When she took over, in the season 1973-1974, the dance group of the Wuppertal Theatre, Pina Bausch started to experiment a performance dramaturgy which generated a perception gap in the dance culture at the time and divided the contemporary critical discourses. Pina Bausch introduced the concept and the practice of dance theatre, which extended the area of analysis for both fields and overturned the performance and reception language, by inserting new references.
With the exception of certain experimental centres in Cologne, Bremen and Darmstadt, German dance in the ‘80s still developed under the strong influence of ballet or by assimilating the modern dance imported from the United Stated. The German tradition of the Ausdruckstanz (expressive dance), associated to renowned names such as Mary Wigman or Rudolf von Laban, began, after the second world war, to lose in representativeness.
Personalized movement, the search in the performers of individual resonances to define the structure of a deeply subjective, non-formal, non-descriptive and non-abstract dance theatre, the common gesture transgressing its everyday-ity, without losing however its daily “aura” defined Pina Bausch's creations from the very beginning.
In Le Sacre du Printemps, Iphigenia in Tauris, Orpheus end Eurydice, Pina Bausch did not translate the librettos into movement, but employed the forming elements of the stories in a bodily dramaturgy, not a literary one. As Norbert Servos said in his where he analyses in detail the performances of Pina Bausch (Pina Bausch, Dance Theatre, K. Kieser Verlag, 2008), dance theatre is developing towards the area of a “theatre of experience in direct confrontation with a reality which she turns into a physical act experienced by the body.” Both the content and the structure are multi-performative. The texts grow into post-narrative performances employing one single word or phrase in a loop, exceeding the classical structure of a story. To be more specific, a story is contracted to a limited number of key-elements. The music has nothing illustrative to it. The sound particularities contextualize a certain determined era or a certain archaic source. The blend of archetypal and contemporary, ritual and recent history is characteristic to the layered perspective of the choreographer.
Pinei Bausch’s performances are focused on catastrophes and revivals, deviations from the set order, defiance of the daily ordinary transfer into the actions we take. They represent releases from the markings of the everyday and fragmented recouplings, non-linear in terms of a rhythm building its own movement dynamics out of pieces of fragmented and overlapping gestures. Tensional circuit breaks occurring within the movements, sudden interruptions of certain intents, resumes, and actions circularly in accord with each other.
The couple as a microstructure of the society, as a post of contemporary kilometres, of alienation and intimacy recovery is in Viktor, as in other performances by Pine Bausch, at the centre of the dance scaffolding. In 1980, a man's face is melted in tens of kisses. Traces of red lipstick cover his skin, like urns containing the momentary passion. In Kontakhof, a couple crushes, trying with their arms and palms, to suffocate and longing for the touch that turns every second of rejection into a search.
The fulfilment and, at the same time, the failure in meeting the other are, in Viktor (created in May 1986 and played again after 15 years) the pillars of a dance theatre structure based on a dramaturgy of repetition: repetition of a gesture, a phrase, a set of movements, repetition recorded in the recognizable rhythmic of everyday life. A repetition rendered stronger, through censorship, by some unexpected sectioning of these dynamics. Pina Bausch introduces an element of syncope to the core of this apparent ordinariness, shattering the entire architecture of the dance, just as the catastrophe that occurs at one time onstage – chairs moved and knocked over, strings that hinder the performers in their advancement, strips and pieces of wood discarded as bridge fragments over a catastrophe area hardly perceived, the running, the thrusting, colliding bodies and the tension of the high tone voices, blow up a certain balance of the repetition.
A handless blonde, in a red dress, is smiling. It is the smile of a vulnerable diva, with a body that will ultimately regain its strength. Hands reappear, and the body seems to have grown like a child who has acquired his “toys” of flesh and bones. A woman is rolled in a carpet. Fix, lying on their backs, a man and a woman are two corpse-dolls, a pair of grooms handled by a priest sealing their marriage: the two say “yes” to one another and embrace post-mortem. Bodies and carpets are displayed like pieces potentially to be traded in an immense human-objectual auction. Objects are described in a language that is intelligible with the exception of the prices, jerky rhythm specific to the auction is further accelerated, a verbal performance in itself, while the performers are themselves treated like exhibits, walk live puppies and ancient statues, march in pushing objects of furniture in front of the public. Dances on the stage - waltz, foxtrot, etc. – continue in the hall, between the rows of seats, a woman says several times “good evening” and then flees. Two real sheep and a paper swan which is thrown some food mingle among the dancers giving away to the public either cobblestones, or sandwiches made of fresh rolls. Women wrap their heads in scarves, men sit on chairs, take lipsticks and pocket mirrors out of their handbags and carefully start to put on makeup. All that in a performance of identities lending specific features to one another. A performance-world-of-all-cultural, personal, political-beginnings - and of all endings, storing corporalized images and overlaps them with rich humour.
foto: Jong-Duk Woo
In Viktor, the fragment has the power of remaining stuck to the retina in the entirety of the connections it set with the organic complex that it is essential to.
Viktor merges cultural influences (classical music, African and South American rhythms, music from the ‘30s) and ritual reminisces of contemporary gender studies in a pit-tomb flanked by walls of earth. Shortly after the beginning of the performance, from somewhere above, at the edge of the pit represented by the large stage, someone starts throwing earth with a shovel, over the dancing, the music and the silence. Until the end.
