Let’s Tanz: Pina Bausch’s Wuppertal dancers on her unearthed 80s creations
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Version 0 of 1. “You come on with a certain energy and then as soon as you get on stage it’s like – whoomp! – someone’s kind of holding you down. The heaviness is really present.” Scott Jennings is explaining what it’s like to make an entrance on a stage that’s buried beneath a deep layer of earth. “Just to stand there, you already feel heavy, dragged down,” he says, looking into the distance. “And there’s a smell in the air…” Related: The sound of Pina Bausch That must be the pine needles. Another dancer, Lutz Förster, smiles as he explains to me matter-of-factly: “There are the Christmas trees – something like 20 of them.” Then there’s the thick fog that hangs over the stage, turning it into a sort of battlefield. Out of the haze, says music adviser Matthias Burkert, there emerges “a little brass band of old gentlemen, playing a romantic song”. We’re sat at the opera house in Wuppertal, an industrial town in North Rhine-Westphalia, home for the last 40-odd years to Pina Bausch’s company. We’re talking about Auf dem Gebirge Hat Man ein Geschrei Gehört (On the Mountain a Cry Was Heard), which Förster performed when it was first staged in 1984. The cast for the current revival includes Jennings, a British dancer who arrived at Tanztheater Wuppertal in 2012 and is one of the company’s five new members since Bausch’s death in 2009. Gebirge is one of two Bausch creations – the other is Ahnen (1987) – that will finally receive their UK premieres this month at Sadler’s Wells in London. We’ll get on to Ahnen’s giant cactuses, remote-controlled helicopter and glass coffin later. For most of the 1970s and 80s, Bausch created one or two new pieces a year, while also touring works from her repertory. Her industriousness, and the technical and financial complications of taking her ambitious shows abroad, means that UK audiences are still encountering some of her shows for the first time more than five years after her death. The company, now under the artistic directorship of Förster, will unveil a much-anticipated new work, by an as yet unnamed choreographer, in their next season. Bausch’s carousels of dazzling images blur dreams with memories. Her shows are absurd and amusing, plaintive and profound, formal but informal, personal yet universal. Elegantly dressed – and often in states of undress – her dancers pull each other by the hair, balance apples on their heads, cling to each other in love and fury, sunbathe – and snake around and off the stage in their famous parades, each wearing an enigmatic smile. A collage of music matches the medley of unexpected scenes: jazz, folk, classical; fados, Chinese drumming, tango; Purcell, Portishead, pavanes. Gebirge turns out to have a typically eclectic mix of music, handpicked by Burkert. During its creation, he was moved by hearing Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s Kriegsmarsch der Priester (March of the Priests Going to War) on the radio. He got hold of the recording and added it to tracks by Billie Holiday, Enrico Caruso, Fred Astaire and Gerry Mulligan. Gebirge shares its title (borrowed from an image in the Old Testament book of Jeremiah) with a piece of church music by Heinrich Schütz; Burkert and Bausch used the composition for a scene at the end of the show’s first half. “The music plays and nothing happens,” says Burkert. “There is just a human being.” The Australian dancer Julie Shanahan says Gebirge is “very sparse – there is often just one person on stage, and then suddenly the whole group fills the stage. There is a lot of simplicity in the piece – time for the audience to really look at somebody.” Bausch’s shows are masterpieces of human observation. She was born near Wuppertal, in Solingen, where her parents owned a restaurant. As a child she would sit under the tables and watch the customers – experiences that directly fed into the creation of her landmark piece Cafe Müller (1978) in which the stage is cluttered with chairs; a woman with windmilling arms careers forlornly around them as a man desperately tries to protect her. After dancing with the Folkwang company in Essen run by her former teacher, Kurt Jooss, Bausch arrived at the opera in Wuppertal – a town known as the birthplace of Friedrich Engels and for the development of aspirin. Taking over the Wuppertal Ballet, she staged “dance operas” and in collaboration with Rolf Borzik, her partner, established the tanztheater style. For the company’s shattering version of The Rite of Spring in the mid-70s, Borzik covered the stage with peat, which stained the dancers’ costumes and bodies – and filled the opera house with the scent of mud and dust. Such audacious works were met with delight and disgust by Wuppertal audiences used to classical ballet. Down the road from the opera house is the office of Tanztheater Wuppertal, which lies close to a noisy, down-at-heel intersection used by Wim Wenders for one of the outdoor performances in his 3D tribute film, Pina. (In that scene, as cars roar past, a couple clad in familiar Bausch attire – suit for him, silk for her – are locked in an incongruously tender duet.) A peep show and “romantika bar” lie around the corner from the office and travellers spill out of the nearby station for