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.