Article by:
Judith Mackrell
When Pina Bausch’s work was first shown in London in 1982 it changed the way we thought about dance. Bausch made the stage look like a whole new playground of possibilities, creating some indefinable genre of dance theatre that hovered between choreography, performance art, absurdist theatre and dreaming. Even now, nine years after her death, we can still see her influence, not only on younger generations of choreographers but on opera directors, theatre-makers and artists.
Yet as radical as Bausch was in her approach, as seminal to modern dance history, her work has never felt strictly contemporary. Throughout her career she sourced her material in memories, fantasies and atavistic yearnings; most of the music she’s used comes with a sepia tinge of nostalgia and for all the moment-by-moment magic that her spectacles create, they never feel quite tethered to the present.
In Viktor, which the company are reviving for this short Sadler’s Wells run, the stage is particularly haunted by the past. It is flanked on three sides by 20ft walls of earth – the mud of ancient history. As the 28 performers go about their comically or tragically intent business they appear to have been excavated from a grave or an archaeological dig.
That visual metaphor stems from Rome, the city that inspired this 1986 production, and while Viktor is far from being a literal portrait of the place its imagery teems with death, sex, corruption and beauty.
Human transactions in Viktor are regularly reduced to games of power, like the two men who force a woman to become a human fountain – pouring water into her mouth and then making her spurt it out again in a steady stream.
The world is up for sale, with women offering speculative glimpses of their buttocks or breasts; a man wandering through the auditorium peddling his collection of postcards, and an auctioneer running bids for everything on stage. Images of mortality abound too, in the priest figure who tries to marry off two dead lovers; in the keening, chorus lines of mourners who parade through the action and in the gravedigger who throughout the work’s duration is relentlessly shovelling earth back down onto the stage.
But if Bausch’s Rome is streaked with darkness is also a city of celebration and fun. Women swing dreamily through the air in gorgeous evening gowns; couples dance together with courtly old-world grace and everybody eats drinks and smokes (how they smoke) with a joyous determination to seize what pleasures they can.
For seasoned Bausch watchers, there is a huge enjoyment from seeing how well the company perform even after their choreographer’s death.
Many of the old timers remain. Glinting, gravelly-voiced Nazareth Panadero; elegantly melancholic Dominique Mercy; endlessly enigmatic Andrey Berezin and Julie Shanahan, with her talent for infinitely graceful derangement, all bring their special gravitas and personality to the material. But there are younger dancers such as Jonathan Frederickson and Emma Barrowman who may never have met Bausch yet who inject a new and entirely credible chemistry to her material.
Just as the characters in Viktor cling stubbornly, hilariously and poignantly to life, so it feels that the work itself will survive.
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