THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Pina Bausch with her 'tanztheater' changed the course of both contemporary dance and theatre. A true original, her work has influenced practitioners across nearly every art form. It's great therefore that Sadler's Wells has brought back her beloved company to revive a signature piece which built her reputation. Created in 1978, Kontakthof (meaning place or house of contact), unusually for Bausch, has a unified setting – a ballroom.
We're in municipal dance/community hall. It's cavernous and gray, with high windows and an imposing ceiling. Seated on chairs lining the 3 walls are 22 dancers, the men dressed in sober business suits, the women in bright satin cocktail dresses all tottering on stilettos (a Bausch favorite). They have a knowing yet trance-like expression as they go through the motions of their, no doubt, weekly courtship rituals. In a wonderful moment, the cast sit in a row downstage and in multiple languages excitedly recall their first date encounters while a man with a roving mic dips us in and out of their stories.
There isn't a narrative but rather fragments or set piece scenes which together are mesmerizing, baffling, sometimes shocking but never dull, despite another Bauschian trick, repetition. Wim Wenders' tribute film Pina prominently features the signature move here. The large cast enter on a diagonal, and slowly parade, single file, with a stately gait and animated arm gestures. It's 'the presentation of self in everyday life' or putting on your best. It's about trying to break out of role models and trying to find yourself.
Bausch, like many of her generation, would have spent her youth watching or waiting for her parents at such places and her love-hate of it is palpable. Ballroom dance supplies a perfect stage to explore that gap between the public and the private. There's the ritualized public mating, with the men all robotically courteous while the women are 'ladylike,' contrasting with the inner life of couples or pairs of friends or gangs of men which we also glimpse.
There's the preening in front of the mirror - checking your teeth or puffing out your chest. There's the neediness, the boredom, the cattiness, the deliberate petty cruelty, the menacing passion of these couplings. It's often full of mini aggressions, occasionally bursting into something worse, and it is all delineated for us with such telling detail by a cast who, here, are mostly new to the piece.
It includes spoken word and all takes place to a glorious soundtrack of 1920s and '30s romantic German dance hall songs. Think of maudlin love ballads, austere tangos, perky novelty tunes, with the vintage recordings all crackling with sepia nostalgia. While the waves of music transport you, Pina never allows you to wallow in it. Because her work is so human, it is replete with humor and while she often paints a grim picture of the human condition in all its shallowness, she never resorts to either preachiness or cynicism. Here you are, she says, do I really need to explain? Parts of this piece will stay with you long after, and the bits that do are entirely personal to you. That's its genius.
This is the second major visit to London of this piece. The last time it was done at the Barbican she, astonishingly, presented two alternative amateur casts: one of just teens and one of over 65s. As you'd imagine that unearthed whole new layers of emotion and meaning and it was devastating. A timeless classic, Kontakthof has a universality which is always resonant.
