Sydney Festival Digital Archive

Dido & Anaeas by Sasha Waltz (2014)

German choreographer Sasha Waltz's reimagined Dido & Aeneas took “immersive” to the next level. Fusing Baroque composer Henry Purcell’s music with contemporary dance, it required performers to submerge themselves in a massive water tank – weighing 7.5 tonnes – to tell the tale of Dido, Queen of Carthage, and her love for the Trojan hero Aeneas.

With its large cast of singers and dancers, the musicians of the Akademie fur Alte Musik Berlin and the show’s technicians and stage crew, Dido & Aeneas was one of the biggest, most technically demanding and most-talked about productions to play in an Australian arts festival – a swimmingly sensuous, emotionally charged meditation on love, duty and the human condition. Breathtaking.