Sixteen years after her passing, Pina Bausch remains the most famous contemporary choreographer in the world, and the fate of the company she founded is still inextricably tied to her. For Tanztheater Wuppertal, this is a double-edged sword. It grants a level of publicity that few other dance troupes could dream of, especially those based in obscure German towns.
But with that comes a heavy level of expectation.
Company Director Boris Charmatz seems to acknowledge that difficulty in this hybrid work, which combines one of her pieces with two of his. Bausch’s iconic Café Müller is what most of the audience is here for. For forty minutes, the stage is infused with romance, wonder and whimsy as six dancers careen through a chair-filled cafe, repeating motifs that build and intertwine as they invite audience members to form their own narratives.
The unusual GA seating arrangement allows us to sit close enough to hear the performers breathing heavily as they move around the stage, and to feel them being slammed into the plexiglass screens that encircle the cafe. We’re surrounded by the sound of high heels pattering across the stage as a woman runs around frantically searching for connection, always escaping just as she is about to find it.
Another sleepwalking woman wanders blindly through the cafe, bumping into chairs and scraping them across the floor. When she picks up her speed, a dapper gentleman emerges to clear her path before she literally runs into her soulmate. Together they play out the stages of their romance over and over, though it’s unclear whether we’re witnessing the strength of their passion or the repetitive patterns of a doomed relationship.
Club Amour’s somewhat awkward staging means there’s a half-hour break on either side of this performance, with half the audience watching Charmatz’s works beforehand and half ushered into the lobby while the stage is reset.
Aatt enen tionon begins with the audience being ushered onto the Festival Theatre stage, where props are leaned against the walls and PJ Harvey’s “Rid Of Me” blasts through the speakers (a nice coincidence, given she headlined WOMADelaide a few days earlier).
In the centre of the stage sits a three-storey structure with one dancer on each level shadowboxing and running on the spot while the guitars and drums crash around them menacingly. As the music goes down, they shed their pants and throw themselves around their cubic cells, dropping to the floor as if felled by invisible wrestlers before flopping around like fish plucked out of the water for forty minutes.
After another PJ interlude, two dancers emerge for the more meditative herses, duo, which evolves at an almost sculptural pace as two naked bodies writhe over and around one another. Charmatz supports Johanna Elisa Lemke as he rolls around, contorting his body so that she barely touches the
floor.
There’s an undeniable poetry to their movements, even if it looks less like love than unhealthy independence, the two dancers seeming whole only when they are intertwined.
Ultimately the juxtaposition of these works, like the staging that leaves audiences milling around for half an hour while the stage is reset, feels a bit clumsy. Charmatz is trying to walk a fine line, acknowledging Bausch’s legacy by programming one of her classic pieces while signalling a new direction for the company with two of his own. But in trying to have it both ways, Club Amour forces the past and (potential) future of the company together in an awkward union that has little connection, let alone the love promised by the title.
THREE AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
The reviewer attended the performance on the 11th of March.
Images credited to Roy Van Der Vegt.