the city’s suspension railway – the Schwebebahn – which sways directly past the room in which Bausch once worked (affording regular glimpses into the carriages – an influence, it has been suggested, on the processions of short, “glimpsed” scenes in her shows). The company still rehearses in this district, in a spellbinding studio space, the Lichtburg, that was once a 1950s cinema. The table where Bausch sat to observe the dancers is still there; racks of colourful costumes line the walls and take up rows of the balcony. At the office, I meet the genial Peter Pabst, who has been designing the company’s sets since Borzik died in 1980. How did Pabst’s collaboration with Bausch work? Famously, she asked questions of her dancers, and their answers – expressed in words and movements – helped to shape each piece. But Pabst says there was just one question she asked of him when he showed her a design: “And what else can it do?” He explains: “We deeply agreed that the set was not just meant to be beautiful – it was meant to create a world for the dancers. That meant that we tried to delay the moment of decision. She wanted to have a feeling of what was coming together and what she was going to do.” Costume designer Marion Cito says that, like Pabst, she spoke very little with Bausch during the creation of a piece and that, as the premiere approached, they worked late into the night on all aspects of the production including costumes: “Some people say it’s a miracle how they come together … It’s true.” The regular practice in large-scale theatre and dance productions is for the labour intensive work on sets and costumes to get under way as early as possible. Pabst says that he would spend a lot of time in rehearsals, watching what the company were doing, but that as the weeks passed, “we would not speak about the set”. He continues: “When Pina started a production, there was nothing to read – and nothing to design for … I felt like an abandoned child … I did not know what to do. So I just started to play around in my model box. She never knew what kind of a piece she was going to do. It was like being in an intense fog.” When Gebirge’s set was placed on the stage and the dancers first came in, he says they were “so curious, like little children, to find out what they could do with it”. Talk at Tanztheater Wuppertal continually returns to children. “When Pina was creating a piece she was like a newborn baby,” says Förster. The dancer Nazareth Panadero has observed that Bausch “let you be old and a child at the same time.” Shanahan says that “in playing, you find imagination and creativity”. She continues: “In a certain way, the beginning of our process was a bit like a game. And what is a game? Being open enough to explore your fantasy, do silly things. When you see kids playing, they’re opening up doors to their imagination. In playing, children are totally natural. Through this abandonment, that’s how Pina built it up.” Children’s games are often played within the pieces themselves. In a joyous sequence in Masurca Fogo, a handful of dancers slide across the stage in a huge makeshift paddling pool. But the games often come with a disturbing adult twist. In the same work, Shanahan is grasped from behind by a male dancer who forces her to repeatedly bob for apples. Bausch’s pieces are full of repetition – at least, that’s what I say to Shanahan. She looks at me in disbelief: “There is no such thing as repetition … Human beings cannot repeat. Every time you do something, you’re in another state of mind. By the end of the piece, when something is repeated, you’ve gone on another journey – your eyes are different, your hand is different. It’s almost like what happens in life. Falling in love at 16 is different to when you’re older. You never repeat yourself, ever. And Pina never repeated herself.” Shanahan says of Bausch’s famous Q&A sessions: “You never knew what the hell she was going to take [from the improvisations]. Some people did great things and she didn’t ask to see it again.” The process was liberating, she tells me, but as the years passed “it got more difficult because you’ve done so many things on stage, you’ve shown so much about yourself”. Förster, who performed in the German premiere of Gebirge, tells the story that Bausch was unhappy about the fact that he had recently gone to New York to work with the José Limón company. “So that meant I was not very happy in rehearsals because she ignored me for a long time. And it was just two weeks before the premiere when she asked Dominique [Mercy] and me to stay and she choreographed this little duet with Dominique and me, a slow dance that is perfect Pina choreography. So in the end we were together again.” Förster adds that in Gebirge and Ahnen, “all the movements” came from Bausch: “A few steps came from the dancers but the basic movements are all from her.” When the company revived Gebirge in Wuppertal in 2013, having not performed it for many years, Förster was one of just a handful of original members among the cast. The company has always emphasised the importance of a dialogue between the dancers who create pieces and those who later appear in them. As the earliest members get older and perform fewer parts, they nonetheless play a role in ensuring that they pass on their knowledge of the works to the younger dancers. Jennings