{"id":1077,"date":"2015-04-20T14:48:49","date_gmt":"2015-04-20T13:48:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/?p=1077"},"modified":"2020-04-20T08:11:38","modified_gmt":"2020-04-20T07:11:38","slug":"dont-mention-the-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/2015\/04\/dont-mention-the-war.html","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t mention the war"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"fGebirge-bound-sitting-lady_1000\"<\/a><\/p>\n

How much should we talk about history when we talk about Pina Bausch<\/a>? Audiences respond to the late choreographer’s elemental themes, but Bausch\u2019s angst was not only existential, but also historic. Sexual politics were an abiding theme in her work, and the pummelling conflict between men and women is the livid matter of much of her dance. But it also figures much more than this \u2013 and the 1984 piece Auf dem Gebirge hat man ein Geschrei geh\u00f6rt<\/em>, which last week received its UK premiere at Sadler\u2019s Wells, speaks clearly to the living trauma of the Second World War.<\/p>\n

In 2012, the Tanztheater Wuppertal brought to London ten of Bausch\u2019s works made in collaboration with major cities<\/a> around the world. They were as various as the places that inspired them \u2013 from Hong Kong to Rio \u2013 but for me, the most successful<\/a> were those which sniffed the air and detected not only what a place revealed but what it concealed. Palermo, Palermo<\/em> (1989) is a rackety piece driven by hunger, from a Sicily still waiting for its economic miracle after wartime devastation. \u2026como el musguito en la piedra, ay si si si\u2026<\/em> (2009) drew lyrical strength from the unspoken disappearances of Chile\u2019s dictatorship. Unhealed wounds, longlasting scars, unacknowledged silences: these are Bausch\u2019s resonant material.<\/p>\n

War baby<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bausch was a war baby, born in 1940. She references her childhood, obliquely, in Caf\u00e9 M\u00fcller<\/em>, where a figure sleepwalks through the production in a nightdress. Bausch herself created the role, drawing on her childhood experiences, and with eyes shut tight against the surrounding scrabbling conflict, it suggests a self-protective somnambulism.<\/p>\n

The family romance and childhood frets that ripple through her work are also about being a child of midcentury Europe \u2013 its damage and desires. The title of Gebirge<\/em> (which translates as \u2018On the mountain a cry was heard\u2019) has been traced back by Hanna Weibye<\/a> of the Arts Desk to a passage in Luther\u2019s Bible, referring to an inconsolable mother lamenting the massacre of the innocents. Innocence, brutalised and herded towards oblivion: there are less accurate descriptions of the anguished mid-20th century.<\/p>\n

\"Auf<\/a>

Auf dem Gebirge. Photo: Oliver Look<\/p><\/div>\n

In Gebirge,<\/em> Bausch drives her signature repetition to the edge of endurance, both in action and in sound. Two scenes are set to Billie Holiday\u2019s recording of \u2018Strange Fruit\u2019, about lynchings in \u2018the gallant South.\u2019 On the second hearing, the recording seems to stick, jump backwards several times \u2013 as if Bausch isn\u2019t ready to let us move past or brush it aside.<\/p>\n

Some images seemed unavoidably steeped in the Holocaust. It is difficult to see women huddling together in a frail caterpillar, heads bent, sitting in the dirt, leaning into each other\u2019s backs, and not think of the Shoah\u2019s victims. A woman who stands at the front of the stage as the first half ends has her long hair chalked grey by a male dancer, looking as though trauma has aged her prematurely. She remains there throughout the interval. She stands, and endures, and bears some kind of witness.<\/p>\n

Bausch elides sexual and political oppression in the recurring figure of a beefy man (Michael Strecker) in too-small fuchsia swimwear, shades over his eyes and elastic smushing his ears and nose into porcine shapes. He strides around bare-chested in his budgie smugglers and incongruous black loafers, ordering and manipulating the dancers (particularly, but not only, the women). He\u2019s a stolid pink patriarchal dick but also a capricious, unreadable commandant \u2013 the phallic imperative in every sphere.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s not alone \u2013 a man whose violence verges on hysteria attacks the huddle of women, slapping and screaming at each in turn until they cry \u2018Uncle!\u2019 and run away. Defiance only lashes his fury \u2013 \u2018I want to kill someone!\u2019 he yells. Like the commandant, he is not any less terrifying for being ridiculous. As Judith Mackrell<\/a> observes, it is \u2018a jagged wound in the piece, and suddenly makes us see the whole production through the lens of Bausch\u2019s Germany and its Nazi past.\u2019<\/p>\n

Like most of Bausch\u2019s work, Gebirge<\/em> is capacious. Often beguiling in detail, disarming in humour, its scenes can\u2019t be reduced to a single theme (if you read one devoted blogger\u2019s aide-memoire<\/a>, you may wonder what links this catalogue of dancing quiddity). Even a single sequence can be at once surreal (the brass ensemble of elderly gents that arrives centre stage), painful (the woman who stands in front of them, slapping at her arms) and blissfully daft (the group of men who bear her aloft, while she rows with invisible oars, bobbing dottily across the stage).<\/p>\n

Sleepwalking through history<\/strong><\/p>\n

Like Bausch\u2019s landmark Rite of Spring<\/em> (1975), it too is set on an earth floor. Rite\u2019s soil flew into the air with each movement, and increasingly streaked and smeared its performers as they were impelled towards its cruel ending. Gebirge<\/em> is less\u00a0extreme \u2013 at least from my seat in the circle, its earth seemed heavier, less mobile, and the frequently dull lighting adds an oppressive note of its own. It\u2019s a piece which largely refuses forward momentum or opportunity for release.<\/p>\n

One sequence that recurs in both halves of the work features a man and woman desperately trying, and failing, to evade groups of men who run them down and drag them together into an unwilling embrace. He struggles, she screams, to no avail. Over and over again. It may echo Rite\u2019s cruel fertility rituals, it may have something to say about individuals crushed by societal pressures. And it may also figure Nazi brutality: certainly to deny these readings is an act of erasure. The aftershocks of the second world war reverberate in the collective unconscious \u2013 in Germany, and far beyond. To ignore them is to sleepwalk through history.<\/p>\n

Photo (top) by Foteini Christofilopoulou.<\/em><\/p>\n

Follow David on Twitter: @mrdavidjays<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How much should we talk about history when we talk about Pina Bausch? Audiences respond to the late choreographer’s elemental themes, but Bausch\u2019s angst was not only existential, but also historic. Sexual politics were an abiding theme in her work, and the pummelling conflict between men and women is the livid matter of much of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1078,"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":[1],"tags":[29,42,184],"class_list":{"0":"post-1077","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-dance","9":"tag-pina-bausch","10":"tag-sadlers-wells","11":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1077"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2022,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1077\/revisions\/2022"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}