He is proud that it survived without subsidy or patronage – although the money made with Carlos Saura’s films helped

He is proud that it survived without subsidy or patronage – although the money made with Carlos Saura’s films helped. “That,” he says, “is the price of liberty.” He clearly has little time for officialdom. He seems to have had several run-ins with ministers in the past. How, he scoffs, can you take seriously a ministry that ties together culture, sport, media (as it does here) and national cuisine Moreover, dance nowadays is “too full of epidemics”. He prefers to concentrate on sailing.Spanish National Dance Company at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London EC1R 4TN (020-7863 8000) to 22 June Audio-described performance on Saturday at 2.30pm. If nothing else, Sasha Waltz knows how to get a message across.

Even if you didn’t know the title – K?r (German for bodies) – of her 90-minute piece, you would guess it from the images. A shallow showcase slowly fills with near-naked bodies, their protuberances squashed against the glass. Two pairs of dancers create composite creatures, legs facing the wrong way. And another, medically inspired sequence shows dancers listing the value of their body parts – a liver (€1,300), a kidney, a pancreas.

There is no doubt that Sasha Waltz has a way with stage pictures. Some of them work as metaphors, such as the piles of saucers jiggled about so they knock and clatter and become vivid representations of vertebral columns. Others impress by their elaborate eccentricity, becoming visions of human limitations transcended through elaborate devices – a man wears skis to travel slowly down a wall in the manner of a fly and a latter-day Loie Fuller manipulates two giant wing-like poles as if she were a female Icarus or insect-woman.The effects can be quite beautiful or heart-stopping: it’s not every day you see a wall apparently crashing down on a crowd of people Or they can provoke titters by their sheer repulsiveness. K?r is not devoid of humour, but it’s of a grating kind, the kind which, along with the plentiful nudity, you might label as Germanic, if you weren’t averse to lazy national stereotyping. One justifiable label, though, is tanztheater or dance theatre, the central European hybrid form best known through Pina Bausch’s work, but now gaining another talented exponent in Sasha Waltz.She has clearly been making the most of the mixed-media environment of the Schaub? Theatre in Berlin where she is part of the artistic team leading almost 40 actors and dancers. Although as varied in appearance as they are in nationality, her 14-strong cast maintain a deliberate anonymity, subordinating individual personality to the choreography.Hans Peter Kuhn has composed the atmospheric sound design, and the monolithically spare, black-walled set created by Waltz and Thomas Schenk is no more, no less than you need..

To write a book like this, you’d have to be either a Romantic or a madman Martin Buckley is both. Not content with dreams of flying, he earned his flying license in a record-breaking six weeks, taking his final test junked up on painkillers to soothe an infected ear. He then circumnavigated the world in a series of hair-raising exploits that brought him into contact with (among others) the flying postmen of Stornoway, a retired engineer who made his own plane from a kit, airborne missionaries in Kenya and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. For Buckley, flying is the ultimate aspirational act, religious in significance Those who learn to fly “become communicants” His intensity is that of the zealot: a “kamikaze writer”. Who but someone lost to the flying bug would strap a motor to his back and jump off a cliff wearing a parachute, as Buckley does in the closing pages?Whatever you make of his terrifying hobby, read Absolute Altitude for the sensitivity and shrewdness with which Buckley describes people he encounters. He has an unerring instinct for remarkable lives behind ordinary exteriors.