In a small German industrial town called Wuppertal, choreographer Pina Bausch and her company of dancers from sixteen countries are turning the chaos of the world into cell-changing art.
Famous for her brazen disregard of categories, Bausch has woven elements of theatre, circus, cinema and modern dance into a new oeuvre she calls Tanztheater, a word with no English equivalent.
In Tanztheater, Bausch breaks the rules. Her productions are theatrical without a plot. The dancers tell stories, yell and laugh as full-blooded characters, yet the performances aren’t about anything. On the surface, her scenes are strung together as if they were pulled out of a hat. Unlike other dance forms where the taut perfection of dancers’ bodies is central, Bausch’s choreography highlights fragility. Even writing about Bausch is notoriously difficult – in the way that it’s hard to describe a dream in words.
Scene from Nelken - photograph by Ursula Kaufmann
How easy to assume from such descriptions that an evening of Pina Bausch would be alienating! Too often artists, in their attempt to redraw the lines of their discipline, sever the silver thread that connects their own imagination with an audience. However, within the destructive chaos that characterises her dance, Bausch generates a wellspring of empathy through her brilliant use of images.
Two enduring images pull the uninitiated into the world of Pina Bausch – the opening sequences from her pieces Nelken (Carnations) and Palermo Palermo, first performed by Bausch’s company Tanztheater Wuppertal in the 1980s, and most recently at Sadlers Wells, London in February 2005. Typical of Bausch’s work in their cinematic potency, these scenes are all the more vivid because they unfold in real space and time. Through them, Bausch sets a tone based on human vulnerability that gives her work such resonance.
In Nelken, before anything, the audience beholds a stage full of flowers, a field of carnations. One imagines that the edges of this field extend out forever in the silence as if nothing else exists but its pink fullness. Then, with the timidity of deer, men and women emerge from the wings holding chairs. Each walks gingerly so as not to crush the flowers, the men in suit trousers and shirts, the women in frocks. This is not what we expect from dance, there is no music and the dancers aren’t dancing. They walk in random directions absorbed by their own enjoyment, they stop to sit and take in the view.
Scene from Nelken - photograph by Ulli Weiss
And there is something peculiar about these performers: they’re ordinary. Make no mistake, these are highly skilled professional dancers, each movement is artfully precise, yet in this meadow they project themselves not as Olympian gods but as vulnerable mortals, each with a story and a wound inside.
Scene from Nelken - photograph by Ursula Kaufmann
The effect of this is enormous. From the start the audience intimately identifies with the dancers. Sometimes a dancer walks to the edge of the stage and, with a pause or a tilt of the head, causes the audience to burst out laughing simply because there is contact, it is direct and generous, and it is a surprise. Such mutual recognition is powerful: we are in this together. With it, Pina Bausch will hurl her dancers into the darkest corners of human experience and we’ll follow them with open hearts. A man places a microphone to his chest. His heartbeat is the first sound we hear and the audience laughs. He begins to chase women through the flowers with his microphone, he wants to project the sound their panicked hearts for our pleasure– is this just for fun, or something sinister?
As in Nelken, the first image of Palermo Palermo (originally created and performed in Sicily) is silent. The curtain rises, and the audience confronts a massive wall of real concrete blocks across the stage. Suddenly, the wall crashes to the floor, the sound is terrible, and the stage is strewn with broken concrete. In the haze, a woman picks her way through the rubble in high heels and a dress that gives the impression that she’s naked underneath. She calls for a man by name, he runs from offstage and stumbles over the broken bricks towards her. She asks him repeatedly to hold her hand, but each time he reaches for her so gently, she flings his arm away. Over and over, she begs him to hold her and he embraces her, and each time she tells him to leave.
When he is almost offstage the woman calls him back, she calls out the name of another man who runs to her aid as well. Each offers her repeated gestures of mute tenderness that she yearns for but can’t accept. So begins a ritual of longing and rejection, each plea for touch more urgent than the last, each rejection more irritable. The conflict reaches a climax when she asks them to pelt her with tomatoes. The audience is torn open by the honesty and familiarity of such degradation, all within the first ten minutes of the dance.
Scene from Palermo Palermo - photograph by Matthias Zoelle
Pina Bausch is not gripped by the Anglo-Saxon fixation for realism. The fragmented worlds she creates are more reminiscent of the dark, absurd humour of central European writers such as Bohumil Hrabal. In Bausch’s work, the surface plane of events cannot be trusted, yet she cultivates a relationship between performers and audience that brims with a rare kind of ‘truth.’ Nelken’s delicate carnation-meadow romp descends into a surreal dream that teeters between humour and menace; by the end of the dance the field of flowers is carnage. The longings of men and women in Palermo Palermo are charged with obsessive cruelty and futility. No matter how whacked or disturbing the images, a tremendous life force, a compassion for the frailties of human nature ring clear and strong in both pieces. Such frailty is the power of Bausch’s method.
What relevance does this choreographer from Wuppertal have for the rest of us?
Scene from Palermo Palermo - photograph by Ulli Weiss
As art is transformed by market forces into entertainment, a mere product for consumption, it can lose its capacity to confront the most difficult and unconscious concerns of the times. Everywhere we witness a decline of civil society, human actions are heavily implicated with destruction, personal lives are fragmented and broken: the air is electric with uncertainty and fear. Where are the universal stories, voices and images that help us understand and transform the morass? Certainly not on television, which cultivates passivity and a torpid imagination; it makes us consume the world rather than engage with it.
The Zeitgeist is Pina Bausch’s palette: she gathers shreds of anxiety, obsession, love and gentleness, hilarity, violence and the tyranny of groups, and distils them as catastrophic images on stage. Another way of putting this: Bausch has her finger on the unconscious pulse of the day. The frenzy of her dance with its surface incoherence reflects a disorder she senses in the larger world. Most significant, with a compassionate eye she focuses on how human beings create and respond to this disorder on individual and collective levels.
Stripped of their classically trained impulses to hide imperfection, her dancers embody emotional responses that are devastatingly honest. Even as the dancers bare the most shocking inconsistencies of human behaviour in the field of carnations, and in the rubble of Palermo Palermo – from gross betrayal and childish hysteria to the smallest gesture of affection – we dearly love them for it.
After seeing a Pina Bausch production, a small misanthropic lump melts, and the maelstrom of the world feels like a dance. What a gift.
Scene from Palermo Palermo - photograph by Ulli Weiss
