The Season’s March: tributes to Pina Bausch

In France, Ireland, Chile, Cyprus, Spain and Germany, dance lovers of all ages – professionals and amateurs – have responded to the call and danced their own individual NELKEN-Line. And many more will be able to join, because the project continues

http://www.pinabausch.org/en/projects/the-nelken-line

The ‘Season’s March‘ also known as the Nelken Line:

https://youtube.com/watch??v=vJpgjsOr6hk

And really quite joyous.

There is an argument that says at times like this we must face up to our fears, explore them. I suppose it’s a kind of the Ancient Greek idea of catharsis. But catharsis has never been acceptably defined.

That is all well and good, it fits in with Middle eastern religious thinking very well: a successful graft, to use a term from gardening (not a practice promulgated in Eden, I dare say. For there our reasoning raises all the dark corners and tangled thorns of ‘the natural’ as a basis for behaviour. Farming; I wonder what celebrations hunter-gatherers had? Successful hunt? Returning safe from the hunt? Finding new spreads of berries, fruits…?)
Catharsis though, also now has the relish of the flagellist about it.

And celebration seems to get forgotten along the way. For celebration is where those dark roads are to lead to.

The Season’s March celebrates what we have left of a basic pattern of life, that is outside of our fears and horrors. It is above droughts and bush-fires, of back-breaking farm work, ploughing, fruit and veg harvesting: celebration is a time out of time.
It is also an activity.

The Season’s March is a leisurely celebration of life.

The term Nelken Line alludes to the particular performance by Pina Bausch’s Tantztheater of Wuppertall, in which The March first occurred.

Enjoy:
https://vimeo.com/273317019

https://vimeo.com/243863216

https://vimeo.com/240967153

Keep yourselves safe; breathe deep and properly deep.

CAFÉ MEULLER

after the dance-theatre performance of the Pina Bausch company

‘We must talk’ you say, ‘sit here, listen’.
The moment is a revolving door
I do not know how to stop, or close;
our table a sun on a scorching planet —
we have wandered there naked, burnt,
and lost amongst its crumbs, metal.

French windows gape like dark wings draped
over the city; and louvred windows hold aloof
their fragile, distant aches.
In their assimilation there is no longer place
for us. Your words are hot —
and the night grows colder. I long for you
but taste only ashes
not peaches, gingered melon.

We have died here before — the waiter
wraps us warm in the embrace
of a thousand passing presumptions,
asks us to chose; I can take none.
We are what we civilise of the wildness in us;
I have blood in my mouth
and the melancholy of pain, like hunger.
Who is this other? She is giddy with the possibility
the naked and the tabletop offer equally;
an ostentation of preparations.
We are deficient, and the menu lessens us further.

Who is waiting at the door? Window? Wall?
Why are we all here? So sit and sit and sit.
Relationships break here, wives
leave, and husbands stand at the flung open
french windows: an offering to the sky.
The night detonates: they stare back, burnt out;
and all the candles flare, then fail.

Our pain is a mirror — the clock’s tells
and its reckless readings circle the words
‘Leave’ and ‘me’; its chime
muffles the smothered ’Never’.
The room always empty, but populated,
a carved-out place of space,
served up on fine platters
— listen
can you hear the rustle of moments
coalescing? A fine meal we make of this.

She said this ring is a broken tone
the wall-clock has forgotten, and won’t take back.
He twists it around and around his finger, wishing,
for this is the day of the continuous lie — a tall tale:
what was once broken, is twice unmended;
— what was once said, is twice unremedied.

And the child’s hand slips from hers, the baby’s cry
unheard in the bustle and hub of the hall;
her nerves wire the walls,  flare the light
as the current flickers again. To be left alone,
empty, as a coat left, hung on the wall….

To be caught is to be in the cup that drips
then is wiped away with a serviette;
to be lost is to be forever going and not going
at the same time, in the same place
is to be found in the tale that breaks off
but does not,
amongst the communion,
and the cutlery.

The break is the tale’s breathing, it continues always:
the room, and the haunting — the window,
and the blind hurt, the bleeding,
and the doors
endlessly
revolving

 

THE MAIDEN’S DANCE FROM THE RITE OF SPRING, BY PINA BAUSCH

 

 

And she took down her pants on the dark dance floor

a shimmer of white in the ultraviolet

around her ankles, hobbling her dance

and glide. Then the other girls did also:

provocative, yes; but nothing more.

