Train riding with lionesses

Sächsische Zeitung
05.04.2016
Irmela Hennig
(...) So on Sunday the ensemble, under the direction of Dan Pelleg and Marko E. Weigert, brought "Watch Out Glass!" back on stage. The company dances to selected works of the US-American musician and composer Philipp Glass (born 1937). He is still considered one of the most important representatives of minimal music. It draws on a wide variety of influences from the Middle Ages to the present, including African and Asian sounds. And it is characterized by endless repetitions of short musical motifs and tone sequences. Changes come only gradually and often not very noticeably.

U.S. theater director Peter Sellars has most beautifully described what Philip Glass does in his music: >With Phil, it's a bit like taking a train ride once across America: if you look out the window, nothing seems to change for hours, but if you look closely, you notice that the landscape does change - slowly, almost imperceptibly.

The apparent monotony, the gradual change - that's what some of the dance pieces in "Watch Out Glass!" pick up on. Right at the beginning there are the lionesses. Uniformly, two dancers swing their shirts like lassos over their heads. Incessantly, one still when the other already can't anymore and gasps. But then the picture changes. The figures, which seem to concentrate only on themselves, turn into fighting lionesses, who stare at each other, attack, bite, drag each other around. (…)

A large part of the individual pieces were choreographed and equipped by members of the ensemble themselves. The choice of music is clever, because the monotony of some Philipp Glass works can also be annoying. But the evening offers, besides its typical minimal music, romantic piano solos, text passages and sounds reminiscent of Irish folklore... (...)