Mellower Now, A Resolute Romantic Keeps Trying
THE reports from Germany confirm it: Pina Bausch has mellowed.
"Gone are the days of the all-too-ugly battle of the sexes," announced one critic. Another wrote that the artistic director of the Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal "has become gentle," displaying a "new and almost old-fashioned tenderness." Kissing couples abound, as do scenic projections of erotically bursting petals and shivering stamens. Last year's Masurca Fogo was described as "an often funny, cheerfully melancholic piece." This summer, O Dido turned out to be more sensual than spectacular. This "kinder, gentler Pina" was glimpsed by New Yorkers as early as 1994, when the company performed Two Cigarettes in the Dark at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. When the troupe returned with Der Fensterputzer ("The Window Washer") in 1997, the New York dance press, which had largely dismissed Ms. Bausch's initial appearances in the mid-1980's as Eurotrash, was quick to note the production's lighter touch — its lyrical music, delightful humor and joyful dancing.
This romantic impulse should come as no surprise, really. The perpetual yearning, the sublime terror, the mysterious symbolism — the belief in the possibility of love in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary — have always underpinned the Wuppertal productions, albeit with a post-modern edge. The very fact that Ms. Bausch continues to probe the human condition, after having explored its foulest, most malignant territories, bespeaks the romantic's refusal to surrender to rational argument. What Ms. Bausch once explained about her dancers applies most of all to herself: she is not repeating herself; she is trying again.
The Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal returns to the Brooklyn Academy for its seventh appearance this week (Tuesday and Thursday through next Sunday), after a monthlong tour in California, Arizona and Texas. This time, the company brings the 1995 production, Danzon, one of only two dances in the repertory that feature Ms. Bausch onstage. She performs her pensive solo partnered by enormous and splendidly colored fish swimming in projection behind her. There's a certain innocence to Danzon, and Keatsian melancholy. It ends with a recollection of mortality by the elderly Goethe, who, after revisiting one of his youthful poems, concludes, "Now we can leave."
The company's cultlike appeal to audiences began in New York during its debut at the Academy 15 years ago. The critical response was just as strong, but hardly devotional. The formalists accused Ms. Bausch of being a feminist, and the feminists (myself included) accused her of being a nihilist.
Coming to grips with Ms. Bausch's 25-year oeuvre at such a remove from Wuppertal is difficult. We see only a small selection from the 33-work repertory every few years, out of sequence and out of sync with her current work. The density and protraction of each piece demands repeated viewings, but if you want to study videotapes, a small monitor in a cramped theater basement in Wuppertal is your only option.
It was Nur Du ("Only You"), Ms. Bausch's 1996 co-production with several American universities in the Southwest and California, that laid bare the fundamental romanticism of her vision.
Act II opens with a despondent dancer, Julie Shanahan, approaching the edge of a redwood forest as if she were arriving at the rehearsal studio — dressed in her civies, dance bag slung over her shoulder. Standing with her back to the audience, she is the lonely figure out of a Caspar David Friedrich landscape, humbled by the exalted vista spread out before her. Ms. Shanahan confides to the trees that she doesn't have any ideas. Or any costume. She's not wearing high heels. But still, she came anyway. "I don't have a hairdo," she continues. "I'm not wearing makeup. I'm sorry. Anyway, I still came." And then she screams.
Sometimes, just showing up is an act of faith.
Like her mentor, Kurt Jooss, who is best known for his prescient 1932 antiwar masterpiece, The Green Table, Ms. Bausch connects most powerfully not with any esthetic tradition or artistic style, but with her life and times, especially its proliferating anxieties. Cafe Muller, Blaubart ("Bluebeard") and Kontakthof ("Contact Courtyard") were created during the worst years of West German terrorist kidnapping, hijacking and murder. Blaubart, the choreographer later recalled, dealt with her fear of violence, and dealt with it in an extreme manner befitting that particular moment in her life. When these dances were presented in New York, Ms. Bausch was roundly denounced for her bleak and brutal vision of humanity.
Perhaps only now, after the accumulated horrors of the Columbine High School shootings, a Texas lynching and a homophobic murder, can we appreciate the wonder, even the triumph, of "going on" — in life or in the theater. For Ms. Bausch, the fact of the theater as a communal space where feelings can be shared and meaning generated constitutes its source of strength and beauty.
