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Julien Stierle and Tsai-Chin Yu watched by the celebrants in Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring<\/em>. Photo: Stephanie Berger<\/p><\/div>\n Pina Bausch made a wise decision in 1984 when Tanztheater Wuppertal\u2014 the company she headed in that park-studded, industrial German city\u2014made its New York debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music: she introduced us to her stylistic preoccupations gradually. Between graduating from the Folkwangschule in Essen in 1958 and performing in the Folkwang Tanzstudio, directed by her former teacher Kurt Jooss, Bausch had spent a year studying at Juilliard and another year performing in the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and in works by Paul Sanasardo and Donya Feuer (plus once joining Paul Taylor in a duet). She may have understood the allure of movement and form in vanguard post-Cunningham circles. So her company\u2019s Program A at BAM in 1984 consisted of her The Rite of Spring<\/em> (1975) and Caf\u00e9 Muller<\/em> (1978). She was, so to speak, breaking us in. Her company performed in Brooklyn fourteen more times.<\/p>\n In these two pieces, unlike in her later ones, no one talked, no one sang, and no one chatted up spectators in the front row. No absurd games were played; no disturbing punishments developed (unless you count dancing yourself to death as punishment). <\/em>In both Rite<\/em> and Caf\u00e9 M\u00fcller<\/em>, dancing dominates, and emotion is conveyed by its timing, focus, and variegated dynamics. Still, those of us who saw Program A before we saw Program B could consider ourselves primed. Program B: Bluebeard<\/em> (1977) and 1980\u2014A Piece by Pina Bausch<\/em>. We were ready to be amazed, outraged, thrilled, and provoked into laughter.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>Watching Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch (re-named after Bausch\u2019s death in 2009) perform revivals of The Rite of Spring<\/em> (rehearsal directors: Barbara Kaufmann, Julie Shanahan, and Kenji Takagi) and Caf\u00e9 M\u00fcller <\/em>(rehearsal director Dominique Mercy, assisted by B\u00e9n\u00e9dicte Billiet), <\/em>I\u2019m interested to see what I didn\u2019t<\/em> notice in 1984. I have changed, and perhaps, very subtly, so have the dances.<\/p>\n Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch in Caf\u00e9 M\u00fcller<\/em>. (L to R): Pau Aran Jimeno, Azusa Seyama, Scott Jennings, and Helena Pikon. Photo: Stephanie Berger<\/p><\/div>\n Compared with most Bausch works we\u2019ve seen, Caf\u00e9 M\u00fcller<\/em> is a miniature. Its setting by Bausch\u2019s then colleague and lover, Rolf Borzik, is a bleak restaurant after hours. Three doors punctuate its solid gray walls; one of these\u2014wide and glassy\u2014shows the outside. We presume another door, hidden behind a panel at the back. At some point, we can see through the main door into actions happening beyond the large room. The chairs are wooden, the tables, small, round, and scattered about. As a child, Bausch must have spent time in her parent\u2019s caf\u00e9, whether patrons were there or not.<\/p>\n What I didn\u2019t see clearly in 1984 is the expertise with which Bausch jumbled together, displaced, and layered the actions of the six people who frequent this place and stride or rush in and out of it. It\u2019s as if we\u2019re seeing an analogue to the stews that might emerge from the kitchen; elements float to the surface and sink down, a current stirs them into juxtaposition or breaks them apart. In one of two casts, Helena Pikon (as tall and thin as Bausch was in the role) is a sleepwalker, her straight arms pushing downward and slightly ahead of her. (She\u2019s strangely inefficient; her fragile fingertips would hit an obstacle first.) The way she bangs against a wall and stays there a while conflates a safe boundary with a barrier. Azusa Seyama (Beatrice Libonati in 1984) is also barefoot, and dressed, like Pikon, in a long, pale, clinging garment, almost a nightgown; she too, at times, gropes her way, unseeing. She too bangs against a wall.<\/p>\n Pau Aran Gimeno assumes the role that Borzik himself played at the work\u2019s 1978 premiere. (How suitable for the set designer to be watchful in case these women hurt themselves!) Gimeno hastens after one or the other of the women, thrusting tables out of the way and toppling chairs to create clear pathways. Over the course of the dance, it becomes harder and harder for him to do this efficiently. No matter; he keeps at it.<\/p>\n Helena Pikon (L) and Nazareth Panadero in Pina Bausch’s Caf\u00e9 M\u00fcller<\/em>. Photo: Stephanie Berger<\/p><\/div>\n A third woman (played in one of the two casts by veteran Bausch performer Nazareth Panadero) also has a single task\u2014or perhaps task is the wrong word, since no clear goal is immediately evident. She\u2019s wearing high heels and a black coat over her dress, and she toddles in and out of the action with busy, but inefficient little steps, as if she\u2019s constantly checking things. Imagine a busy mother or grandmother, periodically looking into the room where the kids are playing to make sure everyone\u2019s okay. She, like Aran Gimeno, is watchful every second she\u2019s onstage, sometimes hovering as if wanting to help but not knowing how to do it. Just before the end, she takes off her coat and shoes and, her back to us, begins a sly fragment of a dance.