explains that he learned his part in Ahnen – that of a surreal, leather-jacketed punk wearing sunglasses and a kilt, with a toilet chain hanging from his mouth – from Mark Sieczkarek who originated the role. He also learned about Sieczkarek’s personal life at the time – an essential part of the process, because the dancers were encouraged to bring autobiographical elements to the performances. Ahnen was paired with the earlier piece for this month’s London dates because it is considerably lighter in tone. “Gebirge is quite a heavy, dark piece,” says Förster. “And Ahnen is just completely crazy.” Rehearsal footage from the time – released on a captivating DVD, Ahnen Ahnen – certainly backs up that assessment. The costumes include huge blue-feathered wings; the stage is full of towering cactuses and an imposing wardrobe seems to form part of the set. The make-up, too, is striking: eyeballs painted on eyelids, a fitting symbol for the choreographer as all-seeing observer of human behaviour. But in the footage it’s hard to tell where the backstage activities begin and end: dancers are seen sitting around, knitting and eating cream cakes, which – this being a Pina Bausch work – may just be part of the performance. Burkert says that, musically, Ahnen is “the most colourful piece I ever did. There are so many different things – ethnological music, easy listening, Fred Astaire and Billie Holiday [both providing a link with Gebirge]. There are between 30 and 40 titles – punk music, folk music from Switzerland, a little Purcell, Monteverdi.” He appears himself in Ahnen as an old man in a winter coat, playing a Catalan guitar piece. The radical approach to music was part of the controversy after Bausch took over at Wuppertal, where the performances had traditionally been accompanied by an orchestra. Bausch used an orchestra for two pieces adapted from Gluck operas, then tried to make Bluebeard – based on Bartók – with an orchestra. “But she had in her head already a special recording,” says Burkert. “When she was confronted with singers in Wuppertal, she realised it wasn’t easy to get the right kind of interpretation – it was a conflict in the end.” Instead, she not only used a recording but also made the tape machine itself integral to the action. “Bluebeard uses a tape machine on four wheels – almost as a weapon against his wife.” Like Gebirge, Ahnen was unstaged for many years after its first round of performances. Pabst says he had forgotten how mad it is. His design encompasses around 50 of the giant cactuses, a glass coffin and a remote-controlled helicopter. The great depth of the stage at Wuppertal enables such ambitious visions. When they go on tour, Pabst sometimes accompanies the company if the set needs to be dramatically re-created for a smaller stage. Ahnen needs to be re-imagined nearly every time. “There are very strange things” in Ahnen, says Shanahan, who explains that the title has a double meaning: ancestors and a sense of premonition. “The piece suggests spirits from other places, everybody is in a strange state of mind.” The way Shanahan talks of Gebirge (“it brings us in all of our strange forms together … we’re so different but all somehow come back to the same essence”) says something about the company’s own identity. Tanztheater Wuppertal has always had an international lineup, most strikingly conveyed in a sequence in 1980 in which, as Land of Hope and Glory plays, the dancers take turns in striding up to a microphone and naming three things from their country (Spaghetti! Caruso! Espresso! / Chopin! Vodka! Nijinsky!). Related: Pina Bausch tributes: 'She got the keys to your soul' Shanahan says that when she arrived in Germany in 1984, “people hadn’t started talking about the holocaust really. People were building up their lives after the war. Everyone was trying to cope with this heaviness that they were living through. The need to do theatre was completely different to what it is today – they had to do something about their pain.” What Bausch achieved, she says, was a mix of performers “from around the world who had their own lives. The Australians came from a place of freedom and wildness. People here had learned to control their emotions. How clever was she to bring together all these people from around the world, all the different facets of human life.” Audiences in Wuppertal, too, come from all over. When, in Masurca Fogo, Nazareth Panadero does her routine asking members of the front row “Where do you come from?”, the answers might often be London or Paris. The company’s annual performances in those cities frequently sell out and many fans fly to Cologne or Düsseldorf to make the short train journey on to Bausch’s home town. If you stay in the hotel next to the company’s office, you can even meet the canine star of one of Bausch’s productions (her famous eye for casting was caught by the hotel owner’s pooch). “This isn’t a city you come to visit because it’s beautiful. This is a city where you work,” Bausch told the dancers. “That’s what she wanted from us,” says Shanahan. “We went into that Lichtburg and we worked and worked and worked. And we created a world of its own, full of so much intimacy. In Wuppertal, where nothing is really happening, we had a world of our own where we can try out everything ... with the spirit of Pina there now.” |