At Pina Bausch, the waltz of plastic buckets

A plastic bucket overflowing with water to put your head in and deflate your neurons; another to water the girlfriend in the middle of the summer heat wave; a third to lather the bar of soap and rinse the tray in the same spurt… Put a bucket on stage, and it’s immediately the choreographer Pina Bausch (1940-2009) you have in your sights to refresh your memory. Master in water games, champion of the breaststroke with her gestures of arms more fluid than those of a mermaid, the genius designer has sublimated the wearing of this multi-use accessory. Until metamorphosing, in its spectacle Nelken (1982)a woman in a sumptuous plastic idol, with buckets in bracelets and headgear.

From the bathroom to the sauna, from the lake that swells with the ocean tide, from the foamy hill that streams to the seeping black rock, water, in all the invigorating shades dear to the philosopher of matter Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962 ), floods a number of creations by the German artist. And what magical object carries all these liters of fleet? The bucket, unearthed in hardware stores in Wuppertal (Germany), regularly robbed by the company’s performers. “I never understood why Pina used those horrible buckets, exclaims Helena Pikon, historical personality of the company. I have always hated them. I thought that the plastic had nothing to do in the world of Pina, but they imposed themselves through the dancers, whose improvisations she kept showing her. Sometimes they even multiplied, as in Wiesenland [2000], by Pina’s choice and for the action itself, and it’s a very beautiful moment in this play. »

Bazaar Gizmo

With its string of white buckets, Vollmond (2006), masterpiece, splashes and splashes happily. While a small river meanders, it wakes up, on a night of full moon, a saraband of madness under a torrential rain. The volley of plastic utensils raises a water battle with childish accents of great letting go. The dancers attack each other with buckets, bounce in the puddles and splash themselves. The trance is not far away as the dresses cling to the bodies, the hair drips, exploding in a myriad of drops. Liberation, rebirth, eroticism, dance beats harder when it is ambushed.

Without thinking of having its effect, the bucket serves the cause of a gestural art that forgets the artifice of representation to focus on action.

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