<\/p>\n The dancing of Pikon and Seyama is sensuous in a different way; they\u2019re self-absorbed, dreamy. Each may wreathe an arm around her head or slip both arms around each other as if tying silky knots. Each bends her body lavishly sideways. The music that intermittently pits the silence and the toppling of chairs is drawn from Henry Purcell\u2019s opera Dido and Aeneas<\/em>, and it seems to get under the skins of these two (or perhaps one woman and her remembered self). \u201cOh let me,\u201d sings the recorded soprano voice, \u201cohhh let me, let me weep.\u201d<\/p>\n The other two characters are men (Jan Minarik and Dominique Mercy in the original production and in Brooklyn in 1984). One (Michael Strecker) wears a dark suit and moves stolidly and purposefully. The other (Scott Jennings) is garbed in trousers and a loosely fitting white shirt. The strongest image that lodged in my mind in 1984 was of a many-times repeated act involving those men and one of the women. It goes like this. Jennings and Seyama stand embraced. Strecker, about to leave, notices this and turns back. He carefully rearranges Jennings\u2019s arms to create a ledge, re-drapes Seyama\u2019s around her partner, presses their mouths together, and lifts her into Jennings’ now-ready support. He\u2019s almost out the door when Jennings lets his arms go limp; Seyama falls to the floor, but immediately recovers into the pair\u2019s original embrace.<\/p>\n (L to R): Michael Strecker, Azusa Seyama, and Scott Jennings in Pina Bausch’s Caf\u00e9 M\u00fcller<\/em>. Photo Stephanie Berger<\/p><\/div>\n Like an impatient teacher or father, Strecker starts the whole process again. And again and again and again and again. . . . The action escalates. Perhaps Jennings is tiring; he drops Seyama sooner and sooner, and she recovers with increasing alacrity; Strecker has to race to reinstate, in slapdash haste, the position he approves of. I didn\u2019t think in 1984, that perhaps this authoritarian character wishes the woman to remain a child. Or perhaps he wants to give her away.\u00a0 Nor had I remembered that the man played by Jennings\u00a0 soon becomes addicted to falling himself\u2014collapsing loosely over and over and over (does he want to know what Seyama has felt?). And I had forgotten that, at least once, Seyama stands alone somewhere else, being embraced when there\u2019s no one near her.<\/p>\n This time, when the lights are almost out, I see in the dimness something I never saw before: Panadero is gently draping her coat over Pikon\u2019s shoulders. Maybe she\u2019s taking her home. Wherever that is. In the darkness, we hear the scrape of a chair against the floor.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve mentioned the names of the performers I saw in 1984 because they were so memorable that the fine performers I see in 2017 harbor their ghosts.<\/p>\n The women of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch perform The Rite of Spring<\/em>. Photo: Stephanie Berger<\/p><\/div>\n Bausch made The Rite of Spring<\/em> while she was busy creating dances for the operas shown in the Wuppertal Opera House. It was one of three works to music by Stravinsky that she staged in 1975 and revived in 2013 for a program honoring her company\u2019s 40th<\/sup> anniversary. (A reconstruction of the opening piece, Wind from the West<\/em>, was presented in New York by Juilliard Dance in December of that year.)<\/p>\n Stravinsky\u2019s epochal score led Bausch from the beginning of a ritual to its ending. It\u2019s not the kind of music a choreographer can easily ignore. What the composer wrote for Njinsky\u2019s 1913 Le Sacre du Printemps<\/em> shocked the Parisians who attended Serge Diaghilev\u2019s Ballets Russes as much as the \u201cprimitive\u201d choreography did. Nijinsky and Stravinsky naturally conceived the ritual as anchored in dancing, and Bausch had to rise to that challenge. She did so magnificently. Her work is more violent, more primal than that of any other choreographer using that music (that is, any that I\u2019ve seen).<\/p>\n The stage design by Borzik (who died in 1980) contributes greatly to its power. Those of us who didn\u2019t leave our seats at intermission got to see the site being prepared. Only instead of village elders and their servants, we watched a small army of black-clad stage technicians spread a groundcloth, staple-gun it down, and, side by side, trudge across it to smooth out any wrinkles. Then they wheeled in six (or was it eight?) containers and, on cue, tipped them to dump loads of red-brown peat on the floor, and, in their own kind of dance, smooth it out with rakes.