Sasha Waltz & Guests
By Charlotte Stace
The year 2020 marked the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth, and the Franco-German television channel ARTE set out to perform and record the composer’s nine symphonies in nine different European cities. One of these was Delphi, where the channel invited choreographer Sasha Waltz and her company to create a choreography based on the music of Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op 92.
Beethoven composed the symphony in 1811. It was a time of wars and liberation between the French Revolution and the Restoration. In this context, through music, Beethoven sought the spiritual transformation of the audience and asked himself whether people were truly free - questions that caused his music to express the ideal of artistic freedom.
This vision of a freer world represented in music is at the foundation of Sasha Waltz’s choreographic creation, which draws on the ideas of revolution and a new world and amplifies them.