THE HANGOVER REPORT – Pina Bausch lives on emphatically in the remount of an historic double bill at BAM

Pina Bausch's "The Rite of Spring" at BAM

Pina Bausch’s “The Rite of Spring” at BAM

There are only a handful of choreographers who have had the same far-reaching impact to the arts as the late, great Pina Bausch. Indeed, her influence reaches beyond the world of dance to cultivate later generations of both dance and theater artists. Here in New York, one need not look much further than popular, long-running immersive hits Sleep No More or Then She Fell to encounter Bausch’s particular brand of dance theater. In 1984, Bausch and her company Tanztheater Wuppertal made their American debut with an historic  double bill at BAM that included the now iconic The Rite of Spring and Café Müller. Fast forward more than three decades, Tanztheater Wuppertal returns to BAM with the same program but without Bausch. Suffice to say, expectations for the sold-out return, an offering at this year’s essential Next Wave Festival, are running very high.

Café Müller is a classic. The dance is a haunted and haunting exploration of the human condition. Viewers may remember snippets of it used in Pedro Almodóvar’s exquisite film Talk to Her and the Bausch documentary Pina (if you can’t make it out to BAM, you owe it to yourself to stream it). Here, Bausch views our existence as limited experiences, bound by animalistic instinct and habit. We are needy, selfish creatures that sleep walk through our lives to little cumulative effect. Despite Café Müller‘s tragic viewpoint of humanity, there is beauty in the tapestry it weaves as it shows its society of characters stumbling along together. Despite my familiarity with the piece, I was deeply unsettled and moved by the experience of seeing it live for the first time (kudos to the hyper-sensitive Tanztheater Wuppertal dancers, some of them quite young and clearly of the post-Bausch era).

Bausch’s take on The Rite of Spring is the more “pure” dance piece – and arguably the less psychologically astute – of the two. But it makes for heart-pounding viewing. Stravinsky’s game-changing score is a rousing piece of music, and Bausch rises up to the occasion, giving us an epic, viscerally-charged battle of the sexes. It’s a ritualistic and relentless depiction that sends the audience into the night howling, and somehow slightly changed.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

 

CAFE MULLER/THE RIGHT OF SPRING
Dance
Tanztheater Wuppertal at BAM
2 hours (with one intermission)
Through September 24

 

Categories: Dance

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