Pina Bausch's most recent works have been classified as travelogues, shows inspired by places (Hong Kong, California and Palermo) where she has spent time working and thinking. Yet, if Masurca Fogo (Fiery Mazurka) can be linked to Portugal and its axis with Brazil, it is also very much a location imagined within the geography of Bausch's internal map.
Travelling south has unquestionably lightened the Teutonic world gloom for which Bausch has been notorious. Masurca Fogo is an exuberant comic fantasy and tropical holiday rolled into one. Film sequences, projected over the whole stage, route the dancers on an exotic journey through a steamy Brazilian landscape, taking in a rainforest, a dusty square and the sea shore (conjured out of huge rock breasting the back of the stage and ecstatic, extraordinary images of water that make the dancers appear as if they are literally frolicking in the waves).
Bausch's sharp mudlarker's eye for social ritual and collective loopiness is attracted to the possibilities of seaside jinks. The dancers parade and scrutinise each other's bodies, scoot like kids along an improvised water slide and cram into a beach hut for a party. Here and everywhere else they dance a great deal of fierce, dense choreography (set to a musical collage that ranges from hot and drowsy Latin rhythms to kd lang), and as the show progresses you realise that the Wuppertal men and women have never looked so happy.
They line up as usual for Bausch's trademark sexual confrontations and skirmishes, they step forward eagerly to confess their secrets. Yet over and over again their unease diffuses into hilarity, their fears turn into flirtation and their cruelty is directed into carnival mayhem.
It is not that the cast (as always a vivid collection of personalities and types) don't let us into their strangest and most intimate fantasies, it is just that for once we see them as beguiling friends and entertainers rather than sufferers. The beatific finale, where the whole cast curl up to sleep amid gigantic blossoms, feels like a benediction, as if Bausch is making peace with the world.
· Until Sunday. Box office: 020-7863 7863. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
