Performance “Cafe Muller” Pina Bausch in Paris. Review

The theater venue of the Grand Halle, a former slaughterhouse in La Villette Park, hosted a tour of the Wuppertal Dance Theater. The troupe of Pina Bausch, led by Boris Sharmats, brought to Paris the cult performance of its founder and one of the key productions of the 20th century, Café Müller (1978). Watched Maria Sidelnikova.

“Cafe Muller” is one of those performances-myths that have long been scattered into quotes and frames. Naked scene. A pile of chairs and tables. Blind Pina Bausch in a nightgown with her arms outstretched, palms turned outward, like El Greco’s Francis of Assisi. Watching the film “Talk to Her” by “pinoman” with the experience of Pedro Almodovar, the moviegoer brushed away a mean tear. Theatrical people, on the other hand, watched the textbook recording from 1985, with heartbreaking close-ups and sniper-like accents, placed by Bausch herself.

Cafe Muller was born from childhood memories. Bausch’s parents ran a small bar where she watched adult drama as a girl. For the phantoms of the past, the artist Rolf Borzik found a stage form that was brilliant in its simplicity – lifeless chairs and tables. They are at the same time silent witnesses of human stories, and obstacles that heroes endlessly stumble over in their desperate search for happiness. Heroes six. The central couple with a blind heroine driven by a manic need to physically see through the other (the life roles of Mala Erodo and Dominic Mercy, pillars of the Wuppertal Bausch Theatre); her understudy, a lone shadow, and maybe a soul (Pina’s favorite party); a secondary couple with a fussy, practical heroine who happens to be nearby in moments of male despair and receives her portion of pleasures, and a man pushing chairs and tables aside for the blind (Bortsik himself did this at the premiere).

The show has gone through several cosmetic changes over the years. Over time, more light appeared in it, and in the 1980s, Peter Pabst, with whom the choreographer began to work after the death of Bortsik, came up with “spare” scenery for small scenes. He changed the blank walls of Cafe Muller to transparent ones, which made the dichotomy “blind-sighted” even thinner. It’s one thing to hit an impenetrable wall, it’s another thing to run into invisible glass from time to time. “Cafe Muller” is the only performance that Pina Bausch danced to the last, went on stage in it even in 2008, a year before her death, until the disease completely deprived her of her strength. He went through her whole life and, judging by the Paris tour, he died with her.

Café Müller has been relaunched with a new generation of the Wuppertal troupe. Resumed without edits, word for word. Unless the artists are already on stage, while the audience is just taking their seats. A common touch, designed to remind you that the stage and the hall, their life and ours are one and the same. For the tour, artistic director Boris Sharmats prepared several compositions. And the first made an insipid impression, although formally everything was in its place.

The emotional little Tsai-Chin Yu, known for her desperate self-giving, and the courageous introvert Christopher Tandy, according to their types, have formed into a good tragic couple, when both together in no way, and separately it is impossible. The main refrain of “Cafe Muller” – the simplest bunch of “girth around the neck – picked up – dropped” – they theatrically filled with the whole palette of feelings: from the first tenderness to bitter disgust, nurtured by the repetition of situations, emotions, all life. Nimble Dian Bioska dutifully removed the chairs on the path of the blind man, now and then overdoing it with caricatured fear on his face. For some reason, Taylor Dryray made a comic character, a kind of laying woman out of her heroine – here she fussed, there she patted her eyes, and now the man has already fallen into her ingenuous trap. The experienced dancer Reginald Lefebvre was good in the image of a buttoned-up male puppeteer, who over and over again winds up the mechanisms of the dramas of the central couple. The role of Pina Bausch went to Ekaterina Shushakova, also an experienced dancer of the troupe with a beautiful poetic gesture, but she never managed to get out of the shadow of the great German. And it would be strange to blame her for this.

The perception of stage time has changed: 45 minutes to the baroque arias of Henry Purcell today seem like an eternity, and the stories played out inside look like a diligent retelling of other people’s lives. Pina stubbornly talked about the search for love, although other meanings were attributed to the performance. In the “toxic”, as they would say today, relations between a man and a woman who are unable to get out of the fatal circle of falls and rises into which they have driven themselves, the mechanisms of political power are also recognized. Exhausting repetitions-rituals, running from corner to corner, running in circles – a clear metaphor for the totalitarian machine of violence, where some are eager to subjugate, others may not be happy, but dutifully obey and blindly follow the strong. Boris Sharmats promised to fill the legacy of Pina Bausch with topical meanings. Perhaps this is what he meant.