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STAGECRAFT

A Bausch dreamscape

Photos: Richard Termine

Innovative choreography: A country memorialised in stylised moves.

Over more than 30 years and through 40 large-scale works, German choreographer Pina Bausch, who heads Tanztheater Wuppertal, her company based in Wuppertal, Germany, has established an inimitable contemporary dance style. Born in 1940, Bausch trained under big name dancer-choreographers first in Germany, then at New York’s famed Juilliard School.

Early on, she shocked audiences with provocative works that focused unsparingly on the human condition. Her evening-length pieces became known for their juxtaposition of witty vignettes of daily life with depictions of profound human suffering. She mixed pure dance with political theatre and created abstract works in the expressionistic style — theatrical pieces that audiences found difficult to deconstruct because they offer no narrative thread and she refuses to explicate them.

In fact, she rarely gives interviews or talks about her work but she did once say, “I developed a love for dance as I couldn’t express myself in words as a kid.” Not surprisingly, then, her imagination is visual, her dance vocabulary non-linear.

Today, her fans say she has mellowed (less political, less violent) but her creations, like modern art or poetry, still defy rational understanding. They require viewers to figure out the meaning for themselves. One needs to give oneself up to a Bausch piece emotionally, to let it wash over one like a dreamscape.

Still, she has a cult following: celebrities like dancer Bill T. Jones, theatre director Robert Wilson and filmmaker Pedro Almodovar have been influenced by her groundbreaking work. In New York, Bausch commands respect, even adoration. Thus, “Bamboo Blues,” a work inspired by Bausch’s love for India and her long friendship with the late choreographer Chandralekha, played in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2,100-seat Opera House for eight sold-out performances this month.

The 140-minute show opens with a barefoot solo dancer in a billowing strapless pink ballgown who whirls in, with long, black hair cascading behind her. She twists, twirls, dips low, and with arms outstretched, circles around the vast stage in fast, fluid swoops. Against the tall backdrop of sheer, billowing white fabric that forms the elegant ever-shifting set, she moves mesmerisingly, faster and faster. As “lead,” her solo sets the pure dance theme that will be reprised repeatedly.

Then the pace changes: women in jewel-coloured silk ballgowns enter languidly, stare, stretch out on the floor as though posed for a group portrait and — chew! Are they courtesans preening for clients? Women chewing paan? Fashion models posing for a shoot? Actually, the dancers imagined they were India’s ubiquitous cows chewing the cud! No matter, every interpretation is equally valid.

The vignette resulted from the way Bausch choreographs: she asks dancers to imagine a scene (or gestures, or movements) from memory or in response to her prompt or theme. From the material thus gathered, she selectively picks about 10 per cent of the contributions, reworks them to create a collage of episodes that link up to become the final performance.

These two scenes set the pattern: pure dance followed by a comic non-narrative vignette with no obvious connection one to the other, or to India. Yet India was evoked: in the brilliant colours — peacock blue, magenta, lipstick red, emerald green, flaming orange — the sheen of the silk, the long dark hair, the languid stares. It is a European’s memory of India, impressionistic and painterly. Subtle, beautiful, economical.

More obvious references followed: pairs of women dressed in strappy bathing suits, high heels and mundus slow-walked diagonally across stage, quick-dipping to hitch up a loincloth tucked in a multitude of ways; bare-chested men performed the same catwalk routine — a hilarious spoof of what Bausch doubtless saw all across South India, memorialised in stylised moves.

Later, a dancer rotated in slow motion against the stretched out fabric of a sari that she draped on; in another scene, a man soaped himself, bathing outdoors while a fully dressed woman crouched, at a distance, for a bucket bath.

Such mundane acts were turned into stage-worthy exotica in an outsider’s view of life in India, evocative of a traveller’s photographs.

Other images were more surreal, harder to decode, more Jungian, less India-specific: women dragged across the floor or carried on men’s shoulders, men rolling en masse on the ground. Other episodes hint at physical violence and the abuse of women.

Interspersed with these theatrical episodes is the core of “Bamboo Blues” — stunning solo dances that do not conform to a uniform style. Each dancer is unique because Bausch encourages individuality and self-expression; she picks dancers for their personalities.

