[Review] Pina Bausch’s Nelken – is too precious, too conscientious, too loving, too pristine?

Pina Bausch can still raise controversy 15 years after her death in 2009.

The German-born choreographer, known throughout the dance world and beyond for the extraordinary works she created for her Tanztheater Wuppertal, helped to change the way dance was perceived during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Rejecting prettiness and formal abstraction, Bausch conjured up on stage an ambiguous world full of love, pain, fear, feminism or misogyny through her own unique movement vocabulary – her company explored the uncomfortable side of life, and they often talked or sang as much as they danced. During her lifetime, Bausch received as much critical ire as she did admiration, but more recently she has become a kind of dance deity, the performances of her works received with unquestioning acclaim by many. You see Bausch’s influence everywhere now in the contemporary dance world, where lesser talents attempt to imitate her, but there are occasions within her work that make me uncomfortable – is it wrong of me to feel ambivalent about her achievements?

A case in point is Tanztheater Wuppertal’s revival of Bausch’s Nelken at London’s Sadler’s Wells on St Valentine’s Day. What struck me most about the work was the disparity between what was written about the production in the programme and what I observed on stage. Former dancers told of how, during Nelken‘s creation in 1982, Bausch had questioned them individually about love and romance and what they thought about it. Indeed, Peter Pabst’s set, showing a floor covered with pink carnations (inspired by a field of carnations Bausch had seen in Chile), seems to place the scene within a romantic meeting place, albeit with scaffolding and large cardboard boxes arranged at the sides of the stage. What I saw enacted on stage, however, suggested intimidation, aggression and harassment. It’s worth remembering that in 1982 Germany was still a divided nation, and that Chile was living under a right-wing military dictatorship.

In Nelken, we see a child-like game of “statues”, with the cast all wearing dresses, descend into an act of control and suppressed aggression; a muscular dancer wearing high heels and briefs appears holding an accordion that is never played; a woman and a man spoon mud from buckets onto the tops of their heads; a man spanks the bottom of another, and instructs other men to walk on all-fours like dogs, their initially playful antics watched over by four security guards with real Alsatian dogs; a woman is made to tickle the feet of a man whilst he kneels to say his prayers; a man force-feeds a woman, stuffing her mouth with fruit, despite her protests; a man dances on top of a row of tables whilst another is forced to remove them, one by one, from the stage; an officious male dancer demands to see the passports of other dancers and asks one of them to drop his trousers. Time after time, these scenes of humiliation effectively create an atmosphere of unease that is only occasionally lifted by lighter moments, such as a lone dancer signing the lyrics to the George Gershwin song “The Man I Love”, and a woman happily peeling potatoes until she is scared away.

At other times, the production seemed clunky and a little dated. One of the best-known sequences in Nelken is when the dancers, amid a chaos of rush and noise, repeatedly line up chairs at the front and then the back of the stage, and make sequences of seated movements that bend backwards and forwards, all to the Andante of Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No 14, “Death and the Maiden”. I couldn’t help thinking this was just a distraction to divert the attention away from the stuntmen erecting a platform of boxes onto which they would a bit later jump onto from a great height. How much did it actually add to the production though? Not much. (I’m expecting a thunderbolt from the dance iconoclasts above to strike me down for daring to write that last sentence.)

The dancers talk as much as they move. They often speak short phrases of nonsense, for example wishing the audience a Merry Christmas for no apparent reason, but there are brief speeches – such as when they tell us how they first began to dance – that are amusing and sometimes poignant. None of their words, however, are as eloquent as those expressed in the lyrics of the Billie Holiday song, “Romance in the Dark”, which also features in Nelken.

Perhaps part of the problem with this revival is that it is too precious, too conscientious, too loving, too pristine? The new dancers of Tanztheater Wuppertal are impressive, both as an ensemble and as individuals, but maybe they should have been allowed a few more liberties that, had she still been alive, Bausch might well have welcomed.

Jonathan Gray Guest Author

Jonathan Gray was editor of Dancing Times from 2008 to 2022.

He studied at The Royal Ballet School, Leicester Polytechnic, and Wimbledon School of Art where he graduated with a BA Hons in Theatre Design. He was on the Curatorial Staff of the Theatre Museum, London, from 1989 to 2005, assisting on a number of dance-related exhibitions, and helping with the recreation of original designs for a number of The Royal Ballet’s productions including Danses concertantes, Daphnis and Chloë, and The Sleeping Beauty.

Jonathan Gray has also contributed to the Financial Times and The Guardian, written programme articles for The Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet, and is co-author of the book Unleashing Britain: Theatre gets real 1955-64, published in 2005. He is a member of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle.