Celebrating visuality – Pina Bausch Company in Budapest again

Pina Bausch was a leading figure of modern dance and an influential character in the development of the Tanztheater style of dance. She died in 2009 a few days after her last premiere, but her company has kept working together, performing in their home country and touring around the world. After Nelken (Carnation), Café Müller and Wiesenland (Green Land, a performance inspired by the company’s stay in Hungary), they are bringing Sweet Mambo to the Hungarian audience in the National Theatre.

Bausch was a pioneer of the mixed genre of dance theatre. Her personality had inspired two great film directors, Federico Fellini and Pedro Almodóvar. Philippine ”Pina” Bausch was born on 27 July 1940 in Solingen, near Dusseldorf (Germany). Having spent her childhood in her parents’ coffehouse, her early experiences of human relationships had an influence on her first creative period. She had an unusually flexible body: she started dancing at 14 and entered the Folkwangschule in Essen then directed by Germany's most influential choreographer Kurt Jooss, one of the founders of German Expressionist dance, who looked on the young and talented girl as his successor in dancing. After graduation, she went to New York to study at the Julliard School, where her teachers included Anthony Tudor, José Limón and Paul Taylor. She was performing with the American Ballett, as well as with Paul Sanasardo’s and Donya Feuer’s company, and soon was a member in the ballet company of the Metropolitan Opera. Returning to Essen in 1962, she joined Jooss’ new Folkwang Ballet Company, where she danced as a soloist and also worked as an assistant to Jooss.

Her first own piece of work was Fragmente, choreographed 1968 to music by Béla Bartók. The following year she took over directing the Folkwang Dance Studio, and from 1972 onwards she was artistic director of the Wuppertal Opera Ballet, which was later renamed as the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. Her choreographies (Café Müller, 1978, Kontakthof, 1978, Nelken, 1982) are centered around sombre themes like male-female interaction, distress, loneliness and alienation, but there are also elements of humour and hope in them. Dialogues and action, often of a surreal nature alternate in her pieces. For Bausch, who was the first one to use the expression ’dance theatre’, choreography, stage, sets, space, time, music, speech and characters are all crucial ingredients of a performance, as they help to express what movement and words alone cannot express. Bausch was the first woman to receive Japan’s Kyoto Prize in the Art and Philosophy category in 2007, then in 2008 the prestigious Goethe Prize. She died at 68 of age on 30 June 2009.

One of her closest friends was Wim Wenders, who took about two decades to produce the movie about Bausch. He claims that he was not ready to bring it onto the screen until 3D technique became available, which made it possible to show dance on film in a more authentic way. The shooting of the movie was planned to begin in the summer of 2009. Bausch was to work as co-director on the film, and the cast were going to follow the company on their tour around Europe and Asia. However, Bausch was diagnosed with cancer in June 2009 and died 5 days later, just 2 days before the shooting would begin. The family members and the dancers encouraged the director to realise his movie, which now needed a new script: the dancers would talk about their master, then express their thoughts in movements. Tanzt, sonst sind wir verloren (Dance, otherwise we’re lost) was premiered at the Berlinale in February 2011.

In Sweet Mambo, Bausch, who was once called by a dance historian and critic as ’the archaeologist of behaviour forms’, illustrates the waving rotation of seducing and being seduced, happiness and misery, physical and mental fragility. She has no illusions in depicting the relationship between man and woman in the seemingly unconnected scenes. In one of them, for instance, a woman is running after a man, shouting ”I want to talk to you. You don't want to talk to me? Why don't you want to talk to me? I don't need to talk to you...” In another scene, one of the dancers keeps repeating his own name, as if begging to the audience not to forget him. From time to time, the dancers tell a story about themselves, in order to reduce the distance between their characters and their own lives. One of them explains that life is like riding a bicycle: you either keep going on or you stumble. A man kisses the back of a woman in a low-cut dress, then suddenly they turn against each other. The women are sometimes funnily, sometimes desperately provocative, they either seduce the men or they lasciviously let them press against their bodies, but again and again we can see the disillusionment in their expressions.

The performance is composed of two parts, each lasting about an hour. Wonderful solos and group dances take turns, all full of gentle gestures, expressive faces and glamorous dresses.