It’s nearly eight years since Pina Bausch died and while her company are striving to preserve her spirit, changes have been inevitable. New dancers have joined the company, a new artistic director is commissioning new works and already the question arises over which of Bausch’s own productions are most likely to survive on the stage.
Café Müller and The Rite of Spring are most likely to gain classic status, especially since they are already being performed by other companies. Yet as Masurca Fogo returns to London, I wonder if this too might gain a wider platform. Created in 1998, it is an impressionist travelogue of Portugal and Brazil, and compared with the nightmares that haunted Bausch’s earlier work it feels like a summer holiday. Projected film footage transforms the stage into a rainforest or a beach, and the music lilts through a hot romantic collage of jazz, fado and kd lang.
Of course, familiar Bausch elements are everywhere. As the dancers confess their most intimate memories they tap into deep seams of yearning insecurity and pain. Courtship rituals become ugly games of power; men posture and women beadily observe each other as they put their bodies on parade. Yet the darkness is always dissolved by the work’s tenderness, and by Bausch’s deliriously strange comic instincts – the lone walrus that heaves itself across the stage, the startling, colourful streamers that fall around a man’s face as he doffs his hat to a woman. Far outweighing the private pain too are the joyous moments where the cast scooch along an improvised water slide, party in a ramshackle beach hut and are liberated into sequences of larky, full-bodied expressive dance.
There’s so much dancing in Masurca and this is one reason why the work could translate well to another cast. Some of Bausch’s performers feel irreplaceable: the fearless, elegant Julie Shanahan, the mordantly droll Nazareth Panadero. But it’s not inconceivable that a large repertory company like Rambert could rise to the challenge of Masurca and bring it a new personality, a new life.
- At Sadler’s Wells, London, until 12 February. Box office: 020-7863 8000.
