Pina Bausch – Café Müller / The Rite of Spring

It was the lovely Persephone who first put me on to Pina Bausch, when we went to see Compagnie Philippe Genty as part of LIMF last year. Since then I’ve lost track of the number of people telling me that I’d love her work, that I must go and see her if I can, that she is the originator of much of the contemporary dance and physical / visual theatre that I love.

So I was pretty excited as I made my way to Sadler’s Wells last night, and judging by the vibes in the audience, I wasn’t the only one. We don’t really “get” this kind of work in this country – in both senses of the word “get” - critics and promoters and arts institutions would much rather put on the kind of work that features, say, the stars and stripes to a soundtrack of guns and screams, than something more complex, elusive, less obviously “political” and “realist”.

So this was a pretty rare visit by her company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, to London, and the first chance ever in this country to see her two seminal works from the 1970s in a single bill.

Taking the second half first, The Rite of Spring was, quite simply, awesome. For somebody who doesn’t really do “classical” this managed to be the 3rd version of The Rite that I have seen in a year, and although the Michael Clark and LPO/Julia Mach versions were both great in their own ways, this was something else altogether.

The scale was breathtaking, a huge bare stage, immaculately lit, covered in earth, and a cast of nearly 40 performers, but it felt like ten times that number at times, such was the effect of the staging, the angles, the physicality, the energy.



The dancers were extraordinary, whether operating as individuals, or as masses (the tension between these two states was one of the central motifs of the piece). There was a lot of the animal about the work, powerful, unselfconscious, beasts thundering about the stage, kicking up a dustbowl of dry earth into the air, savage rituals of mating and slaughter. It was appalling, horrifying, gruesome, in the way that a David Attenborough documentary can be appalling and horrifying and gruesome, and as gripping and wonderful and alien too.

The two key protagonists had amazing presence – in selecting and capturing the victim the prime male was majestic, brutal, proud and irresistible, like a stag, all muscle and sinew and grace; the victim, once chosen, became birdlike, fragile, full of fear and torment, wounded, alone and afraid.

The first piece, Café Müller, was very different indeed, with just 6 performers, and a stage littered with chairs and tables. It was a much more elusive piece, built like a symphony with learned and then repeated motifs, physical phrases with repetitions and variations. Couples come together, fall out, fall apart, drop each other, fling each other against a wall, fight, come back together. A man desperately flings chairs and tables out of the way of a woman running just a fraction behind him.

The piece had a feeling of mortality about it, and although it was apparently based on Pina’s childhood memories of her parents cafe and the people who went there and the liaisons that took place there, it had the feeling to me of being a projection from the mind of an old woman, near death, looking back on a lifetime of romances, good and bad, often both, the remembering of incidents which at the time seemed so awkward and embarrassing and significant, but which with the wisdom of age, seem now just to be part of the ebb and flow of life.


It had a delicious melancholy about it, a sense that moments in life which seem so important at the time turn out to be minor in the grand unknowable scheme of things. Only really now, in thinking and writing about it, does the depth and impact of the piece start to work its magic on me.

Loss - A Valentine's Day Ball

Well what better way not to celebrate Valentine’s Day than at London’s most miserable night, Loss, hosted as always by the Last Tuesday Society. It was all a bit of blur really, and still is. I remember there was a great cheeseboard, a fantastic chap called the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table who sang traditional Japanese folk songs, I know I found a business card in my pocket the next day from somebody I couldn’t remember describing himself as an Aesthetician, there was somebody who thought he was Bogart and kept telling me he had to go back to work, there was a gorgeous string trio in burlesque costume and legs right up to their fiddles, there was a very nice chap called Orlando who sang a song about the North End Road with his fine and very intense looking band, a seminar on broken hearts, oh and the lovely Broken Hearts and the fantastic Alan Weekes Quartet, and some bloke in a kissing booth who just could not stop snogging the girls. I dunno that’s about all I can remember. But it doesn’t account for 6 hours does it? Here are the photos…

self portrait with peacock feather and urinals

Persephone, masked

the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

the Broken Hearts

dolls and coffins

A Life More Ordinary

Over at the ICA, the Japan Foundation has put together a programme of 6 films under the heading “A Life More Ordinary”. The films, all from the last few years, are intended to show a more realistic side to Japanese life, free from ghosts, gore, geishas and the like. I managed to catch four of the films (in for a penny, in for a pound!)

