Club Amour: Café Mueller/Aatt
enen tionon/herses duo
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch
and Terrain . Cafe Mueller choreographed by Pina Bausch. Aatt enen tionon and Herses duo choreographed by Tanztheater Wuppertal Artistic director Boris Charmatz. Festival Theatre Adelaide Festival
Centre. Adelaide Festival March 10-16 2025
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins
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| Aatt enen tionon |
In Club Amour, the work of legendary choreographer the late Pina
Bausch is combined with the highly visceral and extraordinary contemporary
dance performance, choreographed by Tanztheater Wuppertal artistic director
Boris Charmatz. Over an evening audiences are treated to a triptych of amazing
athleticism and beauty in Pina Bausch’s Café Mueller and Terrain’s Aatt enen tionon and Herses duo. The first two pieces from
choreographer Boris Charmatz are performed on the stage of the festival Theatre
with audience either standing, sitting on the stage or wandering around to
different vantage points during the performance. The first performance Aatt enen tionon is a solitary
exploration of isolation and entrapment. Three dancers are enclosed on three
levels of a tower from the ground to the apex. They are seen jerking and
writhing, crashing onto the floor in an attempt to release themselves from
forces that assail and assault. The two men, each on a lower level, and a woman
on the top level create patterns of individual and unison movements separated
and coincidentally creating similar gestures and movements. They are naked from
the waist down with genitals laid bare, stripped of all modesty or decorum.
Their existence is primeval, yet natural, their physical contortion punishing
in an assault of physical flagellation. Occasionally there is a moment of
unison in their choreography but we are left with an impression of loss of
human collaboration and societal unity. The athleticism is extraordinary as
bodies thrust the dancer into varying corporal positions of controlled oppression.
The choreography is repetitive, heightening the tension in a futile attempt to
break free until body and will resign to the reality of powerlessness to change
one’s state. Charmatz’s choreography is at times confronting but it is
inescapable, radical and demanding attention and thought. His dancers embrace
Charmatz’s choreography with unrelenting physical endurance. It is confronting,
radical and groundbreaking.
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| Herses duo. Photo Roy vandervegt |
The tower is removed in
preparation for Charmatz’s second work
Herses,duo,
and the audience encircles the stage. Boris Charmatz and Johanna Elise Lemke
emerge naked from the crowd. The image
conjures a vision of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. There is a naivety, an
innocence to their movement as hand in hand they move into the circle. Passion
is unleashed in a frenzy as the bodies merge in a sculptural dance of love and
desire at times erotic, at times clinging entwined in each other’s bodies and
bound together in a writhing, twisting and tumbling coalescence of limbs.
Separation is momentary until desire and longing compel reunion with the woman
at times astride the body of the man, at other times the man standing tall upon
the limbs of the woman. Conflict and struggle are rapidly turned to reliance in
this passionate, uncertain dance of interconnection.
Charmatz’s work is highly
visceral. Occasionally it confronts, compelling a radical response to a dance
that demands attention. The work provokes, tearing away conformity or
convention. It is new and dynamic and yet it fundamentally addresses in its
interdependence the fundamental needs of the human condition.
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| Cafe Mueller. Photo: Roy Vandervegt |
The audience moves
from the stage into the auditorium while the
stage is set for Café Muller. Tables and chairs fill the stage. Around the edge
are windows and a revolving door entrance. Almost fifty years have passed since
the late legend of dance theatre Pina Bausch choreographed this haunting
remeniscence
of her parents’ café in the
devastated years following Germany’s defeat in World War 2. Café Muller is a
place for lost and damaged souls. Bausch is a masterful storyteller. Her
characters are complex and damaged, struggling for love and hope in a
fragmented world. In Café Muller they are the ghosts of her past. Two
sleepwalkers walk blindly through the space while a young man frantically
attempts to clear away or collapse chairs that stand in her way. A woman dressed
in a coat enters and trots rapidly in constantly changing directions about the
café, A man stands motionless. Another enters to guide the sleepwalker into the
man’s arms. The repetition that marks Bausch’s work creates a comic effect as
the man directs an embrace and a kiss and lifts the sleepwalker into the man’s
arm. He drops her and she returns to the embrace.
The sequence is repeated time
and time again. The young man continues to clear the chairs from the other
sleepwalker. The café owner removes her coat and dances in the hope of finding
love. The cyclical dance of need and longing in search of hope and meaning
becomes the dance of disorientation. It is the ritual of damaged souls. Bausch's
choreography is haunting, evocatively underscored by Henry Purcell’s arias
Her characters search for a meaning to their
lives and the work has a film noir quality that makes it irresistable viewing.
The legend lives on and the images remain indelibly imprinted in our
imagination.
Club Amour brings to the Adelaide
Festival dance of extraordinary artistry that challenges an audience to think.
Bausch and Charmatz are the Bertolt Brecht of dance. Tanztheater Wuppertaal and
Terrain offer a transformative experience that will remain a highlight of the
2025 Adelaide Festival.
Photos by Roy Vandervegt
