by Leigh Witchel
Has there been a major choreographer who cared less about the arc of a performance than Pina Bausch? There were choice moments in “Água,” the work that her company brought to BAM on its first visit in six years. But Bausch made you suffer through flaccid solos and tepid sketches to get to them, and frankly, my dear, she never gave a damn.
“Água” was first performed in Wuppertal in May, 2001. It was one of Bausch’s travelogues; the pieces that she made as a result of the company’s residencies. This one was gestated in Brazil, and it had about as much to do with Brazil as “Nefés” had to do with Istanbul. There was occasional Brazilian music, along with projections of a Brazilian drum corps, but “Água” was largely to the same elevator music Bausch used no matter where she was. The selection of canned music emphasized the similarities. Bausch had the ability to travel the globe yet remain in the same place.
The stage, designed by Peter Pabst, was visible as we filed in, an unadorned white space created with flats angled to the back that created two hidden entries. The flats also served as projection screens that did the heavy lifting for local color: palm trees, jaguars, the Amazon.
“Água” started out with a sketch: a woman in a yellow slip entered, and ate an orange. A man held a microphone and nuzzled, eating it with her. “One night, I had a cramp.” And she ate noisily. “The pain made me jump up out of bed.” Mmmm, slurp, both of them eating. It was classic, familiar Pina, and what many came to see.
Bausch didn’t always combine dance and theater, more often she tended to alternate them. Her abilities as a pure dance choreographer weren’t on the same level as her concept work. A loose solo for a woman followed, heading to the floor. From there, a male duet, which was mostly more floor work and pacing about. All the men assembled for a crouching dance that went repeatedly into a push-up position.
A solo for a woman with her arms and hair whipping ended with her miming smoking a cigarette (what else?), stubbing it out and exiting. But mostly, the solos tended to meander through loose movement.
But this is Pina Bausch – there were going to be brilliant moments. Julie Shanahan was in the original 2001 cast. She’s a goddess. Shanahan came out, blond, willowy and ageless at 60, to toast us with an insane monologue about what she would have liked to do, which she was in fact doing, while regretting “but it’s not possible.” As she did it. Including sawing a table leg. Some things were in fact not done, which was a relief when she got to the part about setting the place on fire.
Age and treachery are powerful things, and Shanahan’s timing was lethal. “I wanted to run away, but I wanted to come back in my most beautiful clothes” just as she got to the wings and BAM! in one hand was a hanger with a fur and sequined gown, in the other, silver fuck-me pumps.
“But it’s not possible.
And then I just wanted to sit down and look at you all.”
Which she did.
“Hi.”
Shanahan exemplified the reasons to go to see a Bausch piece: the manic absurdity delivered with lunatic commitment. As is the structure of most of Bausch’s travelogues, her scene segued like a comedy sketch show right into another woman who ran in front of men, lying down and throwing her skirt up over her face as she came to them. The men studiously ignored her.
Shanahan did her own slow solo, based on a shoulder twitch. Just like the sketch, Shanahan’s focus could make something out of it. But she had to work harder; there was much less to work with. Still, the end of it gave her something; she made it across the stage, crying and going crazy at the wings. Later on, she interrupted someone’s solo. “Stop, what are you doing here? It’s my turn.”
After more solos and duets, the flats rose halfway to reveal a lush palm grove behind, but it went back down, to show projections of forests. Couples pushed and whirled chairs, the men running, stepping over one another, then the women tumbling over them as their dresses billowed. It didn’t lead to anything, but two more meandering solos. At least there was more energy.
Fast forward past more doldrums. After a while the women returned walking around with stuff on their heads, a hat box, champagne glasses, a whole cheese tray. They fed and offered drinks to the front row. If you’ve been cued on structure by almost any choreographer during our time, even Merce Cunningham who eschewed the idea of a structural arc, you still almost always knew when a finale was approaching: everyone returned to the stage.
Please, this is Bausch. The lights went white and there were yet more solos. Sampled into one of them was the line, “it’s the end of an era.” So many dances from the turn of the millennium became about 9/11 even if that wasn’t their original intent. Here, that didn’t seem to be the case; the work made its debut a few months prior.
For all her avant-garde creds, Bausch seemed remote from politics. “Nefés” was made in Turkey as the U.S. was invading Iraq; Bausch’s absurdist viewpoint didn’t seem affected by it. Or maybe we Americans have an overblown sense of our country’s effect, both good and bad. Still, two decades on, Bausch’s humor, especially after dangerous flirtations with fascism in both the U.S. and Brazil, felt toothless. Ironic for someone who was born in Germany as WWII ravaged the planet.