Kamikaze Girls was a teen girl buddy movie, the girls friendship being unlikely because they hailed from two very different yoof tribes – Momoko being a “Lolita” who loves to dress ‘rococo’, all frills and bonnets, and Ichigi being a ‘Yanki’ biker chick who spits and headbuts people at the slightest provocation. The film was glitzy and high energy, perhaps not the deepest film but delightful nonetheless.

The Cat Leaves Home was just about as different as it was possible to be, minimalist, moody, sketchy, but at its heart also lay an uneasy relationship between two girls, older this time, who since their schooldays have always fallen out over boys, the prettier of the two always getting the guy. A film of subtle gradations, where not an awful lot happens, the frumpier of the two manages to get some revenge on the prettier girl, who herself has to come to terms with her own fallibility and limitations.

Kaza-hana was an odd couple road trip, the couple being a hostess who wants to return home to see her child whom she hasn’t seen for five years, having left her in the care of her own mother after the father’s death, and a disgraced and deeply unpleasant bureaucrat whose drunken shoplifting of a can of beer has made it into all the papers. When the hostess attempts suicide having been rejected by her family, you really don’t know which way the film is going to go. Had this been Hollywood you would be pretty confident that it would all come good in the end, and/or the hype surrounding the film would have given you a pretty good idea of what the outcome was. But with no prior cultural knowledge, predicting the outcome was impossible, making the finale truly gripping.

No One’s Ark was probably the most difficult film to watch of the four. A black comedy who’s humour frankly felt very alien to me (the Japanese in the audience found it hilarious though!) and yet a film which in some ways, for all the jokes about snot, had the most incisive moments. It was a film about a couple dreaming of business success selling a new health drink, but the problem is that it tastes disgusting, and they refuse to sell it in small quanities, thus alienating the few potential customers they manage to attract. They return to the bloke’s hometown, where he behaves very badly indeed to his family and his girlfriend.

Some interesting themes emerged across the various films, even though they were all very different. Most characters were either dreaming of going to Tokyo or if they had gotten there, were now dreaming of escaping it. A sense of failure, in business / career and in relationships, pervaded the films, with an undercurrent of unfulfillable pressure to live up to the way of life of previous generations. The women in particular seemed trapped in unsatisfactory relationships, unable to escape because the prospect of starting out again seemed a worse solution than sticking with what they had. The men on the other hand seemed withdrawn, slightly out of time. Universal themes but at the same all the films seemed uniquely Japanese.

CSSD/Punchdrunk - A Guest For Dinner; Array / Darren Johnston - Outre

What a glorious day Saturday turned out to be. Watching United thumping Arsenal 4-0 in a pub near Waterloo was the glorious meat in a sumptuous cultural sandwich. Van Morrison said there'd be days like this but frankly I’d stopped believing him.

The day began with “A Guest For Dinner” up at the Arts Depot, for what was, to all intents, a mini-Punchdrunk performance in Finchley. Regular readers of this blog (oh if only!) will know just how extraordinary and exciting that concept is to me. So exciting that I have to say it again, as if aurally pinching myself to believe it. Yes. Punchdrunk in Finchley.

To be precise, A Guest for Dinner is a collaboration between final year degree students at The Central School of Speech and Drama and Maxine Doyle (director/choreographer) and Livi Vaughan (design / details / atmosphere) of Punchdrunk. But this was no student drama production, this was the real McCoy. Continuing Punchdrunk’s obsessive investigation of Edgar Allan Poe, A Guest For Dinner takes as its starting point Poe’s story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” about the lunatics taking over the asylum. The story is also used as the basis for one of the most powerful set pieces in Masque of the Red Death.

We weren’t given masks, but otherwise the entrance into the theatre was classic Punchdrunk. We were led into a goods lift lined in red fabric, with a silent actor with moody beard rocking on a child’s wooden horse; the doors were slammed shut and we descended, emerging from the lift into a pitch black space, following a path inside a desiccated bonsai forest which had magically sprung up inside the Arts Depot. We were led into a tiny anti –chamber where a stunning ethereal ghost told us the story of the little boy who went to the moon (first encountered by me in Faust, but which I now know to come from Woyzeck) whilst dabbing a silent man’s shaved head with TCP. In the flickering light one could just make out various specimen jars with unidentifiable organic matter inside.

