Adelaide Festival. Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch + Terrain Boris Charmatz. Festival Theatre. 11 Mar 2025
Cafe Muller - Pina Bausch
Aatt enen tionon - Boris Charmatz
herses, duo - Boris Charmatz
The dance world tipped on its axis when Pina Bausch came on the scene. Ever since her Kontakthof and 1980 at the 1982 Adelaide Festival, our audiences have craved to see more. Bausch dance is not just dance, it is theatre of extraordinary movement. It delves into the human predicament and our emotional quandaries, interpreting them in the form of highly evocative and original mannerisms. They hit a nerve in the psyche and stay there. So, we Adelaide audiences beamed with pleasure in 1992 to see her work back in town with Palermo Palermo and yet again in 2016 when her Nelken covered the stage in carnations.
Bausch's early smoker’s death in 2009 was taken as a great blow not only to the arts internationally, but the grief reverberated through the Adelaide thousands who had so admired her work during Festival encounters.
Bausch’s impact on this city’s arts aficionados has been the stereotypical of what well-curated Adelaide Festivals do to nourish and sophisticate the arts sensibilities of the city. Since 1960, it has lain the foundation of an educated arts market.
Cafe Muller was first danced in 1978 and since has been deemed Bausch’s most iconic work. In 2025 it is impeccably reiterated with the Festival Theatre stage flanked by perspex screens and arrayed in chairs and tables. Spot-lit at the back is the revolving door which may or may not lead customers into Cafe Muller. The cafe’s principal patron is a sleepwalking woman whose path through the chairs and tables is constantly and fairly chaotically cleared by an anxious gentleman in a suit. A second dreaming woman, similarly clad in a plain slip nightie, echoes some of this woman’s obliviousness.
The scene develops with two more males, one of whom tries repeatedly to arrange the body of the sleepwalker with that of a very passive man who stood in her path. Fail after fail ensues as the woman drops repeatedly from his impassive arms to the floor, finally to seek his embrace in her own way. It is funny. It is frustrating but accompanied by Henry Purcell arias and sounds of bodies in contact with surfaces, it makes sense in the end. It is all about lost souls and the flaws of human connection. Sometimes Cafe Muller conveys a sense of the placid and sometimes high anxiety. A third woman, clad in streetwear, scuttles to and fro tracking and scrutinising the action of the others. She feels like “us”. When, at last, she sheds her coat and shoes, she expresses her confusion and hope in a piece of the beautifully idiosyncratic Bausch form of movement which thrills the soul and, indeed, has made that indelible mark on the international choreographic repertoire ever since. And the Adelaide audience sighs, because this is what it has come for: the essence of Bausch.
Cafe Muller is part of Club Amour which is a triple program. While the audience is seated in the auditorium for Cafe Muller, for the first two pieces it is either standing or sitting on the floor on the stage itself. With the stage enclosed by its curtains, it permits a novel sense of theatrical intimacy.
For this first of choreographer Boris Charmatz’s pieces, three dancers, two males and a female, appear on a tall three-tiered scaffold. They take their pants off and throw their bodies to and fro in their contained spaces, athletic and aesthetic, the soundscape largely that of their bodies hitting the floor in frequent purposeful falls but sometimes the amazing sound of a human voice sustaining an endless breath on one note. This work is a bit worrying, the incessant hard and loud falls the performers are taking feels punishing rather than enlightening.
After a short break herses, duo is performed. Two dancers, completely nude, writhe and intertwine on the floor. Such floor work reminds one of the very earliest experiences of modern dance when prone bodies were a brave new choreographic thing, back when our indomitable Elizabeth Dalman exposed Adelaide to the work of Elio Pomare. Perchance there are few of us still around with such ancient terms of reference. But, believe me, before our Liz and Elio, dancers were mainly on their feet and in conventional sightlines. Nor were they nude.
This present writhing work features two lithe and flawless bodies. One gains little sense of character and perceives mainly a sense of physical versatility. In this context, it is indeed amazingly aesthetic and inventive: beautiful, complex bodywork; a joy of skin on skin; a message on the meaning of human contact, primal and essential. Yet, while it is interesting and symbolic on the ground, ’tis not quite groundbreaking.
Charmatz is the new face of Tanztheater Wuppertal and one is very grateful that he carries that precious legacy.
Adelaide will be enthusiastic to see where next he takes it. Please come back.
Samela Harris
When: 10 to 16 Mar
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