"I marvel not why someone dies outside his lover's tent," says the actress Mechthild Grossmann in the 1989 film, "Die Klage der Kaiserin" ("The Plaint of the Empress"). "I marvel though when someone loves and still goes on with life." Ms. Bausch's works have always addressed the abyss between desire and reality in one form or another, most often in the crucible of male-female relationships. We long for love or autonomy or perfection. We rarely, if ever, get it, but we'll die trying. And in the meantime, we'll make theater out of its shadows. But instead of smoothing over that desperate chasm, Hollywood-style, Ms. Bausch adapts its structure — incompletion, fragmentation, disruption and interruption — as a way to inhabit and inspect it more fully.
WHAT diverted our attention from Ms. Bausch's romantic disposition was the veneer of gritty hyper-realism in her work. The dancers share their own memories and stories, manhandle each other and plow their way across dirt, grass and water. The scenery looks so real that it's obviously fake.
By playing conspicuously with the open secret of theatrical illusion, Ms. Bausch overturns the usual presumption that art mirrors life. Acting becomes the primal behavior and our own performance anxieties just so many variants on the actor's almost unbearable vulnerability: the desire to be loved and the fear of rejection; the desire to be seen and the fear of humiliation; the desire to show off and the fear of failure.
Ms. Bausch's art aspires to the condition of poetry in order to express the inexpressible. Choreography then becomes a search for the external form — images and pictures, mostly — of what she already knows but cannot yet articulate. There is an exact knowledge somewhere, she said, circling her hands around her body and her head during a recent lecture in Austin, "but I don't know where it is."
Not unlike the sightless but insightful princess she portrayed in Fellini's film "E la Nave Va" ("And the Ship Sails On"), Ms. Bausch gropes toward form and clarity by asking her dancers questions. When choreographing site-specific commissions, she begins with several weeks of "research" on location.
Her entire career (even she admits that the repertory feels like one long dance) has been a sustained inquiry into human behavior, onstage and off.
"It always starts with life," Ms. Bausch says. "Why are we together? Why are people dancing? What does it mean? Why does it mean?" Her answers, each one provisional, are necessarily but not explicitly political.
What few artist-philosophers we have left in this country are writers or artists, and certainly not choreographers. Bill T. Jones is the exception who proves the rule. According to high modernist decorum, choreographers are supposed to confine their attention to matters of form and style and leave the muck of human relations to politicians and popular culture. (In other words, stay barefoot and in the studio.) But hasn't modern dance always been responsible for rooting out the telling gesture?
Surely Ms. Bausch learned about that when she studied with Antony Tudor, a 20th-century master of the dramatic ballet. With an auteur's radically subjective eye, Ms. Bausch has pursued to its logical extreme Martha Graham's dictum that "movement never lies."
In the early 1960's Ms. Bausch was a favored student of Graham's mentor, Louis Horst, at the Juilliard school in New York. Horst was a notoriously rigorous composition teacher, and the German exchange student apparently learned her lessons well. Her Tanztheater is crammed with telling gestures, arresting images and intense emotions. But "in the end," she once remarked to an interviewer, "it's composition."
In his book Study of Modern Dance Forms (1961), Horst included dances of "introspection," "expressionism" and "impressionism," which sound remarkably like Tanztheater. "The impressionist dance," for example, "has a romantic tone but still achieves the dissonance that belongs to our time. It arouses an intensity of attention by its very failure to complete, which is hauntingly affecting. The style has been used by contemporary choreographers to create a poetic mood with a modern texture, removed from any specific development of a plot." He offered as an example Tudor's Lilac Garden, whose leading role, the unfulfilled bride-to-be, Ms. Bausch herself danced under his direction.
It may well turn out, in hindsight, that Ms. Bausch was a romantic post-modernist after all. (The film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder called himself a "romantic anarchist.") What looked at first to be clotted angst appears, with some distance, to contain at least the fantasy of some human solace. Despite the anomie and exhaustion, the Wuppertal productions have never trafficked in anger, and maybe that's why they've been able to outpace the despair.
But then again, maybe age is nature's palliative. "Perhaps the older we get," Ms. Bausch wondered aloud, while still in her early 40's, "the more we fight for love?" Now facing 60, she has renewed her pursuit of the beautiful. Next year she will direct a Wuppertal production of Kontakthof — her most riveting confrontation between the sexes — with senior citizens. "In old age, too, there is beauty," she says.