Tanztheater Wuppertal: Café Muller/The Rite of Spring
Sadler’s Wells 16/02/08
In Café Muller, two women enter, blind, offering their arms, palms turned upwards, defenceless, stumbling around. A man in a suit clears tables and chairs from their path, attending to, without containing their traumatic spasms of feeling. A man enters, also blind and barefoot, eventually found by one of the women, who embraces him with unguarded commitment and honesty. They stand; desperate, together, consoling, entwined, Adam and Eve. Another man in a suit, seeks to rearrange their Antediluvian innocence, first encouraging, then compelling the man to wrest himself from the embrace and to carry the women’s limp body, as if rescued from some catastrophe. The man can’t bear her weight for long, and she falls to the ground. Again, the suited contriver compels; again, the man drops his burden. Again and again, until the contriver disappears, leaving the woman to offer herself as a sacrifice, so habituated has she become to her manipulation.
The couple battle for the exit, throwing each other back against the wall, rather than permit each other to withdraw. The man is helpless, lost, angry, craving guidance from the dispassionate Graces who attend on him, clearing a path as he palpitates and thrashes on the ground.
Beyond them, and before them, an older Sylph (originally danced by Bausch herself), struggles alone along her own path, as one who has gone before, as one who has put down the desperate dance of relationship and is out ahead on her own journey of yearning and disappointment. She turns to the wall, in dejection, moves into the room and a mournful, graceful solo, a statement simply that she is here, she has been here; remember her.
Strutting and fretting around this valse triste, a ginger-wigged floozy on pink heels careers hither and yon, the monkey mind of self-consciousness; always busy, always noisy, rarely useful. Initially ineffectual, her attention slowly focusses and she sheds her pretty, childish shoes and dances alone, striking a new, audacious attitude. Her efforts are rewarded by the attention of a mirroring male, all slicked hair and geeky glasses, another avatar of the self-regarding ego, lurking in the doorway, uncommitted, quick to flee.
The women freeze, legs apart and rigid, in shock at the immensity of their solitude, exhausted by the failure of their pleading for recognition. They are carried when they fall, only to fall again, and again.
Leaving Pina, still dancing alone, reaching upwards towards some silent space above.
The Rite of Spring is fire to Café Muller’s ice; a pagan, quivering, carnal ritual in which quarry is selected, tracked and brought down; in which the cardiac throb of Stravinsky’s music is reflected in the sympathetic, ventrical breathing of the sweating dancers.
Pina Bausch articulates the necessity of struggle, of courage to make life meaningful. Her female cohorts graze and roam together, individuals breaking away from the pack to taste the freedom of individual action before scurrying back to hide behind the chiffon shifts of their sisters. One by one, they offer themselves to the marauding males, avoiding the shame of non-selection by de-selecting themselves and cowering in the herd, as most of us do, most of the time.
But one is, at last, chosen, brutally, and put to the test, dancing herself into a frenzy of violence until we gasp at her sacrifice.
In this secular rite, Pina Bausch shows us what Dylan Thomas described as “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” She shows us that to live is to throb with desire, dumb and unknowing. And yet, powerless though we are over these elemental forces that sometimes shape us (but more often knock us out of shape), we are not helpless. In the humility of her dancers’ demeanour as they take their curtain call, and in the wry detachment of her own smile, she also shows us that to live is to answer Nature’s demand to be heard and seen. To be fully human is to demand our place and time, just as every living thing competes for its moment of expression. Pina Bausch makes of this imperative a sacrament.
