I'm so glad to hear she's still going. I'm not normally a real dance/movement fan, but I remember seeing her troupe in Melbourne in the late 70s or early 80s (can it really be that long ago?) and being completely blown away. It was extraordinarily beautiful to watch, and, as you say, very funny. And at times very moving. A great talent. Wish she'd come back to this part of the world.

Posted by: Frank at February 11, 2005 09:49 AM

Not too upbeat. My main problem was, never having seen Bausch before, but being a little more familiar -- thanks to you -- with some of her spiritual children, it was that rather weird experience of encountering a period piece that you knew must have been a substantial challenge at the time, but was constantly overfamiliar through one's experience of what it had influenced. Astonishing quite how *much* of it one had seen in C de la B -- down to the autobiographical expression of the dancers, the recurring obsession with petty sadism and cruelty, and the questionable Eurohumour. Some moments of astonishing beauty. The aggressive rejection of *any* substantial, you know, dance, was impressive, though I longed for the occasional bit of energetic Cherkaouiesque transcendence. Really glad I saw, really looking forward to Palermo, Palermo, but impossible to have the impact it would have done in 1982.

Posted by: Max at February 12, 2005 12:01 PM

Um, so I saw Palermo Palermo. Fuck me. No doubts or hesitations on this one. I started the standing ovation.

Posted by: Max at February 18, 2005 11:50 PM

Really? Good grief. I wished I'd stood for the Nelken ovation, because I certainly wasn't about to for this.

While I loved some bits of it, I disliked or was bored by much more.

From a sensational start, the first act rapidly settled into a relentlessly dreary rhythm in which any vague hint of an idea had to be flogged to death by repetition and interleaved with interminable walking on and off stage. In place of last week's ensemble fluidity it seemed to present a series of flaccid, disconnected snippets, each spun out far beyond its merit. Only in the closing stages -- something like an hour and a half in -- did things build up any kind of momentum.

The second act was a lot livelier -- more dynamic -- and had some wonderful moments, but it too took a perverse pride in outstaying its welcome. The end, when it came -- after a very long evening -- was a blessed relief, and the (partial) standing ovation something of a mystery to my party and (admittedly) a minority of our neighbours.

Some of my own disappointment may be attributed to having aggravating seats in the 2nd Circle -- high-priced but with poor sight-lines, behind a woman with an unforgivably gorgonesque hairstyle -- but mostly it was because the show seemed desperately over-extended.

It reminded me of a (much, much worse) piece by Jan Fabre which I saw in about 1992 at the QEH. Sweet Temptations was over 3 hours long with no interval, and the pitter-patter of feet heading for the exit was a semi-constant accompaniment from maybe thirty minutes in; probably less than half the audience made it to the end. I was there with a guy called Edward Lam, who'd accosted me after some performance at the Chisenhale (a studio in East London; I have no idea if it even still exists) and invited me to join his dance company. (I was just a random audience member there, like him, so what made him think I could perform is anyone's guess. Probably it was random lust.)

Edward was another Pina Bausch devotee; my first. He showed me a video of part of Cafe Muller, one of her signature pieces. At the time I wasn't impressed -- I suspect a great deal was lost on VHS -- but I've longed to see it in the flesh ever since. It played at the Edinburgh Festival sometime after, the same year as Mark Morris's Dido and Aeneas, I think, but I wasn't in a position to go up and see it.

I hung out with Edward (platonically) a few times and spent a day rehearsing and improvising with his company, but I wasn't really cut out for that; who knows what my life might have been like if I was? In any case, that rehearsal was (I think) the day after Sweet Temptations, and most of the other members of the company had seen it too. In the consequent discussion, one of the dancers described it with a phrase from Laurie Anderson:

You've already paid for this!

Meaning: the whole performance was a sort of extended practical joke on the audience. Not an insult, exactly, but a metaphorical pie in the face.

Palermo Palermo wasn't that, but it did seem very deliberately constructed to piss people off, and not (in my obviously not at all humble opinion) in very interesting ways. I've seen enough "challenging" work in my time to feel entitled to say that being nerve-jangling isn't, automatically, an admirable achievement. People have been fucking with the bounds of theatre for a good many decades now and, while I'm certain there's plenty of great material yet to be mined from that seam, it doesn't have any special status anymore. It isn't novel.

Now, I'm not quite old and experienced enough to say for sure whether that was the case sixteen years ago when Palermo Palermo premiered. Perhaps it really was groundbreaking, though given the evidence of Nelken, seven years its senior, I'm not convinced. In any case, now it isn't. And so, for me, Palermo Palermo seemed much more dated, less fresh, than the earlier piece.

There are things I'll probably remember about it for a long time, images that will stay with me, and I'll certainly make an effort to go to whatever Pina brings to town in future, but overall I really didn't think much of it.

Posted by: matt at February 19, 2005 02:38 AM

Firstly, that was a post, not a comment.

Secondly, I dunno what to say. All of your comments about Palermo seemed to me to apply to Nelken, which was far more self-consciously 'constructed to piss people off', or at least to stride about waving flags about how they weren't going to conform to the (1982) audience's expectations -- viz. the part where one dancer says to the audience you can have the classic ballet moves if you want; the you're yawning and my feet are tired bit. And while PP was longer, it felt no slower or more protracted than Nelken to me, and the latter extended scenes and ideas just as much.

PP had much less irritating Eurohumour, and many moments of serious pain, pathos and beauty.

But then I was bang in the middle of stalls row F ;) (for Nelken I was centre front row second circle).

Posted by: Max at February 19, 2005 05:43 PM

Oh yeah: 'interminable walking on and off stage' was precisely a friend's complaint about Nelken.

Posted by: Max at February 19, 2005 05:44 PM

The comment was a bit post-like, but it seemed to belong in this thread rather than broken out somewhere else.

You do have a marked preference for boredom over comedy, so we'll just have to agree to disagree about that. But perhaps it really is just a matter of viewing position. I imagine both pieces look quite different from above.

Posted by: matt at February 19, 2005 08:27 PM

I like comedy. When it's funny.

Posted by: Max at February 19, 2005 11:17 PM

Don't we all? But we don't necessarily agree on when that is.

Posted by: matt at February 20, 2005 01:13 AM

On the way out of PP, I was crowded up next to some teenage bimbo dance student -- I got the impression there were a great many of those in the audience that night -- as she said to her companion, in an infuriatingly authoritative manner clearly intended to impress everyone in the vicinity, "Oh yes, the thing about her is that she's so post-modern!"

And I thought, with an exaggerated, if wholly internal, sigh: Jesus, is this what they're teaching them nowadays? Oh, the callowness of youth.

Posted by: matt at February 20, 2005 01:28 AM

Fuck youths.

Spotted at Pina perfs: Fiona Shaw, Simon Callow, Tim Piggot-Smith.

Spotted at the next table at lunch today: Mick Jagger.

Posted by: Max at February 20, 2005 04:48 PM

I'm pretty sure Ian McKellen was at Thursday's perf of PP, and there was no mistaking Chris Smith at Nelken. At dinner tonight were Gilbert & George, though admittedly that isn't very surprising -- I think they've been at the Mangal every time I've eaten there.

Posted by: matt at February 20, 2005 11:11 PM

I didn't know you were a fellow Mangal-fancier.

Posted by: Max at February 21, 2005 12:27 PM