Sasha Waltz has made a career of ponderous, structurally meticulous dances with massive casts to iconic scores (Sacre, Beethoven’s Seventh, St. John’s Passion, Terry Riley’s In C); she’s made a second career of commenting on architectural monuments with site-specific dances. But that’s not how the Berliner started. Waltz made her mark in the 1990s with scrappy, funny, rude, and topical dance-theater pieces populated by small casts that included herself. The most enduring of these early works, Travelogue I—Twenty to eight, takes place in a rundown German kitchen where, to Tristan Honsinger’s jaunty, hoarse cello, the players mix mechanical habit with compulsive desire like a meaner, leaner Charlie Chaplin on a day off from tramping. For three years after it premiered, in 1993, Travelogue I toured—first across Germany, then to New York, Montreal, Los Angeles, Paris, Copenhagen, Moscow, and on and on. For this revival, though, Sasha Waltz and Guests are staying put in Berlin. —Apollinaire Scherr