"Behind us is the east, in front of us is the west, or is it vice versa? The direction in which you move is decisive, don't you always end up in the same place? There are those in the east who would like to go to the west, there is the west that wants to reach the east, like two giant waves. Somewhere they meet, there is no movement there. Life and death'.
With these words the English choreographer Liz King, who succeeded Johann Kresnik as director of the Heidelberger Ballett in 1989, introduces "Westwest", the show presented in its national premiere in Rovereto. Born in 1947 in Salisbury, England, King trained at the Royal Ballet School in London. At the age of twenty, she joined the Stuttgart Ballet, then directed by John Cranko, before returning to London to work with a group of actors. He danced with the Ballet de Wallonie for two years before moving to Vienna in '77. There he choreographed for the Wiener Staatsoper and the city's Tanzfestival. The foundation of the Tanztheater Wien dates back to 1982: two years later, she is already described as the most interesting contemporary author on the Austrian scene. She signed among others "Mid.Atlantic" ('82), "Wien, Wien, du bist allein" ('84), the Freudian "Ein Haus im Garten" ('87). A dancer and choreographer with a solid classical training, she is the author of performances that are formally structured with montage techniques indebted to the "German tanztheater", but in which language choices with a frequent academic imprint are evident. In his text dedicated to tanztheater, critic Jochen Schmidt quotes some of King's own expressions from her time as director of the Heidelberger Ballett: "I discover new paths for myself in the vocabulary of ballet, without using classical terminology... My work on ballet aims to make it a flexible and transparent instrument, to free it from clichés...". Die Gegeneinlaudung" ('90), "Ikarus Meets Newton" ('91), "Westwest" ('92), "Der Knacks" ('93) were born in Heidelberg. A choreographer particularly attentive to the political and social issues that are revolutionising Europe at the end of the 20th century, Liz King is considered by German critics to be among the most committed contemporary choreographers. Of her latest show "Der Knacks" the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung says: "it seems to be one of the rare choreographic works that manages to reconcile political statements with a convincing aesthetic". In the presentation booklet at "Westwest", signed by Vilém Flusser and full of quotations from Kafka, Beckett, Baudrillard, Hugo, Milosz, Sugawara no Michizane, the main topic is the contemporary restlessness typical of a world in which man can no longer recognise himself. The end of certainties is rendered through the metaphor of a continuous journey. "We are in the process of relocation," the text reads, "because our world is transformed to the point of unrecognisability, because it has become unusual and consequently uninhabitable. Migration is spoken of as a phenomenon that has the power to synchronise different histories: 'the mystical time of the Indians and the magical time of those from the North East'. Exile seems to be the only condition that can protect against change ("only exiles have a land", writes Jean Baudrillard). From these themes, Liz King constructs a dense, complex performance. In the middle is a large floor area on which motorway stripes are drawn. A mountain of suitcases, a man of Kantorian memory with a long coat and hat sliding on his knees and hands, women and men in evening dress, bare-chested characters, girls in short dresses: people of all kinds (a symbol of that mingling of races and customs typical of our time) are united by the same hurry to get away, to escape. 'The dreadful thing about present-day migration,' the presentation text goes on to say, 'is something else again, namely the fact that babies with bellies swollen by hunger, this future humanity, are advancing in the same direction in which we are fleeing. Legs angrily soaring upwards, frantic movements of the torso, for a dance that succeeds in communicating the starting assumption. Through her sign, King launches the final message contained in the text: 'We must learn to recognise ourselves in the future that chases us'.
