Uraufführung 2009
Pina Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal after their return from Chile
Opernhaus Barmen
Wuppertal,
June 20, 2009 (performance – first night was June 12)
by Horst Koegler
copyright @ 2009 by Horst Koegler
Compared to its fellow Iberians of Argentina and Brazil, Chile´s contribution to the history of world ballet has been rather meager. Actually its longest entry in the ´Theatrical Dance´ section of the country´s appearance in the ´International Encyclopedia of Dance´ deals with the exile existence of the Ballets Jooss under the direction of Ernst Uthoff, which dates from the 1940 season, later growing via the school, established by Uthoff into the Ballet Nacional Chileno. touring the country and abroad, with Uthoff´s wife Lola Botka and Patricio Bunster as its top-stars. Later on the Santiago born Lupe Serrano became one of the most popular ballerinas of American Ballet Theatre, but her influence on the dance scene of her home country was nil. Michael, son of Ernst Uthoff, another home-grown Chilean product, made it to the states, studied at Juillard, started his career as a dancer with Joffrey and became the artistic director of the Hartford Ballet Company, but never looked back to his roots. Short attempts at forming an indigenous Chilean company, for instance under the Hungarian Ivan Nagy or, during the early ´nineties under Marcia Haydée, proved too short-lived, to develop an identity of its own. So Chile remained until today, dance-wise, a country to come and go.
Thus one was very much looking forward what was going to happen when we heard that Pina Bausch and her Wuppertal Dance Theatre, on their continuous merry go round trip of the world, had received an invitation to spend some of the 2008/9 season at the Teatro Santiago a Mil (in collaboration with the Goethe Institute of the city), to explore the country and distil her local experiences in her next new production, which bowed in the Wuppertal Opernhaus on June 12 for a run of seven performances, of which I caught a later one on June 20. As on former occasions it had not yet found its title, but was announced as ´Uraufführung 2009, A Piece by Pina Bausch`. Come to think of it, how about calling all her future productions by the year of their creation – like the vintage of wines? In that case the 2009 vintage has to be classified, I am afraid, as one of her minor products - maybe it will mature in the future, but at the moment it is clearly disqualified by the full bodied Chilean home-grown ´Los Vascos Cabernet Sauvignon´ from the local caves. Nothing to think of the riches Bournonville brought home to Denmark from his excursions around the globe in a former century.
In vain one was looking for topical references – and, necessarily, to the political uproars and consequences of the Chilean dictatorship of Pinochet and his military junta. And this the more so as Germany had suffered twice a similar fate in the last century, first under the nazis and then in East Germany under the Moscow instrumentalized communists. And there was that special German interest as Erich Honecker, last president of the communist German East Zone, was granted exile in Chile, where he died in 1994. But there were no direct links to Chile´s past, though there was a lot of Chlilean music, most of it pop, blasted from the loudspeakers, including some songs of Victor Jara, Chile´s internationally known folk-singer who was brought to death by the Pinochet guards. Otherwise the black-box stage, occasionally flickerd by some projections of waves of water, created by Peter Pabst, Bausch´s regular designer, surrounded the white floor, which cracked up every now and then, as if the underground cries of the tortured and murdered victims of the regime crashed the gay and sunny surface – but they were soon covered again and the dances went on as before.
And these were, as in former Bausch productions, mostly solos or duos or small ensembles, brilliantly performed by the 16 members of the company, girls and young men - the females mostly clad in colourful robes, designed by Marion City, while the man appeared in blacks suits, if not bare-chested. The oldest is Dominique Mercy of 1950s vintage, who has been in the company from its very beginnings,, but whether his daughter, Thusnelda Mercy, who is also listed, is the youngest, I do not know, as there are some others who look like teenagers.
They are a mixed bag, hailing from all over the globe, often with names sounding like an exotic perfume, which is certainly how they look. Splendid technicians, often contortionally twisted, each is given her or his occasion to parade their individual gifts. Often they humiliate each other – for instance by pulling their limbs so that their bodies seem to be about to burst at any moment, or they are pouring water on a girl who is just in the process of repairing her make-up; at other times they are treated like dogs, for instance in the very beginning, when Silvia Farias Heredia enters on her four limbs and the males try to drive her away bwith sticks, which makes her emitting murderous howlings. Then the males drive the women like cattle in hordes over the stage, until they line up in diagonals, sitting next to each other on the floor and sift through their hair, while moving forward on their behinds. A man is compelled to make his way hand over hand on a rope over a ravine.
There are a lot of humiliations, both the men of the women and vice versa. But it is hard to discover any indigenous Chilean seasoning in these maltreatments of each other, exploiting man´s sadistic passions, which, however, do not seem to differ substantially between the human beings of Santiago or Wuppertal. We have all seen this before in earlier Bausch productions. So far “2009” looks like an anthology of her reports from all over the world, which she has strung together as individual pieces, without any sort of through running dramaturgy. Which explains the decrescendo of tension during the longuish three hours of duration of the performance.
As one has to admit to oneself that one has seen most of those events during the thirty years of existence of the Wuppertal Tanztheater, one becomes aware that they are performed now by a completely different generation of dancers, appetizingly to look at and technically much more accomplished than their forerunners, but lacking that strong personality, which Mercy still communicates in every of his movements, and some – few – others (as the inexhaustible Rainer Behr or the delicate Ditta Miranda Jasifi). But one very much misses the more rough-hewn features of the erstwhile members of the company – say, the like of Malou Airraudo, Josephine Ann Endicott, Mechthild Grossmann, Jan Minarik, Lutz Foerster or Ed Kortland. At 69 Pina Bausch and her Wuppertal company of 37 years standing (that is almost twice as long as Diaghilev´s Ballets Russes lasted) it cannot be denied that the Wuppertaler Tanztheater Miracle has lost some of its original electrifying magic.
Photos, Copyright: Ursula Kaufmann.
