Stuart founded in 1994, is based in Brussels but her apartment is in Berlin. For the past two years, she had a project-based residency at the Kammerspiele in Munich and a fresh alliance is now beginning with Annemie Vanackere, the new manager and artistic director of Berlin’s hip Hebbel am Ufer (HAU). After her partnerships with Zurich’s Schauspielhaus and Berlin’s Volksbuhne, this is a further, albeit loose association with a specific theatre. Few of her European colleagues
can match this record . Apart from Stuart, it is rare for contemporary choreographers to be offered residences
at theatres where dance is not part of the usual programme. One highprofile exception was the experiment by Thomas Ostermeier and Sasha Waltz at Berlin ’s Schaubuhne, from 1999-2004, which came to an end for financial reasons. To hear Stuart tell the story, it sounds like her own career came about more by chance than design. Maybe that is part of her secret. Sketches is now being staged as a striking start to her time at HAU. As so often in Stuart’s works, the
light in the space seems to be filtered through celluloid. The quilted lady mentioned before also made an previous
appearance, featuring under the working t itle Blanket Lady in the performance Moments (2012) at ZKM
