Dance
Pina Bausch: Tanztheater Wuppertal (Theatre de la Ville, Paris)
A touch of frivolity
Sophie Constant'
n evening in the company of Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal used to mean unrelieved exposure — up to four hours of it — to the violent, bewildered and regressive outpourings of men and Women who would have looked more at home making small talk at a cocktail party than participating in a multilingual, group version of In the Psychiatrist's Chair. .Tanzabend II, created this year, is recog- nisable Bausch territory: 25 performers — all, thankfully, well past the first flush of Youth — in a series of walk-on, walk-off episodes, all with a story to tell, a comment to make, a little phrase of movement to demonstrate, a joke to throw away or a problem to air. What is new about all this is
that the images drawn are often as digni- fied as they are funny or silly, and the over- all tone of the piece is light-hearted, affectionate, celebratory. Gone is the obsessive cruelty of Bausch's earlier disser- tations, where to reveal a small portion of one's personal history was to succumb to emotional and physical pain of the highest order. Bausch's recurring themes — male domination, female revenge, the free spirit straitjacketed by convention and the dis- turbed psyche breaking out from under a veneer of sickening formality and respectability — were hardly what you'd call frivolous. But, even in the darker days, hers was a theatre not entirely without humour.
Ten years on, Bausch's backdrop is still a harrowing vision of the futility of existence, but an irrepressible naughtiness counters the heavy, Germanic angst. The women are no longer perpetually cast as downtrodden, pathetic creatures who have suffered untold horrors at the hands of screwed-up, sadistic men. And the men are now offered more options. Although both the emotion- ally dead, northern European cardboard cut-out in a suit and the smarmy git polic- ing the stage are still there, vulnerability and embarrassment are now as evident as brute strength and authority in Bausch's operative list of male traits.
With Tanzabend II, Bausch also leaves behind the sex-war mantras of her earlier
epics. Raw nerves are touched with far more subtlety in this new work and Bausch's direction is characterised by suc- cinctness and perfect timing. The solo pre- sentations, in particular, are frequently brisk, businesslike and straight to the point — the point usually being as incomprehen- sible and entertaining as the act itself. A woman strides on stage with a china piggy bank, holds it out to people in the front row and waits for them to make a contribu- tion. Another woman climbs into a wet skirt, poses, grins and walks off. Another rushes in and attempts to relay the distress- ing details of a fatal accident. A woman sit- ting slumped in her chair is turned into a living corpse by an assistant who forces a broomstick down the back of her clothing, secures it to her neck, stuffs her jowls with tissue and encourages her to go walkabout.
The set, as in nearly every Bausch pro- duction, is dominated by the floor surface. This time it's a snowy field, with a light storm of flakes drifting down for most of the evening. Women in evening dresses and stiletto heels, and men in suits — the Wuppertal uniform — look utterly at ease in the landscape. Bausch's performers have always made an art out of the details of inappropriate attire or behaviour. These things simply add to the tailored absurdity and neurosis which infects everything they do. Bausch creates a world in which men and women are instructed not to listen to the inner voice of reason, the voice which, if nothing else, tells one to behave. The irrational is allowed to exist, but it is strictly controlled: Bausch no longer has time for fruitless meandering or snatches of psy- chotherapy on stage. Her performers get on, do their stuff and get off without fuss. The images of self-pity and degradation have been replaced — by an attitude which embraces and illustrates the notion of life as one big, ridiculous pose; a notion taken to its extreme when one of the women stands in front of us, removes her bra pads and shoulder pads, takes off her wig, rips off her false eyelashes, smears away her lip- stick and marches out with devastating panache.
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