Masochism makes for a glum evening
Dennis Chang finds that Pina Bausch is not as light-hearted as he remembered
7 March 2008

I still remember the hushed tones with which Pina Bausch's name was first whispered to me at the time I was a student and militant disciple of the Merce Cunningham religion of American modern dance. I had asked a fellow acolyte what world existed outside of Merce. She furtively revealed, as if spreading heresy: "Check out Pina Bausch's company. They turn to the audience and say how they are feeling." Merce does not do stories and emotions - at least not explicitly. One is first and foremost struck by the dancers - their speed, precision and grace - rather than by the accidental whimsy or passion that surfaces. So it was not without a frisson of guilty excitement that I had my first Bausch experience at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. The evening length work was Masurca Fogo (or "Fiery Mazurka"), dating from 1998. To call it liberation would be an understatement. Not only did her dancers speak, scream and moan, but they also fed watermelon to a rooster, danced the samba to projections of flowers and washed dishes in a tub while taking a bubble bath. I thought this woman was a complete genius: a whole generation of Continental choreographers apparently all think so, too.

The little German town of Wuppertal, where she and her company have been based for more than 25 years, is the unlikely Mecca of German dance theatre (Tanztheater), a genre for which she continues to fly the flag. I discovered later that my New York experience was a rare light-hearted affair, for she is best known for three-hour epics that delve into the darkest side of humanity.

Her company's visits to London have grown to become a fixture over the years, but it was a fascinating backward glance at dance history to see two of Bausch's earliest pieces: Café Müller from 1978 and The Rite of Spring from 1975. If the former is a microcosm of every Bausch trait, the latter is a one-off experiment at "conventional" dance form.

Other than a stage covered with peat, Bausch's take on Stravinsky's seminal score really isn't that radical. Wearing skin-coloured tunics, the dancers' mud-smeared bodies gave a gritty edge to the choreographed sex and violence, but the impact of the music remained far more powerful. Typically Bausch introduces elements of men versus women and individual versus herd, but here they had the levelling effect of making everyone look equally unsavoury: the women were predatory and suspicious of one another, while the men were muscle-bound ciphers oppressing the women. For the greater part of the dance, everyone stands with legs apart, banging their heads forward in spasms while flinging their arms around their abdomen or striking their thighs - as if in mid-vomit or pre-labour. The chosen victim's dance in the final minutes saw Ruth Amarante convulsing with an ever greater degree of desperation before collapsing. But why would she be dancing the same steps as everyone else had already done in the previous 40 minutes?

If Bausch's Rite is one big scream, her Café Müller is a voyeuristic 45-minute peek at her uniquely altered universe. Set in an antiseptic chamber littered with tables, chairs and installed with a revolving glass door at the far end of the stage, six characters act out their neurotic ticks, then repeat them ad infinitum. The most pathetic and creepy of the group is a dishevelled older woman in a night-gown (which Bausch would have danced herself had she not become indisposed at the last minute). She staggered, bumped into chairs and crept along a wall. Was she observing the lunacy of the other five or was she lost in her own world of helplessness? A younger woman in a wig and gaudy dress scurried about in high heels without interacting with anyone else. A short woman tottered on as if blind, while her minder noisily cleared furniture out of her path. A second man entered and put the short woman in the arms of a third man, who might have been her lover. The third man held her until he could no longer, then he dropped her. The second man picked up the big-haired woman then re-mounted her on her man. She got dropped again. Later they took turns throwing each other against a wall. Piped in the background from time to time was the angelic Janet Baker singing Purcell.

It was all terribly cryptic. Were these incompetent men and unreasonable women guests of Café Müller acting out their morbid thoughts? Or were they simply mentally disabled? They emanated frustration, dejection, alienation, repression, with which I found difficult to sympathise. There was little build-up, never mind explanation. I refused to yield to the masochistic urges that Bausch seems to want to provoke in her audience. It was a glum evening until friends asked in the car on the way back: "Do you suppose they ever just sit around and have a laugh?" Quite.