We were then led into the main space, where the lunatics / doctors) were assembled around the dinner table. It was a full on sensual assault – the actors passed over to us bits of papers dipped in essential oils with strange sayings – “who put the din into dinner”. The normal spectral equation was reversed – as if we the audience were the ghosts - occasionally one of the actors would just glimpse us out of the corner of the eye, and strain to see or hear us.

Just as everything was starting to feel familiar and comfortable, at least for a Punchdrunk obsessive, we were moved on again – a curtain opened to reveal what ordinarily is the auditorium, and we were ushered off the stage and into the seats, whilst the lunatics/doctors gave us a show, an interlude one might call it, perhaps recalling the vaudevillian Palais Royale inside the Masque of the Red Death. After a crazy song, some mesmerism and some quackery, the show took a further turn as the cast, now all in white, turned what had been the dining table into hospital beds, and a long and quite brilliantly choreographed scene emerged, the actors exploring the duality of the patient - doctor theme in the Poe Story. The choreography reminded me of the Woyzeck I saw earlier in the year and last year’s Icelandic Peer Gynt (set in a lunatic hospital), especially the way the beds were hurled from side to side of the stage to create an extraordinary energy and visceral visuality.

It was a tremendous production – light and sound and smells were of course magnificent, and I cannot praise the cast highly enough given their relative inexperience. As with all Punchdrunk stuff, they are really challenged hard, acting, dancing/physical theatre-ing, singing, some playing instruments, interacting with the audience and performing in tight narrow spaces. It was difficult to believe they were still learning their trade. Not everyone was equally brilliant at everything, but everyone excelled at something.

After heading down to the South Bank and watching the footie, it was into the QEH for Darren Johnston / Array and a piece of visual theatre / dance called Outre. If my Martian cousin were to come down from the skies and say to me “Robin, I’ve been reading your blog, in fact I am that regular reader you have been dreaming about, and I really like the sound of this thing you humans call culture - oh and before I forget, yes they do have Jews on Mars, anyway I really like all this stuff you go to see - can you take me to see something, maybe - cos it’s short visit, you know what with the costs of accommodation on Earth and all that – something that has a bit of all the stuff you keep going on about, please, will you, please?” then I would take him/her/it to see this.

Outre seemed to be a summation of everything wonderful I have seen in the past three years. In no particular order it was: uncanny, gothic Victorian, ghostly/hauntological, fragmentary, macabre, sinister, and extraordinarily, intensely, mentally stimulating. It had touches of the freak show/circus. It suggested automata and living puppets. It had elements of David Lynch and Angela Carter. It was sound-tracked with specially commissioned abstract electronica and contemporary classical. I connected with it on a deep unconscious level, yet it remained elusive, forever just beyond the tip of my tongue. It had touches of those classic Doctor Who episodes, The Talons of Weng Chiang and Spearhead from Space, and brought out memories of Bagpuss. It made me think (and dream) of Von Kleist’s famous essay “On The Marionette Theatre”, with its discussion of grace and the unconsciousness of inanimate objects in movement. It had intimations of Noh and Kabuki theatre and tapped into that uniquely Japanese strain of supernatural/ghost story, in particular reminding me of Kaneto Shindo’s two wonderful supernatural movies of the 1960s, “Kuroneko” and “Onibaba”.

But more, more than this, it was absolutely exquisite, with some of the most beautiful moments I have ever seen conjured in the theatre. To manage to be tough and physical yet at the same time delicate and fragile is the sign of a truly masterful piece of work.

What it was is of course hard to describe. The first section seemed to be set in the freakiest of freakshows; we saw a living automaton, conjoined twins, a headless man, and a lithe erotic dancer who was revealed to have a gruesome witch’s face. Each act was preceded by a projected introduction from a sinister distorted MC. Then there was some kind of breakdown, a rift in the ether, and we were watching a crazed and tortured Japanese ghost figure. Finally all the pieces of the nightmare seemed to coalesce before the figures collapsed in a heap in the centre of the stage, like de-animated children’s dolls.

The production took place behind a gauze screen and the air was heavy with dry ice. Minimally, but very carefully, lit, the haunting figures seemed barely there, drifting in and out of the blackness and the mist and the beams of light.

Like I say, exquisite.