Nelken Sadler's Wells, London EC1
Henri Oguike Dance Company
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1
When Pina Bausch first brought her Tanztheater Wuppertal company to Sadler's Wells in 1982, the stage was turfed with real grass. Now, for Nelken (created that same year), the field has blossomed into fake flowers. Thousands of plastic carnations propose a theatrical garden of Eden, patrolled by guards with Alsatian dogs.
By the end, the flowers will be battered, strewn like offerings in a vandalised graveyard. Nelken and this week's Palermo Palermo (from 1989) are messy pieces from Bausch's back catalogue. London is still catching up, lagging behind Paris and New York - and Edinburgh, whose festival presented Nelken 10 years ago.
Some of Nelken 's original cast are still performing their roles, faces well lived-in, bodies agile as ever. Their maturity adds another layer of poignancy to this vision of lost innocence. Each performer is both child and grown-up, struggling to find their place in an unfair world. Rules, whether for party games or law enforcement, seem arbitrary: defiance results in humiliation. Even one of the dogs protested at the punishment meted out to a man in a frock bunny-hopping harmlessly among the flowers.
The authority figure (Andrey Berezin) bullies because he can. The cast gang together, then turn on each other, cruelty and compassion equally wanton. When the audience is taught a simple gesture routine, it's so that the dancers can move among us, offering embraces. The longing for affection is tragi-comic, universal.
It's also a trick, for how can we tell who or what is genuine? The theatre is the performers' playground, where they dress up, show off, create chaos. In the middle of the piece, they carry on doing their set-piece routine to Schubert's music, oblivious to Nazareth Panadero's cries of alarm. She's acting adult, warning of danger. Four men plummet from scaffolding into cardboard boxes, narrowly missing the dancers. But they're stunt men, so Panadero panicked unnecessarily. Acts of violence turn out to be as phoney as the tears induced by a faceful of onions chopped up on stage.
'What do you want?' cries Dominique Mercy, draped in an unbecoming dress. Blood, as well as sweat? Angrily, he executes ballet steps to appease those who can't see the dance in Bausch's Tanztheater. Finally, the cast assembles as for a ballet-school photo, telling us why they became dancers. At their heart is their crazed teacher - Berezin again, in a long dark wig. Sending herself up, Bausch stands by him for the curtain calls, ringmaster of this bittersweet entertainment.
Henri Oguike starts his company's latest programme with a bang and ends with Handel's Messiah. There's no limit to his imagination or ambition; his chamber group has grown to 12 and in May they'll be per forming in Bury St Edmunds Cathedral. On the present tour they're confined to relatively small spaces, sharing the stage with musicians.
In Second Signal, three Taiko drummers are integral to the action. They strike the big Japanese drums with their full weight behind the blows: the deep sounds reverberate in everyone's guts. The dancers splay face down, bums bouncing like the hide stretched across the drum face. Upright, they confront each other in martial arts moves, hurtle through the air like the drummers' sticks, bold as Bausch's stuntmen.
In White Space, to Scarlatti studies, they strut and preen in Oguike's satiric take on courtly conventions. Their extravagance, though, is as episodic as the bursts of music. You long for him to sustain a flow of movement among a mass of dancers. He's finding his way in Seen of Angels, to excerpts from the Messiah. His interpretation of the words isn't as inevitable as Mark Morris's response to Handel, but there's such beauty there that Oguike might yet make it as one of our finest choreographers.
