Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch: Bluebeard at Sadler’s Wells

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Bluebeard, Sadler’s Wells, February 14.

Because of the Béla Bartók estate’s withdrawal of the rights to the music, it has been a long time since Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch has been able to perform the 1977 creation, Bluebeard — While Listening to a Tape Recording of Béla Bartók’s Opera ‘Duke Bluebeard’s Castle’. But if you had never seen it before and, wanting to complete your review of Pina Bausch’s work, had spent an hour and fifty minutes watching it at Sadler’s Wells, you still would not have seen it. Bausch died in 2009 and, despite the company’s constant efforts to the contrary — now under the general and artistic direction of Bettina Wagner-Bergelt — it is ingenuous to expect anybody else to have the authority to restage her works, especially ones like Bluebeard that have been out of the repertoire for so long. Dancers whom Bausch rehearsed may remember the choreography and be able to transfer their individual insights and understanding to a younger generation — as in this reconstruction directed by two of the original cast, Jan Minarik and Beatrice Libonati — but Bausch’s precise, idiosyncratic process of moulding the individual dancers to her imagination and her imagination to the work can never be reproduced. It can be experienced, however, in film; there is an early, grainy VHS recording in which Minarik and Libonati embody Bausch’s conception of Bluebeard and Judith with such ferocious energy — as does the entire cast — it is far more immediate than the current reconstruction. Notwithstanding the physical signifiers, one major casualty of the Bluebeard at Sadler’s Wells is the sense of dark menace; gestures are repeated without the tics of feral obsession, while the sardonic humour of the men preening themselves at the front of the stage turns into gratuitous display. In addition to directing the reconstruction, Minarik and Libonati have to contend with the worldview of a young company in a very different era. Perhaps we have become so inured to psychosis and sexual violence that we find it amusing — as some in the audience expressed on Friday night — or perhaps the production simply lacks a sufficient sense of alienation to disturb our complacency. 

Bausch’s creative life is so intimately integrated in her work that any presentation of her repertoire inevitably reflects on her legacy. For those who see this Bluebeard for the first time the legacy is affected, unintentionally on the part of the company and perhaps unknowingly on the part of the audience, by the absence of her approval. And yet while it may not be the real thing, seeing this example of Bausch’s early creative canon is enough to remind us of her genius for transforming the stage into choreographic drama and of those original dancers who embodied her vision so devotedly.  

One might be tempted to ascribe a Jungian interpretation of the Bluebeard tale to Bausch’s interest in staging the work at that early point in her career. Having taken over the Wuppertal Opera in 1973 and choreographed two operas, as well as the Rite of Spring, and The Seven Deadly Sins, she had come to a creative door that threatened to close. The key to the forbidden room in the tale symbolizes consciousness; Judith can choose not to open the door or by unlocking it find the truth. For Bausch, working away from the theatre in Jan Minarik’s studio with a tape recorder and a small group of dancers who believed in her methods, the production of Bluebeard released her inspiration and launched the development of Tanztheater. 

Based on an early recording of Bartók’s opera, Bausch’s rendering invokes classical ballet, expressionist dance, everyday gestures and dramatic theatre. Rolf Borzik’s set suggests the inside of the room Bausch had unlocked: clinically bare, with high white walls in a nineteenth century mansion or institution with inset windows and doors that mark the perimeter of the stage. The white floor is covered in armfuls of dry autumn leaves that record the passage of dancers passing over it. It is an imposing space and at the same time an intimate setting in which a tape recorder on a portable base takes on the role of fateful agent. Throughout the performance the character of Bluebeard (Oleg Stepanov) plays, stops, and rewinds the tape so as to provoke, arrest or replay his obsessive passion for his wife, Judith (Ophelia Young) that is magnified and enhanced by the entire cast. It is in the negotiation of such precise, repetitive details that the pervasive menace of the work is either contained or seeps away.

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Viktor at Sadler’s Wells

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Viktor, Sadler’s Wells, February 8

Eddie Martinez and Ophelia Young in Viktor (photo: Meyer Originals)

Peter Pabst’s set locates Viktor in a deep underground cavern surrounded on three sides by high earthen walls on which wooden ladders lean like the interior of a fortified rampart; at intervals during the performance Andrey Berezin shovels earth from the top on to the stage, an aural as much as a visual rhythm of burial. At the foot of one of the walls, rather incongruously, stands an upright piano. Even more incongruously Julie Shanahan enters armless in a scarlet dress, coming to rest like a smiling Roman goddess as Khachaturian’s Masquerade waltz swirls around her until Dominique Mercy brings a fur coat, places it over her shoulders and escorts her out. In this starkly beautiful opening scene, Pina Bausch merges the conceptions of Pabst’s sepulchral set and Marion Cito’s bright, witty costumes in her choreographic evocation of Rome, the Eternal City that inspired Viktor following an invitation to coproduce with Teatro Argentina di Roma and a company visit. There is none of the city’s classical columns or grandiose baroque architecture here but an imaginary locus in which Viktor’s symbiotic themes of death, antiquity, life and beauty play out over the next three hours, ricocheting from one surreal association to the next: from a living statue to a marriage ceremony for the dead, from bargaining two sheep on the black market to furniture auctions, from flirtations to sexual assault, from undressing to cross dressing to the men sitting in a row putting on makeup, from fur coats stored in a fridge to a human fountain. The imagination wanders deliriously from entrance to entrance, each one setting up the expectation of a narrative that never quite fits with the previous one and brings time to a temporary halt. It’s an exquisitely judged choreographic rhythm to which the musical inputs by Matthias Burkert add a range of emotional highlights, from Russian symphonic music to New Orleans jazz to Italian folk songs.

Three hours may seem a long time, but in identifying the underlying nature of time and experience in these traces of her exploration — and those of her dancers who helped create the material — Bausch has synthesized them by condensing the time and experience into a theatrical setting. We are re-living those experiences in their reconvened form. Bausch was aware of the significance of the present moment as a tangible appearance on the surface of history, and in Viktor she has chosen rather to delve into that fertile ground of the past — underneath the streets — to portray what lies above. It is a miracle she accomplishes this in a mere three hours.

There is no doubt that death hangs over Viktor but there are also the luscious, smiling processions, the ensemble gestural dances and the rapturous swinging that are like shoots appearing above the ground after winter, and the bright colours and flowing design of Cito’s costumes on the elegant dancers are themselves a sign of radiance that punctuates the darker layers of Bausch’s vision. And she never fails to highlight the small absurdities of life that she presents on stage for our delight.

Bausch died nine years ago, so all her works the company has performed since then are, in a poignant yet real sense, memento mori — perhaps none more so, given its themes, than Viktor. It thus has a double resonance, reminding us of Bausch’s genius at transforming experience into a transcendent choreographic language of Tanztheater and of the indivisibility of life and death. We shall never again know what Bausch is thinking in the present, but only what was in her mind at the time of a particular work. Unlike a photograph that sets the past exactly as it appeared at the moment it was taken, a choreographic work can only be an approximation of what it was during the choreographer’s lifetime. For Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch we would seem to be on safe ground — some of the performers were in the original work — and although the level of performance is uneven in terms of experience, Viktor is shot through with conviction and colour to the extent we can see what the work must have been like from its creation in May 1986 up until Bausch’s death in June 2009.

Early on we learn that Viktor is itself a voice from the grave, a ghostly presence who through a woman’s lips in a man’s voice asks permission to remain for the performance insisting he is very quiet and closes the door when there is a draught. How tantalizing to imagine Bausch writing her spectral self into each performance.