Fruhlingsopher, a three parts play values the German tradition of the Ausdruckstanz stronger than any other work of the choreographer. Shortly after the premiere, the third part was presented separately, under the title Le Sacre du Printemps, introduced in the repertory of the dance theatre in Wuppertal and became one of the most played performances in the repertoire of the company.
Le Sacre du Printemps marks a major stage in defining the characteristic style of the dance theatre aesthetics that Pina Bausch Dance Theatre constantly innovated on. From one work to another, Bausch experienced various working methods based on the willingness of the dancers to dive in vulnerable area of memories, and scratch to their most intimate feelings and intensify their sensations. Pina Bausch creates senzo-thermal performances, a documentation of personal emotions, materialised unsophisticated, symbolic body language.
Dramatical radicalization in a dance creation, as well as the exploration of possibilities for transhipment of current dance practices become visible in Le Sacre du Printemps. Pina Bausch is concerned, on one hand, with controversial physicality creating its own scenario for the movement dramaturgy, focused on contradictory, repetitive states, alternating situations and, on the other hand, with the ritualization of movement.
In Le Sacre du Printemps, the staging technique, the overlapping narratives (fragments of corporalized story) with a common bond, action plans accumulation, apparently unrelated, in different areas of the stage, contrapuntal time of placing the moments of movement and stillness, freezing of music into the body and its sudden melting in contracted muscles are in an embryonic phase.
Lying on the ground, a woman moves slowly as if trying to wake up from a frost. The scene is filled with women who burst chaotically, their bodies stuck to the ground, stand up and recommence the group ritual. There is a group of men who disperses and regroups around one woman. A ritual circle is thus formed; an arena of live bodies where jerky movements are repeated and develop organically from the stomach outwards.
Two entities of bodies confront without touching each other at first. They vibrate and haunt each other, watching one another. A group of women and a group of men have a life and death dispute over their fighting area. The unity of the group breaks and the bodies explode violent falls, balance recoveries made in chaotic motion.A bodily earthquake starting from the ankles and ends in cervical spasms. Bodies jump in the air, seeming to be detached from vertical spindle that keeps them standing. They lose balance, fall down and almost fall to the earth that sticks to their sweaty flesh. Earth and the skin absorb each other, stick to each other in a frenetically pulsating organic alloy.
Later, the frenzy turns into organic calm, natural peace that controls the sudden muscle movements and recontextualizes, spiritualizes it. This is not a mere re-presentation of movement or re-rendering of a familiar gestural context. There is a degree of abstraction that turns the most common aspect into a symbolic gesture. Abstraction is the result of absolute control of extremes in a contrasting structure that Pina Bausch emphasizes from one work to another.
The dancers are isolated and return exactly at the initial point, forking a gradual type of polarization between the state of a solid group and the liquid state of individual sacrifice. The theme of Le Sacre du Printemps is the sacrifice of a girl in a symbolic and violent ritual, in contemporary re-staging of the original feast. There is a stylistic of the attraction-rejection and distancing-yearning that positions bodies according to affective centres of mass.
The censorship of the impetus and its release, converting fear of getting closer to the other into the brutality of attraction are the main tension lines in Le Sacre du Printemps. We can hear bodies violently crushing into each other, breathing intensifies, touches resound.
Men run faster around women, taken them into their arms, shake them as if they were puppets and take distance from them. The earth covering the stage covers the skin of the dancers and gives a certain quality to movements, a weightness that makes the effort of advancement visible.
Pina Bausch aims at a dynamic of distancing bodies, based on the controversy which arises both between the two groups (men-women), and within them. In the beginning, the groups preserve a certain distance from a woman and a man who detach from them, and then encircle them until they almost swallow them. The woman detaches from the group and is kept outside the community as a foreign and alinenated body, that extreme panic and ultimate invocation of salvation force to live in agony its reclusion. Bodies mutually eject each other, and then accept closeness.
At the end of the performance, after the war of bodies ends, the body becomes part of the earth again, as if it never raised from the matter in which it deepens its breath. The physical body is deposited on the earth granular body. The organicalness and materiality of the earth are the two fundamental principles of the performance. The arms touch the earth; feet stick to the earth; the body becomes earth; dissolves into original matter. An organic bond tension is produced to stimulate the return of the fragile and temporary body into the timeless body of the earth. Two bodies find again their primordial centre of unity.
