Café Müller
It’s difficult to watch Pina Bausch’s Café Müller – which was first created and performed with her company Tanztheater Wuppertal in 1973 – without thinking about Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust.
Bausch was born during the War; her parents owned and ran a hotel and restaurant, where she did childhood performances for the guests and patrons – all of which is evoked in Café Müller.
The stage was filled with scattered chairs and tables. Upstage was a revolving door through which the performers entered and exited, as well as coming and going from the wings. Huge mirrors formed walls on either side of the stage.
An older and younger woman in white nightdresses and a younger man in a white shirt, black pants and bare feet entered repeatedly one by one and danced with their eyes closed and their arms outstretched like sleepwalkers, occasionally banging into a chair or table, or one of the glass side walls.
A second man also in white shirt and black pants repeatedly entered and dashed ahead of them frantically knocking chairs and tables out of the way, while the sleepwalkers broke into more expressive and sometimes wild movements.
A third man similarly attired occasionally entered and moved more commandingly; for example, repeatedly positioning and arranging the younger woman and man like puppets, making them embrace and kiss, and then lifting the young woman into the young man’s arms, but the latter kept dropping her. This sequence was repeated over and over again, faster and faster. Later the young man and woman repeatedly threw each other against one of the glass walls. A third woman in a red wig, blue dress, black overcoat and red heels also repeatedly entered and tottered anxiously to and fro, towards and away from the others.
Most of this happened in silence, apart from the sound of the performers banging into things, furniture being moved or knocked over, high heels tottering, or the sound of their bodies and breathing; but there were four crucial pieces of recorded music by Purcell. One was ‘Dido’s Lament’ from Dido And Aeneas; the other three were from The Fairy-Queen, two of which were also laments, while the last was a lullaby.
The role of the older sleepwalking woman was originally performed by Bausch herself, which made it hard to shake off the impression that the work belongs to the genre of ‘memory theatre’ or is a kind of ‘dream play’ based on memories. This impression was heightened by the music, with its alternating evocations of lamentation and lullaby.
None of this was conveyed in the restaging by French choreographer Boris Charmatz (the current artistic director of Tanztheater Wuppertal), which was faithful to the letter, but not the spirit of the original work.
Club Amour
Charmatz paired Café Müller with two works of his own from the 1990s under the somewhat jarring collective title of Club Amour, claiming in an interview that all three works deal with “the impossibility of simple, true, plain love’” This interpretation seems all the more puzzling given the content of the two pieces by Charmatz, both of which were performed with the audience standing or sitting on the stage surrounding the action (for Café Müller, we were seated in the auditorium).
The title of Aatt enen tionen is possibly a drawn-out articulation of the French ‘Attention!’ (or ‘Look!’), the syllables of which were periodically shouted on the soundtrack, which also included songs by British post-punk singer-songwriter PJ Harvey.
Read: Concert review: PJ Harvey, Sydney Opera House Forecourt
The piece featured three dancers (a woman and two men) who were isolated from each other on three levels of a tower of scaffolding, surrounded by three tethered white balloons with lights inside them. When the work began, the dancers removed their pants – so they were dressed only in white t-shirts and naked from the waist down – and moved in violent, spasmodic and unsynchronised jerks alternating with moments of stillness or exhaustion.
The second piece, herses, duo, was first performed a year later in 1997; the title is perhaps a reference to the French word for hearse (or harrow). It featured two fully naked figures, a woman and a man – Johanna-Elisa Lembke and Charmatz himself.
Unlike Aatt enen tionen, this was all about physical contact and essentially involved the two performers rolling over each other on the bare floor, forming awkward shapes and sometimes even kneeling or standing on each other, while starkly lit from above, and with a low-level ambient industrial score by Stefan Fraunberger.
This was the most affecting of all three performances. Like Aatt enen tionen, it made one think of the AIDs era when it was created, but there was also a physical and emotional tenderness (if that’s the right word) that offered a sense of connection with (and between) the performers, as well as between the piece itself and Café Müller.
Read: Theatre review: Love, Old Fitz Theatre
If only that sense of connection had been present in the performance of the latter. Memory and repetition are central to Bausch’s work, which is fundamentally about working through historical and personal trauma. Once the work becomes disconnected from its intentionality, only the empty gesture of memorialisation remains.
Café Müller and Club Amour by Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch + Terrain Brosi Charmatz were performed at Festival Theatre as part of Adelaide Festival from 10-16 March 2025.
