A NEW WORK FOR SCAPINO BALLET ROTTERDAM

CREATION 2026

WAXES IS THE CONTINUATION OF VÉNUS ANATOMIQUE, A PIECE CREATED BY SARAH BALTZINGER IN DECEMBER 2023. NANINE LINNING AND SCAPINO BALLET ROTTERDAM HAVE INVITED SARAH BALTZINGER AND ISAIAH WILSON TO REVISIT AND EXPAND UPON THE UNIVERSE OF THE ANATOMICAL VENUSES.

WAXES is the second chapter in an ongoing choreographic investigation into the anatomical Venus figures—those hyper-realistic wax bodies created in the 18th century by ceroplasts such as Clemente Susini. If VÉNUS ANATOMIQUE exposed the eroticized simulation of femininity and the tension between puppet-like passivity and eruptive physicality, WAXES pushes deeper into the body’s decomposition, reanimation, and reclamation.

Set in a sterile white cube populated with iron furniture and shared metal buckets of water, WAXES stages a community of bodies confined together—washing one another, surviving together, decaying together. Their gestures are fractured, mechanical, almost post-human.

Inspired by the wax bodies designed to teach anatomy to a curious public, WAXES reimagines these women not as passive teaching tools, but as haunted artifacts. Laid out on beds that echo museum vitrines, these bodies are exposed yet absent, desired yet defiled. Venus no longer ascends from the sea; she ferments in formaldehyde. At its core, WAXES is a visceral meditation on body dysmorphia and the violence of representation. It detaches the body from gender and erotic fantasy, reframing it as a malfunctioning organism, manipulated and medicalized. In this world, nudity ceases to provoke—it reveals the grotesque, the unclean, the raw.

The choreography draws from puppeteering traditions, anatomical exhibitions, and morbid museum rituals. The performers move like specimens: dissected, hallucinatory, spectral. Yet beneath this passivity pulses a drive to reclaim form, presence, and agency. WAXES is both an autopsy and a resurrection. A dissection of identity. A ghosted tribute to the stolen, silenced bodies of history. It is an ode to the flesh beneath the wax—to what persists, feral and unfinished, beneath the glass.

Choreography
Sarah Baltzinger + Isaiah Wilson

Music composition
Guillaume Jullien 

Body Sculptures
Manuela Benaïm

Light design
Jan Boiten

Costumes
Petra Finke

Decor
Sarah Baltzinger + Isaiah Wilson in consultation with Guido Verschoor 

Dramaturgy
Merit Vessies

Artistic direction Scapino Ballet Rotterdam
Nanine Linning