RAW & REVOLUTIONARY
Pina Bausch’s famed dance theatre company returns to NAC
More than 30 years ago, when Cathy Levy was a student, she was thrilled to see the cuttingedge German modern dance company Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch perform in Toronto.
Led by Bausch, a world-famous choreographer and ballet director, the company presented her groundbreaking works Café Müller, in which she danced, as well as her reimagining of The Rite of Spring, a ballet that already had a revolutionary reputation. It’s these two works that Levy, now the National Arts Centre’s executive producer for dance, will at last bring to Southam Hall, Thursday through Saturday.
In the years in between, Levy saw Bausch’s company perform those works in London, Paris and Wuppertal, its base of operations in western Germany. But Levy can still cast her mind back to those initial performances at Ryerson College in 1984.
“I didn’t know what happened to me. I’d never seen anything like that in my life,” Levy recalls. “I remember Café Müller, thinking it was just so raw.”
Then, as now, the company danced The Rite of Spring on a stage covered with dark, fragrant earth, and Levy says: “I remember the smell of the room.”
Now in her 17th year in her position at the NAC, Levy has brought the German company to Ottawa four times — in 2004, 2007, 2011 and 2014. But it’s only this weekend that the ensemble, fresh off a two-week run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, will perform the program that captivated Levy in 1984.
“Sometimes these things take a very long time to percolate and then happen,” Levy says. “I think that everybody’s anticipating it to be a wonderful event.”
What’s more, the Ottawa performance will mark one of the few occasions when the company will dance The Rite of Spring to a live performance of Stravinsky’s music. The National Arts Centre Orchestra will play the work, which debuted in Paris in 1913, during the second half of the program each night.
Coincidentally, the two works by Bausch have even been captured in films. Excerpts of Café Müller appear at the beginning of Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s 2002 film Talk to Her, and sections from both works figure in German filmmaker Wim Wenders’s 2011 documentary Pina.
When the German company came to Ottawa in 2004 and 2007, Bausch travelled with them. She died of cancer in 2009, a few weeks shy of her 69th birthday. But her namesake company, now in its 44th season and consisting of 36 dancers from 19 countries and spanning three generations, continues to stage her works and tour globally. Just in May, a new director for the company, Adolphe Binder, was named.
Levy says that she got to know Bausch while she was alive. “She was very stately, very quiet, with a lot of power. She didn’t want to give away too much about the work, she wanted the works to speak for themselves,” Levy says.
Café Müller has been called an autobiographical work, because Bausch’s parents owned a restaurant with guest rooms, and when Bausch was young, she performed for the hotel’s guests. Bausch regularly danced in Café Müller.
However, Levy hesitates to call the work autobiographical, because she never heard Bausch say it was. For Levy, Café Müller “is a sad and beautiful work” that expresses “the fate of human vulnerability.” The piece, which sets its dancers to the operatic arias of English baroque composer Henry Purcell, “is a study of the human psyche and the human heart,” Levy says, and the café setting provides a metaphor “for what happens between people when they interact and when they come and go, like at a railway station or airport.
“There’s something very theatrical about it, but it’s always very human,” Levy says. By contrast, Bausch’s The Rite of Spring is less overtly theatrical and “very dance-y,” she says. “It is so physically and beautifully demanding.
“It is stirring; it is a thrilling and emotionally charged work,” Levy says. “The dynamics between the music and the dance are extremely strong and forceful. The ultimate ending … is heart-wrenching.”
Of the performance of this work in Brooklyn, New York Times reviewer Brian Seibert earlier this month wrote: “As the masses of sweating, heavily breathing dancers — usually, but not always, separated by gender — punch themselves in the gut and kick up dust, the audience experience is like being close to a stampede. It’s live, visceral theatre … Faithful to the dramatic pacing of the dominating score, the choreography gives a strong impression of an inexorable ritual, a world without free will.”
Levy says the company has danced The Rite of Spring to a live orchestral accompaniment just a few times — it danced to a recording in Brooklyn — and that NACO will play under the baton of a guest maestro familiar with Bausch’s unique choreography.
NACO music director and conductor Alexander Shelley says he would love to be conducting when the orchestra plays for the dance company. “I’m jealous,” he says.
Bausch’s company, Shelley says, is “fantastic,” and he calls Stravinsky’s work “one of my favourite scores in the entire world.
“It remains one of the seminal scores and it sounds as new and fresh today as it did when it was first performed. It has aged beautifully. There are elements that sound still utterly avant-garde. I think it will be a great pleasure for the orchestra to perform it.”
But even if Shelley can’t be part of the performance, he plans to take it in. “I’m going to be going and listening on Thursday and I can’t wait,” he says.
It remains one of the seminal scores and it sounds as new and fresh today as it did when it was first performed. It has aged beautifully. There are elements that sound still utterly avant-garde.