<\/p>\n The throng in Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring<\/em> circles the ritual space. Photo: Stephanie Berger<\/p><\/div>\n It\u2019s the women in the piece that we see as individuals, even though they perform dances as rhythmically thumping and thrusting as the men and are crucial in the big wheeling circle with which all 36 performers enclose the ritual space to the sound of a heavy-footed passage of music. They are the first to answer to Stravinsky\u2019s quiet summons\u2014one by one, or in twos and threes. They cluster to confer, wander about, seem to anticipate what\u2019s to come. Occasionally one of them pulls her dress up, as if thinking of taking it off. The red piece of fabric that one woman is lying on when the lights come up will turn out to be the garment that the chosen one will wear. Having watched a video of this intermittently over the years, I never noticed until now that much of the dancing that the women do tells us that they are practicing the steps of the climactic ritual for which one of them will be selected.<\/p>\n Once the men arrive, the participants separate by gender into two tight-knit squads. The dancing is as ferocious as the crashing music. The performers stamp, feet wide apart; they fling themselves into the air; they charge across the space. On a final loud crack of sound, they fall face down. As the piece winds toward its inevitable end, Borzik\u2019s earth adds its own grim touch. It sticks to the sweating, bare-chested men, begrimes their hands and faces, soils the women\u2019s flimsy dresses.<\/p>\n Suddenly we\u2019re aware of one man (Julien Stierle) who is standing still: the leader, the shaman. We begin to notice individual women. Seyama has a brief outburst, is watched, stalked. Ophelia Young gets Stierle\u2019s attention; he feels her body, but she runs away. The crisis mounts when the quaking women huddle together, and now one, now another approaches the waiting priest, holding the bundled-up red dress. Each in her own way runs back into the group\u2014frightened, or rejected by the immobile man in charge, whose face we can\u2019t see.<\/p>\n Julian Stierle (kneeling) with Ophelia Young and the male ensemble of Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring<\/em>. Photo Stephanie Berger<\/p><\/div>\n As soon as he grasps one (Tsai-Chin Yu), the ritual takes another turn. The women spraddle the men and are twisted this way and that in a stylized, pre-ordained rape. Terrifyingly, they launch themselves into the air and end up seated on a partner\u2019s shoulder. Stierle pushes small, resistant Yu toward the men and leans her out toward them. In the midst of a dancing storm, his back turned to us, he conceals her while he garbs her in the red dress. Then he lies on his back, both arms raised, and waits, while Stravinsky\u2019s music begins its shudderings and outcries. Everyone else watches without emotion the final dance. Almost every movement we\u2019ve seen so far reappears transformed by ordeal. As in those performances of the piece that I\u2019ve seen one of the straps of the maiden\u2019s dress breaks, so that one of her breasts is bare, somehow rendering her even more vulnerable (I once thought this effect was accidental).<\/p>\n The sacrificial dance is a long one\u2014arduous for the dancer as well as terminal for the character. Nijinsky and Stravinsky may not have made this connection, but watching Yu\u2019s wrenching portrayal of Bausch\u2019s victim-heroine, you can think of the sacrifices that dancers make and the ordeals they undergo in the life span of their careers.<\/p>\n At the performance I attended, the audience consisted of many more young people than usual at BAM, and people seemed not only thrilled but flabbergasted as they stood to applaud the wet, grimy, exhausted dancers, who\u2014 as always with Tanztheater Wuppertal\u2019s heroic performers\u2014bowed gravely, breathing hard. Pina would have been proud.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch returns to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (through September 24). Pina Bausch made a wise decision in 1984 when Tanztheater Wuppertal\u2014 the company she headed in that park-studded, industrial German city\u2014made its New York debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music: she introduced us to her stylistic preoccupations gradually. Between graduating […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5239,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[448,2790,2781,2787,2784,2782,2786,2783,365,1030,2785,2780,2789,2788],"class_list":{"0":"post-5238","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-dance-theater","8":"tag-azusa-seyama","9":"tag-cafe-muller","10":"tag-helena-pikon","11":"tag-julien-stierle","12":"tag-michael-strecker","13":"tag-nazareth-panadero","14":"tag-ophelia-young","15":"tag-pau-auran-gimeno","16":"tag-pina-bausch","17":"tag-rolf-borzik","18":"tag-scott-jennings","19":"tag-tanztheater-wuppertal-pina-bausch","20":"tag-the-rite-of-spring","21":"tag-tsai-chin-yu","22":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5238"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5248,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5238\/revisions\/5248"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/AJ-Muller-lift.jpg\")
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