WUNDERKAMMER• BERLIN SCHILLER THEATER
★★★★★☆
Foto: Yan Revazov
REVIEW: WUNDERKAMMER BERLIN: MARCOS MORAU TRIUMPH
Spanish super-choreographer Marcos Morau is currently in Berlin with WUNDERKAMMER—a new hit with audiences, even those who don’t usually call themselves dance enthusiasts.
Photo: Yan Revazov
A hybrid of dance and concert, a completely electrifying performance that once again confirms Morau’s reputation as a modern artist who masters the art of combining artistic impact with broad audience appeal.
Photo: Yan Revazov
Wunderkammer was created for the Staatsballett Berlin, where Morau is currently artist-in-residence. The performance is structured in eight tableaux that function as objects in a “wunderkammer”—a reference to the Renaissance cabinets of curiosities, where strange and fascinating objects were gathered in a single room.
Photo: Yan Revazov
Each section stands as a visual and physical exhibition that—in keeping with Morau’s custom—does not explain itself, but invites the audience to perceive and make associations.
Morau does not work classically with steps and variations. WUNDERKAMMER captivates with a collective, repetitive, and angular movement language, where bodies shake, stomp, tremble, and clump together in tight formations. The stage images and group compositions are wrapped in an exuberant, wild, and almost hallucinatory set design featuring spectacular costumes of tattooed leotards, leather armor, and beads.
It is all accompanied by a soundtrack of thumping electronic textures, choppy rhythms, and song—an expression that coalesces into a sort of performance concert with a choreographic engine.
Photo: Yan Revazov
Although the title alludes to the Renaissance’s cabinets of curiosities, the content is firmly rooted in the cliché of Weimar-era Berlin. Morau himself has highlighted the city’s nightlife, cabarets, and the physical communities of nightlife as sources of inspiration. The choreography and staging draw on references to fetish, drag, and the androgynous bodies of the 1920s.
The ensemble appears as a homogeneous organism where gender, hierarchy, and individuality merge—a tribute to the night’s free space, where identity can be tested, dissolved, and reinvented.
Morau borrows from fashion, club culture, pop aesthetics, and film in a performance that may impress more live than in retrospect—but which blows the audience away with its visual power and earns five stars from GOT TO SEE THIS.
