My dad saw Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal performed “Danzon” on December 3rd at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, California. He was slightly nervous to write the review, as a PE teacher and definitely not a modern dancer, but here it is…slightly belated but still pertinent. It’s always interesting to see what someone who isn’t schooled in modern dance appreciates, notices, reacts to — particularly in the case of an incredible iconic company.
As the lights dimmed, ten minutes later than expected, for the Pina Bausch Dance Troupe performance of ‘Danzon’, the audience was still in a talkative mood, like guests at a wedding reception unable, in their excitement, to quiet down and listen to the father of the bride commence with the speeches. In our center balcony seats, and throughout the hall, I overheard snippets of conversation reverent in their references to this icon of performance-art-dance. I imagined I’d dropped in on a party of familiars ready to share a festive night together.
And then, onto the stage erupted a flurry of figures, laughing and bubbling with unintelligible vocal excitement, involved in an intricate and amusing ritualistic flirtation between themselves and with the audience as well. The female dancers arrived in white Maidenform bras and undies over which half of them wore loose-fitting, light colored, flowing, gauze gowns. As they pranced around the stage, suddenly two would unite, clasp hands and fold forward, arms outstretched, forming a table top, their sides to the audience. Then, in a grandly amusing and thoroughly sexual gesture, a male dancer would grab the dress at its hem, lift it over the first dancer’s head and arms and draw it onto the second dancer’s unclothed torso. The dancers laugh; the audience laughs; and the pairings continue at center stage while a commotion of frenetic couplings ensue upstage. If this had been all I’d see this evening it would have been enough. But, the performance hadn’t really even begun.
With the second tableau began the show, in earnest. As the stage cleared, one of the dancers invited an audience member, dressed in a flaming red gown and topped with extravagant hair – obviously one of the troupe members – to join the performance onstage. With this grand, artificial gesture the audience, too, was invited to enjoin with the performers for almost two hours of shared imaginings.
So much transpired, I remember only bits and pieces, three weeks later: a quartet of dancers struggling to free their feet in frenzied undulations as they moved slowly downstage, the bulk of their bodies locked and immobile in Victorian rectitude; a tall, white-skinned male dressed in over-sized, sumo-style diapers crawling on all fours and rolling large stones toward a pair of maidens, side-by-side center stage, their arms and legs writhing lustily skyward until the caveman, placing the stones on their chests and between their legs, upon the white cloth of their gowns, clumsily vanquishing their free female energy; a set of pas-de-deux in which various dancers paired with enlarged projections of colorful saltwater fish; and all this interspersed with a number of dances set to spoken word recordings, some playful and some serious, exploring familiar and important transitional moments in life: from youth to adulthood; from the exquisite to the banal; and, inevitably, from life to death.
The evening with Tanztheatre Wuppertal Pina Bausch continues to resonate, as do those important dreams we awaken from in the dark of the night, wondering who we are, how we got here where we are, what on earth was it all about and, most importantly, what does it all mean. It is a rare performance that leaves us asking more questions than we knew we had to ask. Pina Bausch’s, ‘Danzon’, is one of those rare, memorable and resonant theatre experiences.
By Chris Strempek, Sofia Strempek’s Dad
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