Contactless world – Newspaper Kommersant No. 231 (7432) dated 12/13/2022

On the stage of the Paris Opera, the premiere of the restored “Kontakthof” took place – the last and legendary performance of Pina Bausch from the golden fund of the 1970s, which contains all the signs of her dance theater, an anthology of her language and her art. I watched how the universal world of the great German continues to find its heroes and spectators. Maria Sidelnikova.

During the life of Pina Bausch (1940–2009), getting her performance into the repertoire was another challenge. Former Opera ballet director Brigitte Lefebvre traveled to Wuppertal on schedule to persuade the relentless grand dame to relocate first Le Rite of Spring in 1997 and then Orfeo in 2005 to Paris. Above all techniques and talents, Bausch valued the personality, so she put only on her own, on those who do not need to explain common truths: “it is important to me not how you move, but why”, the basis of the foundations of her theater. Work in her performances, as they now say, is akin to personal transformation. Others run to an appointment with a psychotherapist, while the artists dreamed of getting to the casting for Pina, so that she could see in them something that seems to be not accepted in the ballet world – people. In 1997, among these artists was the young Aurelie Dupont, then five minutes to five etoile. Hiding behind fouettes and pirouettes like iron armor, the exemplary classical ballerina craved sensuality, while only ballet tricks were expected from her. Pina’s sensitive eye pulled the defenseless inside out of Dupont. “She cured me, I owe her everything,” the Dupont director admitted many, many years later, planning the premiere of “Kontakthof” in her last, as it turned out, season as artistic director.

“Kontakthof” (1978) – literally from the German “court of contacts” – a legendary performance, the result of a fruitful five-year plan of the 1970s, for which Pina Bausch staged her main ballets. Their success is largely the merit of stage designer Rolf Borzik (1944–1980), a unique artist who knew how to find the most concise and precise stage form for her ideas. Gray walls around the perimeter as a memory space, chairs as the main props, a dress as a character, a costume as a sentence – all this was invented by them together. With his sudden death, Bausch lost a full-fledged co-author, after which she undertook to compose sentimental city guide performances, as well as resurrect past masterpieces. In 2002, she resumed “Kontakthof” with the pensioners of Wuppertal, and a year before her death she released it in a teenage version, confirming the universality of her obvious, in general, observations: both old and young are looking for recognition and love. Do they find them? Hardly.

“I am a respectable and married woman,” Eva Greenstein now reports on the Parisian stage (a brilliant finale to the career of the 42-year-old “first dancer”). Her back is steel, her gait from the hip is assertive, the hairpins dig into the stage, her gaze is into the audience. But as soon as a man appears, respectability is gone. In his greedy hands, she becomes a weak-willed doll or an aggressive hysteric, one of the two. “Woman”, “dress”, “material” – for Bausch these words are, in fact, the same root, hence the endless dressing up: not in this dress, but in another life, you see, and it will get better. At the same time, men emphasizedly remain buttoned up with all buttons – this is how the choreographer emphasizes their rigidity. Relations with the opposite sex are the main criterion for the success of her characters in life, these vulnerable neurotics who are constantly looking for intimacy. They look at their lives through the prism of relationships – but relationships do not add up, cracks are everywhere. Any contact that begins quite innocently and even gently turns into violence. That is mutual: smiling couples alternately come to the fore and, with undisguised pleasure, cuff their counterparts on the back of the head, pull each other by the nipples, by the earlobe and in every possible way excel in cruelty. Either masochistic: lying down on the floor, a man in glasses tortures himself by dropping a heavy disk from a barbell on his stomach (Germain Louvet – there are no other étoiles in a wonderful artistic ensemble, composed mainly of corps de ballet dancers and soloists). And even in groups. A tormented girl in a pastel chiton dress (an excellent work by the luminary Charlotte Ranson), who even at the beginning of the performance squealed excitedly at the sight of a dead rat, at the end will cool off both to the rat and to male harassment – after numerous hands will paw her limp body. But it all started with innocent strokes. Even the ducks in the documentary, which the characters carefully sit down to watch at the beginning of the second act, have nothing in their personal lives, let alone people.

For quite a long time, the characters and the viewer do not build contact. Pina Bausch places them either in the circus, or on TV, or in the cinema, but neither tricks, nor words that turn into gibberish (everyone sits on the edge of the stage and alternately carries something about their happy and unhappy love, devaluing the stage word as such), nor thirty-two-toothed grins and excessive wagging behind in an attempt to attract glances do not bring them satisfaction. Pleasure goes only to the main introvert of the troupe – Ava Joannes. She secretly asks Monsieur in the first row for a coin, quietly sits astride a horse from a children’s carousel – and all wishes come true. But here human contact is not required.

The Kontakthof was transferred to the Opera under the strict supervision of the Pina Bausch Foundation and its artists. The dancers worked with Julie Shanaan, Breanna O’Mara, Franco Schmidt, Ann Martin, Andrey Berezin – all those who received the texts first hand and now lovingly pass them on. The Parisians turned out to be not just diligent performers, but also amazing, completely original characters. Everyone here is a personality, with its own external imperfections, internal weaknesses and unique stage power. That is why the end of the performance wins endlessly in persuasiveness, when the actors, lining up in a round dance, “whisper” their seductive spell-movements, puff out their cheeks theatrically and look into the eyes, it seems, to everyone sitting in the hall. Finally, a well-established contact – at least visual, at least with the viewer – is perceived as reconciliation, liberation, as a long-awaited life-affirming point at the end of a complex speech.