A large ballroom with white walls and thirteen men in dark suits, as many women in retro-style dresses. This is a "meeting room," Pina Bausch's Kontakthof, a piece written more than thirty years ago when she had just founded the Tanztheater Wuppertal. She revived the piece in 2000 with non-professional dancers over 65, explaining that she couldn't wait until her own dancers reached their sixties. A final version of the piece was created just months before the passing of the grande dame of Wuppertal, featuring fourteen-year-olds selected from local schools. Across these three versions, Kontakthof remains unchanged in form. The same ballroom with white walls. The same music evoking 1930s Germany. The same costumes, the same simple gestures, the same movements drawn from everyday life. For nearly three hours, the audience watches these twenty-six dancers, confined to their ballroom like rats in a cage. Much tenderness, love, desire, envy, vanity, a good dose of humor, but also jealousy, hatred, hysteria, and the most extreme violence. It is a truly uncompromising exploration of the possibilities of human nature, with all its beauty, complexity, perversity, and cruelty. Seemingly innocuous movements repeated, tender and brutal scenes that gently reveal their subtlety and incredible scope.
With this final version, Pina Bausch seems to have placed the keystone in a body of work begun in 1978. These teenagers, playing adults in their formal suits, are about to take over from their parents. They, in turn, find themselves in this hall for a debutante ball. A new generation is emerging, its mastery not yet fully developed, and yet the same story unfolds: once again, a few notes of Juan Llossas's "Oh, Fraulein Grete" are enough to transform the chaos of human relationships into the conventions of a smiling, orderly society. Lowering the tango's volume is all it takes for the pounding of the dancers' feet on the floor to foreshadow the sound of boots from these young Germans. A spectacle that never ceases to fascinate us. All that remains is to see "Dancing Dreams" at the Parvis cinema, a documentary that chronicles the creation of this Kontakthof, to prolong the pleasure of this evening.
