"What do you long for? Money? Fame? The love of women? Security? Pleasure? Youth? Your own youth? Your mother's love? Escape to tropical paradise? To be adored? Access to the one you worship? Grace? To be understood? Peace and quiet?"
The great German choreographer Pina Bausch, who died in 2009, regularly asked her dancers such questions. Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, which survives her, has just danced her Danzon here in Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall to screaming ovations (presented by Cal Performances). Simultaneously, Wim Wenders' brilliant 3D documentary film Pina, which shows them dancing literally on the edge of a cliff, was shown at the Shattuck Cinema, in advance of its wide release this coming January.
Her performers replied to her questions with small dances as answers, which formed the basis of her creative process, which has since influenced contemporary dance worldwide. This material she tested, shaped "so it could survive repetition," and strung into tight lyric units, each little world having its own tone and timbre �" some hilarious, some sick-unto-death �" a "playlist" with a deep subtext that holds the whole thing together and takes the audience through a surreal emotional journey.
Worldwide, she's been hugely popular. My spies tell me that tickets are nearly sold out already for the 10 Bausch pieces that play at London's Olympiad next summer. They get a month of Pina. By contrast, in the last 10 years, we've seen only three of her works here. Nur Du, co-commissioned by Cal Perf., which featured three giant sequoias on stage, was a German meditation on the California lifestyle built around the Platters' song "Only You."
Bausch worked in the anti-Nazi tradition, the German Expressionist line that goes straight from Kafka's The Trial, which prophesied the Nazis, through Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Her great teacher Kurt Jooss had refused to work for Hitler (who wanted him to create the spectacle surrounding the Berlin Olympiad) and took refuge during WWII in England. Returning after the war, he gave the young Pina Bausch the role of the grieving mother in his great antiwar ballet, the woman who has to see all her children picked off by Death. Danzon has many echoes of the nightmarish Green Table. At any moment the pleasant scene could dissolve and reveal itself to be a wish-fulfilling fantasy, and the reality is, you're about to die.
Danzon (created in 1995) is loosely Cuban, but essentially is a study in the perennial German escapist dream, the tropical Paradise where, in Goethe's phrase, "die Zitronen Bluhn [the lemon tree blooms]." It is not necessary to feel all the echoes of the great pre-Nazi tradition inherent in Danzon, but if you do hear them, they add greatly to the resonance of the piece, and make it almost intolerably moving. It's two hours long with no intermission but easy to enjoy, if you're willing to accept an absurdist tone. The evening's arc is explicitly birth to death. The dancer who appears in a diaper, crawling on his hands and knees at the beginning, and recurs in that garb many times, once crawling across the catwalk at the top back of the bare stage, from which he throws things like a baby dropping his spoon from a high chair, that same dancer reappears as a menacing figure of Death. He stalks maidens lolling in bathtubs like odalisques, whom he hauls one after another off to a mysterious end. Each one flirts with him, like Blanche Dubois, but gets hauled away nonetheless. It was impossible for me not to think of Death taking away the mother's sons in The Green Table.
Danzon seems steeped in the pre-Nazi world of German Romanticism. Goethe himself is evoked explicitly in a "messenger's scene" where the composition of Der Wanderers Nachtlied is recited in English. There is a hilarious scene of campfire tales, told in English and screamingly funny, which evokes the Waldesgesprach of so many German Lieder, translated into modern tones. But the last word is Mahleresque melancholy. Das Lied von der Erde was evoked early, with a recitation from the Chinese, and again at the end, as one of his most desolate songs plays while a dancer crawls off-stage and shovelfuls of dirt are tossed onto her back. Hitler sent jazz-lovers to the concentration camps; perhaps that's why jazz features so prominently in Bausch's soundscapes.
I leave you with a YouTube clip of the most Kafkaesque moment in the piece, in which dancer Dominique Mercy freaks out: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBM3RJjtEqU. This spastic solo expresses a Kafkaesque state of frenzied anxiety, but the dance, though it mimics loss of control, in fact sustains exact repetition. The Bausch repertory is classic �" it is built to last, and to sustain endless re-applications of attention.