Festival review: Club Amour
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch director and choreographer Boris Charmatz prefaces the late Pina Bausch’s iconic 1978 work Café Müller with two of his own in this trio of performances that explodes boundaries between audience and performer, dance and conceptual art and body as solid mass and object of desire.
Two years before her death in 2009, German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch gave an acceptance speech for the Kyoto Prize, revealing how events in her personal life had fuelled her work a dancer and choreographer. Born in 1940, her childhood experience of war and later, the death of her 35-year old partner and the birth of her son, compelled her to transgress the conventions of dance so her work would convey the intensity and authenticity of human experience; of love and desire, of suffering, sorrow and joy.
French choreographer and enfant terrible of dance Boris Charmatz took the helm of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch in 2022, continuing Bausch’s legacy. He founded his company Terrain in 2019 which focused on the removal of physical boundaries in dance: of walls and roof, of orchestra pit dividing audience from performer, of costume and naked body. Club Amour is a fusion of Bausch and Charmatz’s expression of human experience – of the dynamics of love and desire in particular – unencumbered by barriers, sentiment or artifice.
For the first piece, Charmatz’s 1996 piece Aatt enen tionon, the audience is invited onto the stage, the usually unseen guts of backstage workings visible and fully lit by three large moon-like spheres while PJ Harvey’s ‘Me-Jane’ blasts out at body-vibrating volume, Three dancers take up their positions on a tall three-tier tower, having removed their clothing save for a white t-shirt.
Performed on this opening night by Solène Wachter, who stands precariously high on the top tier, Simon Le Borgne and Frank Williens occupying tiers below, the dance begins once the music stops. The sounds of huffing breath, of limbs slapping, squeaks of skin friction on floor in the silence magnifies the raw physicality of human bodily presence. Part one of Club Amour this may be, but there is little attempt at connection and the dancers’ faces remain expressionless. The tower has no walls but the two-square-metre platforms on which the dancers writhe, pirouette, kick or fall heavily to the floor present their own limitations; the dancers are liberated yet trapped, made vulnerable by their semi-nudity of white t-shirt and exposed genitalia and their precarious positions on the tower.
The silence is relieved on occasion with loud Om-like single-breath chants for each of the title’s syllables – a command to pay AaTt-ENen-TIONon – and a short, sweet burst of clear, ethereal singing from Wachter, certain words allowing the audience free association, whether of feminist resistance or bathos of the human condition. J Harvey’s blares out again, relieving the tension as the performance ends, leaving a breathless sense of having witnessed the visceral rawness of what it is to inhabit a human body in all its power and vulnerability.
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The second piece, Charmatz’s 1997 work herses, duo (une lente introduction) is performed naked on the same stage by Charmatz and Johanna Lemka. In a slow, deliberate duet, they roll and knot together, carry the weight of each other’s bodies before pulling apart, Charmatz at one point carrying Johanna’s bent body on his head. The nudity feels different from the first piece, bone, muscle and sinew highlighted as they ripple and twist. Evoking the heroic nudity of ancient Greek art, the interaction of the two dancers’ nakedness suggests the dynamics of intimate human relationship but without sexualisation. The performance is beautiful, absorbing, detached and full of bathos.
The audience is seated in the auditorium for the final piece, Bausch’s Café Müller. The walls seen in the video of the original 1978 performance are replaced here by transparent Perspex panels, while similar tables and chairs are scattered across the stage. Taylor Drury, eyes closed and in a pale, nightdress-like gown, takes hesitant and faltering steps around the stage as if sleepwalking, arms straight down and palms forward. At times she rushes forward in short running bursts, sometimes running up against the transparent walls, prompting Dean Biosca, dressed in a suit as if he were a front-of-house manager, to leap ahead of her to fling chairs and tables out of her way with loud crashes. Emily Castelli echoes Drury’s movements at a detached distance, while Blanca Noguerol Ramirez capers across the stage from time to time in an auburn wig of curls and a dark coat, as if looking for somebody; Christopher Tandy and Castelli act out a relationship dynamic with echoes of toxic co-dependency, hurling one another against the walls, their faces registering little emotion despite the violence of their movements. Adding to this sense of a lack of agency – a reflection perhaps, of the way we all act out the unconscious programming laid down over a lifetime of experiences – Reginald Lefebvre approaches to manipulate the couple’s limbs, repeating and undoing their gestures until they no longer require his intervention to keep repeating the same destructive patterns.
The six dancers, despite their proximity to one another, seem as isolated as the three in the tower. The seeming randomness of their movements belie the sheer difficulty and discomfort of this choreography, bruises forming. The tenderness, futility and bathos are reminiscent of a Beckett play, of the way we go through the life’s motions, not quite sure of where we are or where we are going. Club Amour prompts us to remain as present as raw physicality of the dancers, to break free of the automatic patterns that hinder and divide. Prompting admiration and criticism in equal measure, as all ground-breaking works tend to do, Club Amour is a counterpoint for the unease of our times, a thought-provoking triptych that will stay with you long after the festival season is over.
Club Amour continues at the Festival Theatre as part of the Adelaide Festival until March 16
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