Tanztheater Wuppertal and Full Moon at Sadler’s Wells
There’s so much I hate about Pina Bausch. I hate the absurdist comedy that appears like a fart in a parfumerie throughout every show. I hate the indulgent lack of editing, so that it takes four hours to tell a story when two would do. And I hate it when so much stage time is taken up with ponderous, gentle physical theatre. I would rather see a loved one autopsied than ever again sit through Kontakthof, a minimalist, mostly dance-free production so tedious that I can’t bring myself to describe it here.
Most of all, I hate that she’s dead and we’ll never see anything new from her again, because despite everything about her work that was annoying and often intensely boring, Pina Bausch was possibly the greatest contemporary dancer and choreographer that the world has ever seen.
We’ve enjoyed more of Bausch in the UK since she passed away in 2009 than we ever did when she was alive. Last year we had the opportunity to binge on her World Cities productions, the set of shows that she created at the invitation of specific global cities, and which refracted each country’s culture through the Tanztheater Wuppertal lens. The last twenty minutes of Ten Chi – her homage to Japanese culture which covered everything from horror movies to coach party tourism – were the most wonderful I spent in a theatre last year. As is often the way with Bausch, the jokes gave way to a finale of pure dance, reinforced with a sorcerous understanding of spectacle: all of her performers were on stage, engaged in complex, electric choreography next to the immense tail of a whale, while it snowed white flower petals. Bausch may have had the wit of Benny Hill at times, but more than anything, she understood the power of beauty.
Bausch may have had the wit of Benny Hill at times, but more than anything, she understood the power of beauty
When Bausch died, plans by her close friend Wim Wenders to create a 3D movie about her work seemed unlikely to come to fruition. He went ahead, with mixed results. The talking heads were tedious, but the film of the dance was as close to the real thing as you could get. I relished seeing moments from her Rite of Spring, which remains the most incredible thing I have ever seen on any stage anywhere. When I first saw this show in London in 2008 – performed in a double bill with Café Müller – I’d never experienced anything like it. It was a life-changing experience. She seemed to have plugged her dancers – grouped in a circle, performing on a ring of soil – into something primal, elemental and quite dangerous. It sounds pretentious as hell, but it was transcendental. The split second the show finished, the entire audience leapt to its feet as one and gave the most empowered standing ovation I’ve ever seen.
Along with the productions in the movie that I had seen, there were others I hadn’t. I became quite obsessed with Vollmond (“Full Moon”), one of Bausch’s final works. Excerpts in Wenders’ film showed a dancer next to a lunar-looking rock, lit with a heavenly white light. I mistakenly thought that the title must refer to something taking place in orbit around the Earth; in fact, Full Moon tells a very earthbound, typically Bausch story of sexual obsession and flawed romance. When it finally appeared at Sadler’s Wells this winter, my obsession proved to have been warranted. Yes, there was the tiresome humour, but that’s part and parcel of Pina. (And actually, some of it was laugh-out-loud funny.) But most importantly, there was a lot of pure, thrilling dance. When I’m bored during a Bausch show, it’s usually because I’m frustrated by the absence of what could be… that magical, distinctive movement. There are those bends and twists from the pelvis and energetic flicks of hair, there are those straight lines, those touches of Asian ceremony and perhaps even shades of the Vogueing ballrooms of Harlem.
Rite of Spring
Full Moon is classic, fantastic Pina. Somewhere in the middle of the second half, my mind began to wander, then I was pulled back in: the music became starker, darker and more rhythmic. The rain was falling heavily on stage and Bausch’s dancers were performing outlandish solos, partially submerged in water, creating wild arcs with liquid, limbs pulled this way and that as if possessed. The final 15 minutes consisted partly of frantic one-on-one-off solos, and partly of genuinely spine-tingling ensemble action. It built, and built, and built… and only broke when the stage went dark, the house lights came up, and the audience rose to its feet to applaud. One wonders, however, why she could never just let us have that pure dance on its own.
There’s something less elegiac, and more tragic, about the constant touring of Bausch’s company. It’s a kind of glorious denial: to stop dancing would, it feels, be to let her slip away. And the work is so strong, so full of life. Much has been written – on Merce Cunningham in particular – about how you archive dance once a choreographer has passed away. Can it survive? Bausch herself had a style that could never be mistaken for anyone else’s, and it’s difficult to think of another artist who forged her collaborators so literally in her own image: her women are near-skeletal, with waist-length, middle-parted straight hair, and are almost always dressed in the same floor-skimming dresses with plunging necklines falling over their flat chests. In the first performances of Café Müller, Bausch herself played the lead role of the woman sleepwalking through a space filled with chairs. When it’s performed now, it’s by a figure who could – like most of her performers – be mistaken for Pina herself: angular and lean, at once both fragile and super strong.
When her close friend Yohji Yamamoto was the subject of a fashion retrospective at the V&A in 2011, one of the most arresting images in the show consisted of one of the dresses he had made for Bausch, which was set apart from the rest of the collection, in a quiet corner, far from the main gallery. The dress seemed charged somehow – as iconic as the Ruby Slippers or David Byrne’s oversized Stop Making Sense suit. Bausch had, and has, a style as strong and iconic as Mickey Mouse. What happens to that style now remains to be seen.