The male dancers, barefoot and clad in black slacks and white shirts, are strikingly athletic, nimble and powerful. Their interactions with the female dancers comment on human relationships: love, power, sex, violence are variously viewed. In one recurring episode, for instance, a couple make a bed from a bamboo pole and a plank, and lying on it, roll it back and forth, covering themselves with each other’s garments; in another, a man rolls across the floor as a woman rolls crosswise on top of him. Such playfulness makes innovative choreography.

Surprisingly, the haunting music is neither live nor original, but an eclectic blend of Indian classical (Anoushka Shankar on sitar, Suphala on tabla) and contemporary Western (songs, blues, Alice Coltrane).

Bausch makes her achingly romantic mix from extant discs, and adds video to complement her simple set. Life-size palm trees, gigantic chhau dancers, Hindu deities and Bollywood lovers are projected on to the sheer fabric of the backdrop to create magical effects as diminutive dancers seemingly weave through them.

This is as Indian as Bausch gets: the overall effect is one of a dream landscape, not the banal logic of the present but the vagueness of mystery, of something remembered from time past.

The writer is Contributing Editor, Newsweek International, New York.

A different body language

At 14, she played Miranda, the wonderstruck teenage heroine of Shakespeare’s “Tempest,” in Peter Brook’s French-language production. Ten years later, Brook cast her as Ophelia in his version of “Hamlet”.

For Shantala Shivalingappa, a budding Madras-born dancer growing up in Paris (where her father was a UNESCO director), the wonder has not ceased since then. Her “brave new world” opened up miraculously when she entered the international theatre scene thanks to her mother, Bharatnatyam choreographer Savitry Nair, who was her first teacher and Brook’s consultant for the “Mahabharata”.

At 15, she discovered Kuchipudi and studied under Vempatti Chinna Satyam in Madras in her long summer breaks. In time, she had her arangetram at Kalakshetra (where her mother had trained under Rukmini Devi) and since then, she has appeared as guest dancer in three Pina Bausch productions, most recently in “Bamboo Blues”.

At 32, Shivalingappa has won many American plaudits. She has danced at two of the country’s most highly regarded festivals — Fall for Dance and Jacob’s Pillow — where she premiered “Gamaka”, a full-length, five-piece Kuchipudi solo that she choreographed and took on tour last August with four musicians from Madras. Cast in the traditional classical format, “Gamaka” includes a varnam, a pure rhythm piece, a javali and a thillana but has a distinctly contemporary feel. Four months later, the New York Times singled her out as a “Bausch favourite who is attracting notice here in her own right” in a profile headlined, “A Dancer Rises in the East, and Now the West”.

Asked about her role in “Bamboo Blues”, Shivalingappa explains: “I’m the only Indian in an Indian piece so it is a kind of special place. As part of the group, I’m like any other dancer. What makes me different is that I have a different body language and movement material, my way of moving is distinct from the others. I’m trained as a classical Indian dancer, not as a ballet or contemporary dancer. My Kuchipudi training is affecting my performance here; it’s a very specific technique.”

The only dancer to use Indian mudras, she performs a solo, appears throughout “Bamboo Blues”, and in one memorable scene, resembles a Christmas tree with lights that twine over her short diaphanous dress and down one leg. In fact, working with Bausch has been “a journey”, she admits. “My shows are very much influenced by my contemporary work — the dynamics of it, the sense of space, the release of energy is different from that of an Indian dancer who has only been in the Indian mould. Working with Pina has greatly enriched me on both fronts and for that, I feel very lucky, very refreshed.” Then she reflects, “My master’s Kuchipudi style is also innovative, it is elegant and very modern. He taught me to be eclectic. Pina loved his work, too. I am blessed to be trained by him.”

A French citizen, educated at a private bilingual school in Paris, Shivalingappa earned a Master’s in ethnology from the Sorbonne. She will premiere a new piece in Paris next fall before bringing it to New York. French audiences are deeply appreciative of Indian dance but she still counts on her mother to be the “objective eye” for her work.

“This past year has been wonderful for me,” she confesses. “I’m building up my own contemporary work, I love being in New York, I worked with the fantastic Japanese choreographer Amagatsu of the Sankai Juku company.” Any wishes? “I would love to perform in India.”

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