Dialoge 09 – Neues Museum Berlin

From March 18 until March 30, 2009, Sasha Waltz & Guests – 70 dancers, musicians and singers – explored the still empty rooms of the Neues Museum on Berlin’s Museum Island in her work Dialogues 09 – Neues Museum, thus celebrating the artistic inauguration of the museum, which is scheduled to reopen after almost 60 years in the fall of 2009. Immediately after the architectural rebuilding of the museum, which took almost ten years, and shortly before the exhibits of the Museum of Prehistory and Early History and of the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection will move into the newly renovated rooms, Sasha Waltz, with support from the Ernst Schering Foundation, presented an extraordinary temporary ‘exhibition’ in the still empty rooms of this complex building.

After almost ten years of rebuilding under the supervision of David Chipperfield Architects, the Neues Museum on Berlin’s Museum Island also found itself in a special moment of transition between its architectural completion and the moving in of exhibits. In response to this historic constellation, Sasha Waltz staged an extraordinary temporary “exhibition” in the empty museum building. For her project, Dialogues 09 – Neues Museum, she brought together dancers from 15 years of Sasha Waltz & Guests as well as the Vocalconsort Berlin, the Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop and colleagues from the theater, costume and lighting design. The audience could move about freely through the rooms.

Tanz um Nofretete: Interview with Michael Rauter, artistic director of Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop: youtube.com/watch