Word from the choreographer

Winterrreise (Winter Journey) is a cycle of 24 songs for voice and piano, composed by Franz Schubert towards the end of his short life. It traces a wanderer’s nonlinear journey and I have been journeying with it for nearly a decade. From the first time I listened to it – sung by Thomas Quasthoff – my body reacted and tears sprung to my eyes. In 2011, I choreographed the cycle’s last song, “Der Leiermann” (“The Hurdy-Gurdy Man”), as part of my solo show Personæ. From that moment, I fell in love with the piece and the challenge of choreographing it as a solo. During my work, I drew substantial guidance from Ian Bostridge’s masterful book Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession.

My Winterreise includes key elements that are continuous with my prior solo shows. One is the dancer waiting on stage, meditating, while the audience enters the hall. Another is the empty space with nothing but the costumes and a chair. A third is the covering of the dancer’s head, at moments of transformation or of observing the body in motion, unconstrained by personal identity.

Winterreise parallels the nature of the mind, which wanders constantly, consumed with its lacks and fears. It is through understanding his suffering that the wanderer finds solace, just as the mind finds solace when one learns to observe it with equanimity. The wanderer passes through stages of solitude, alienation, and enlightenment. Walking to a realization of his own mortality, the wanderer presents a perfect canvas for my dance. My journey as a dancer increasingly leads me to confront the presence of physical pain in my everyday life. I experience physical suffering and transform it into movement. In dancing Winterreise, I transform the calm behind the pain into poetry and inspiration for others.