By Xenia Andreou
“WHAT will be the one thing I will have regretted not having done when I’m 50?” Alexandra Waierstall asked herself as she walked down the street one day, aged 16. She went straight home and told her mother – contemporary and experimental dancer Ariana Economou – that she wanted to dance.
Now aged 23, and already an accomplished choreographer, she smiles with understanding at her less mature younger self. She had, of course, always danced until the age of 14, when teenage hormones made her ‘naturally’ rejectionist. She decided to concentrate on music, she wanted to write film scores, and spent two years incessantly composing on the piano. “That still feeds my work,” she tells me, “it wasn’t a waste of time.”
It is abundantly clear that not much time was wasted at all in her meteoric rise to artistic achievement. Mum – Ariana as her daughter calls her — helped with the catching up and auditions process that landed her a place at Laban Dance Centre in London, where the likes of Richard Alston started out. But she did not want to go directly into a BA programme, so opted for an independent course at Cologne’s Moving Arts Centre.
“It was also an opportunity to explore my German roots, and through that to get to know my father [Cyprus-based artist Horst Weierstall] better.” The standard was well beyond a foundation course and all her expectations. The teachers were superb – great names in choreography working as freelance teachers, including an 85-year-old Israeli who taught them his own technique – giving masterclasses in contemporary dance and mind-body centring, among others.
Next stop, the EDD Centre in Arnhem, Holland, a place where normally only mature students over 23 were accepted, but an exception was made for her and one other German girl. After a year, she transferred to the EDD’s Dance Research Centre at the Tanzhaus in Dusseldorf, where the fastest maturing process took place.
There she worked on different projects, like the one with 80-year-old Jaap Flier, a student of Nijinsky, where original ballets such as La Sylphide were first studied in the original, then brought into the present in search for truthfulness and veracity. The students were asked to refer back to their childhoods to prepare their own solos, or create a group piece based on Kafka’s work.
Another project, under the supervision of Mary O’Donnel Fulkerson (incidentally one of her mother’s old teachers at Dartington in the UK), sent them in search of alchemy, through original manuscripts from the Vatican on the subject, immersing them “into black in order to strike gold”.
Having the facilities of the Tanzhaus at their disposal, the students helped each other to stage performances of their work, which audiences could watch for free. Alexandra experimented with Drop, a video dance performance with a German painter, who then took the work further, making an installation at an exhibition in Dortmund.
She also put herself in the role of choreographer almost by chance, when she impulsively walked into the shop of one of the city’s most important fashion designers and audaciously asked to use his clothes for a performance. He accepted, but in the red dress he gave her she could not move. So she decided to use that, directing the performance rather than dancing in it herself, getting out of her usual way of doing things.
It was in her third and final year that she began to select the direction she wanted to move into, the same one she is exploring more deeply now.
“I moved away from theatre dance and more in the direction of the body narrative, I wanted to look at the vocabulary of movement. I became more abstractive, more minimalist. What is the essence of my work? It is the body, not just the idea or the plot. Now I feel more ready to layer my work.”
She partly rejects the theatre element of dance as a defence, a trick: “Where is the creator’s voice?” she asks. “There are so many points of reference, and it’s easy to fall into patterns. I felt the need to return to the body and develop my own movement. I wanted to move into what had always been there – my body – but had never really dived there. Why do things happen? I started becoming more visual, looking at the landscapes of the body.”
Hence Deep Rise, the piece she choreographed and danced with two others, a Korean and a Greek, and which won the 1st Dance Platform in Cyprus. “There were no props, only Koretsky’s music and just the bodies experiencing passion and joy in moving. Before, it had all been theatrical, but here there were no plots, I let the body talk.”
It was “good” to let go of a lot of things that she had felt bound by, and to allow the audience more freedom to get involved without telling them what to look at. The piece was then performed at the 4th European Dance Festival in 2001 at the Rialto in Limassol.
Much work and learning has intervened since then, including The Aesthetics of Dance, a duet with her mother at the Global Dance Festival in Germany, which looked at two generations, one education, at different time periods. Communication between the two is excellent, although Alexandra admits it was difficult at first.
“I had to react. It was easier for me to dance for her, to contribute as a dancer. Now that I have found my own language through which to give her feedback, it’s easier still.”
Alexandra also takes refuge under the welcome shade of the Echo Arts cultural association umbrella, founded and run by Ariana Economou. Having finished her studies, she came face to face with the cruel reality of funding: there was none, and many of her fellow students were forced to become waiters in cafés in order to survive. She was lucky to have the option of returning home to something already set up and running that could help her keep active. But it remains tough. She must still knock on doors for money and watch the annoyance on the same faces over and over, without any recognition for her success. It is demoralising, but she is learning fast that this will be part of her job always, and she better learn the game fast.
Listening to her talk and watching her eloquent arms and hands express feelings, concepts, thoughts through the air, I have to remind myself repeatedly of her age, as her maturity and determination keep misleading me. Her face is mesmerisingly beautiful and still, fully centred, her eyes inform on the intense personality that lies behind them.
She talks of her team of dancers and technicians – most of them quite a bit older than herself – and her own role in the team: “I do not always participate when I choreograph. It’s a gift being out, you see better, more clearly. And it is a gift they give me every time they perform my piece. It’s in fact theirs, they carry it. I just give them the space within which to search and find themselves as people and as dancers. It is a great joy to watch.”
But is it not frustrating not to dance, does she not miss it? “I balance it out by doing my own research and solos, which I then bring into the group. The dancers bring their own stuff into the group too. We also use release technique, where we work through images I give them. They filter these through their own bodies and bring out their own vocabulary.”
She works as a director, a selector, guiding them and helping them to break their patterns so that each time they are authentic and do not repeat themselves. It is a constant educational process for all of them. Her work does not hang from the virtuosity of her dancers, even though she often has the opportunity to work with the best of them. She has the confidence to present her own work in its essence. She wants to see people on stage, not dancers, carrying their training but also a depth that comes from their experiences of l
ife.
I get my chance: where does her own maturity come from, how many experiences can
she have had at such a young age? “Just breathing is enough to learn.” Serves me right. “I want to see people who are alive on stage,” she picks up the thread again, “but who also belong to a group, all on a journey. This is what the [latest] piece is about, a trip, a journey – transcendence – going through borders, limits, dividing lines, whether these are real or metaphorical, in the world or inside us.”
Transiency will be performed this week in Nicosia, before the team moves to Athens with Gaze for the 11th Biennale for Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean, and to the Katia Dandoulaki Theatre there. They then take Transiency to Portugal for the International Dance Festival in October.
Art with a capital ‘A’ used to cause her anxiety. “I was dominated by my expectations to be an artist. But I did not want art to run after me.” She took a very conscious decision to live her life, and believed that art would follow. Now she never works herself more than necessary, never to exhaustion, she listens to the group and herself, and takes time off when she feels the need. Work then happens with depth and engagement, but in a healthy ‘I live’ framework. We talk of the great misunderstanding: “It is all important for life to feed art. Art should not be pain – pain could be part of it but not it. I feel I dive in my work, in silence, into a depth that is more cosmic, beyond the self. It takes on a new dimension, usually it has a sadness, but it is sweet. Art must be soft, like velvet.” Her arms envelope the air and caress it, you feel velvetness all around. How old is she again?
Transiency. Dance performance by Echo Arts, choreographed by Alexandra Waierstall. June 9 and 10, 9pm. THOK New Stage, 29 Kambos St., Strovolos, Nicosia. Tel: 22-480300. Tickets £5 and £7.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