More sketches, some singing in Portuguese, and a comic number with a woman repeatedly mounting a guy. Wearing swimsuits, everyone brought in couches and lounged on them. Again, a big group number, this time where folks held towels in front of them with faces and body parts printed on them. They all came once again to the front. Was this an act ending? Of course not.
Everyone paired off, then another solo, and things just kept going. This was already way past an hour, and only somewhere into the first act. The cast was sitting on the couch, with lounge music playing and no end in sight. But finally, someone onstage announced it was the intermission as they did . . . nothing. Which got a laugh. There was never a beginning, middle or end for Bausch unless it was forced on her by a pre-existing script. Why expect one posthumously?
The couch stayed during intermission, with sections arranged into a semi-circle. Shanahan lay on it, then hiked up her skirt and struck a leggy glamour pose for us but stumbled out of it. A man in a cheap tuxedo produced a cigarette, a lighter, an ashtray, which she could barely light as they both circled their arms woozily. She poured a drink all over her face. It felt like a unified field theory of shtick: from the Catskills to the drag bar to Wuppertal. Still, a great comedian can make a stale joke work, and Shanahan is an absolute star. She laughed wildly as someone rolled her offstage.
In the second act, there were a few sketches with a continuous, if familiar, theme: gender roles and the battle of the sexes. A woman in a red dress walked out; all the men kissed her breasts, then her cheeks.
A man tried to compliment her but everything he said prompted a worse reaction, from liking her eyes, “They are brown!” to her feet, “They are so small and delicate.” “That’s just it, I have almost no feet!”
The women got the men back. Another woman prompted that man to strip off first his jacket, then his vest, then his shirt, then another shirt, until he was bare-chested.
“Turn around.” And she pulled at a non-existent back roll. “What’s this?” Yet in the intervening two decades, there’s been so much questioning of the gender binary that Bausch’s examination and reliance on it felt quaintly dated. There was such a homogeneity of ideas in the work; every concept got Pina-ized to a world populated by skinny women in flimsy silk gowns and thin men in nondescript suits, with shirts or without. Was this avant-garde, or a lesson in how quickly the avant-garde becomes outdated?
Time has shifted the ground under Bausch’s worldview enough that the cracks show how heteronormative and bourgeois it was. Despite the current attitude towards both, being either of those things isn’t intrinsically a sin, any more than being their opposites. But being those things when you’re supposed to be the cutting edge?
Many of the jokes in “Água” didn’t land. Some did. A man did a solo, and refreshingly, he did it to someone, a woman with long, curly brown hair. He left and returned with an elaborately wrapped gift: a tire. It was that kind of sketch comedy, Franz Kafka meets Jerry Seinfeld, that Bausch did best. But what was ever avant-garde about that?
What was always magnificent about Bausch was her use of striking design – carnations flooding the stage, or dirt, or rocks. Pabst’s design for this wasn’t on that level – it had moments recalling the most striking, as when a giant palm branch extended all the way into the stage, but it didn’t have the éclat. The cast stood in the back among the palm trees, at a cocktail party. Of course it was a cocktail party. Then the leaves got brought on to the stage with the dancers concealing themselves underneath. And brought off almost immediately. Why? The last thing you’d expect from Bausch was not to fully use a prop.
Yet another solo, this one for a man in a hoop skirt to Tom Waits’ “Walk Away” just ended without any sense of an ending. Most things did. If Bausch was done and the music wasn’t, she cut it off. If she wasn’t, she started it again. It was wallpaper.
Two more solos. Like the Energizer Bunny, “Água” just kept going. Bausch repeated two sections, the push-up duet and the running men and tumbling women. If it’s wasn’t a recapitulation why do the repeat? There wasn’t done anything resembling composition in “Água,” why start now?
Finally there was água in “Água,” but most of it in 1.5l bottles. Everyone swigged the water and spit on each other, like children playing at a hydrant. A woman dancing in the front slowly got soaked. Everyone assembled twice to create a slide, which tumbled water out to the floor. There was water all over, which either had to be cleaned up to do more, or we were close to the end.
The cast brought in patio tables, sat on them and wobbled around. Finally, the dancers wandered off the stage and “Água” ended. Well, more accurately, it stopped.
Cranking about Bausch, who for most of the audience was the tanztheater genius gone way too soon, feels like being the atheist at a prayer breakfast. But if you’re not part of the cult, this was not even close to a major work. Watching it was a marathon of inconsistent quality that you wondered why you were running.
When Bausch hit her target, you can see why she was revered. But there was so much filler in a three hour performance, so little pruning out of mediocre material, so much dreck that should never have made it to the stage. The woman needed an editor while she was still making dances. And now that she’s enshrined as a goddess, it’s certainly not going to happen.
copyright © 2023 by Leigh Witchel
“Água” – Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn, NY
March 5, 2023
Cover: Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch in “Água.” Photo © Julieta Cervantes.
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