Boys with their blood up, watched from the side

dangerous, brimful of what just might

happen. And if the girls faltered, and if by chance

one ran, then the pack would also.

The boys all grab and want on the dance floor.

 

But the girls took the rhythm down, slow.

For the boys Cool was to hold back, play

the brag and swagger right up to the line,

pushy for more. The frontier of tease.

The dance rhythm was blood rhythm, touch and go.

How that night it would be easy. Or maybe not so:

the week was played out there, the weight of each day,

its frustrations, insults,  and the blind

confusion of it all. The night on its knees

in the beat of the moment: break it, or let it go.

 

 

Pina Baush (1940-2009):

 

 

 

 

Pina Bausch and the Tanztheater Wuppertal

Every so often English tv comes up with something amazing. 1985 was a real coup: a full televised performance by the Pina Bausch company.
It’s not dance, not theatre; how could you describe it? Try this: “…speech, song, circus tricks, gymnastics, brilliant visual images, and monumental sets.” Exuberance. Or would you prefer: “…the pornography of pain.”?
What could arouse such strong emotions?

Interesting, the first quote is from the Sydney Morning Herald (2000), and the last from Stamford University, USA. Interesting also the Stamford’s last comments: “In the fifteen years since Bausch’s last appearance in Los Angeles, American dance has found its way into the territory of pain…”

The territory of pain.

The tv performance, like most of Pina’s work was long, discursive, digressive, yes even uncomfortable at times. A bridging motif between pieces had the performers form into a long snaking line all enacting the same rigorous, obsessive body-manipulations as they wound around the audience. Wound and wound around, up to the edge of discomfort, until the novelty became an affront, then picking up on the audience mood the performers took it back up onto stage and used it for the tone of the following piece.

In some performances the performers chat to the audience, ask intimate questions: “Are you here on your own? Do you like me? Do you want come round the back?”
Challenge, confrontation, but also movements of great lyrical beauty, emotional intensity. Huge ensemble pieces constructed from the performer’s own experiences:
Copy someone else’s tic
Do something you are ashamed of
Write your name with a movement
What would you do with a corpse?
Move your favourite body part
How do you behave when you have lost something?

Pina (Phillipine) Bausch was born in Solingen, Germany in 1940. At 14 she was already studying with Jooss, the German top choreographer. (“I loved to dance because I was scared to speak.”). She studied in America under such people as Jose Limon, Paul Taylor, Antony Tudor. In 1973 she was made director of Wuppertal Dance Theatre.
She died in 2009.

Why choose Wuppertal? An industrialized urban area in the Ruhr valley, its one characteristic a century-old overhead monorail system.
For its ordinariness.

She changed the Dance Theatre utterly.
She loved forms, materials. Her sets could be breathtaking: a sea of flowers for Nelken, a stage of heaped leaves for Bluebird, a water-flooded stage for Arien.

She used dress to send sexual messages to the audience; women can be vampy, or dressed in girly clothes, stilettos, or evening gowns.
She also loved romantic pop songs, the ritual of the cigarette, social dance. She may fool around with sex and sexual forms, but she always took romantic love seriously.

In 1982’s Nelken male performers in ill-fitting frocks frolicked in a sea of flowers whilst, separating them from the audience were guards with guard dogs. Real ones. The dogs were going frantic as the men ‘fooled around’; the guards struggling to hold them. The audience were scared, horrified. Then officials came onto the stage checking passports. Politics: gender politics, Cold War politics. But a performance for Pina Bausch is always many things: simple statements, positions, belief systems are starting points only: all is filtered through the personal lives of the performers; they all bring to the piece something of their personal lives. Such political statements may be a beginning but the piece soon moves away into the vastness of the human arena.

“In the work of Pina Bausch repetition often evokes an overwhelming image of pain and imprisonment.” We are presented with a take on our own lives: is this how we really seem? Do you recognise something of yourself there?

Is this the story of our time?
It may well be. Who was the psychologist said the way the pessimist sees the world is probably nearest the truth?
Performance though, engagement, are their own rewards.
A love affair falls apart: it is not that pain, distress, collapse of the self, but the wonder that was there. Not the easy relapse, but the straining, striving for the topmost apple.

Pornography of pain? America now knows it has relearned pain.
Perhaps I do Pina Bausch a disservice: like all works of wonder the edge of threat is always present. But it is still a work of wonder.