Review: Kontakthof – Echoes of ’78, Pina Bausch through the eyes of Meryl Tankard

Lily Hyde sees a reworked version of Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof with original cast members from 1978 – mired in the old, the show presents something remarkably new.

Memory is a monster. It is a capricious thing that both empowers and enslaves us, putting us at the mercy of that which we wish to keep and that which we wish to forget, but may be forced to eventually confront.

Memories are ephemeral things, never exactly the same when revisited. So is a dance – once performed, it can never be truly recaptured; even if it is repeated, it will never be exactly as it was before.

Therefore, filming dance – fleeting, unpredictable, and impermanent – and making the indefinite definite seems entirely at odds with what makes the form so thrillingly unique. Indeed, it was a practice that Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of Ballets Russes, was so fiercely opposed to that only one twenty-eight-second film of the company, recorded in secret, is known to exist.

The divide between memory and the definite is at the heart of the conflict of Kontakthof – Echoes of ’78. A revival of Pina Bausch’s seminal work, Kontakthof, stars its original cast from nearly fifty years ago, both present and absent. Of the twenty dancers, eight (nine were scheduled to appear, but Elisabeth Clarke had to withdraw from the performance due to illness) now take to the floor of Rolf Borzik’s sparse and imposing dancehall, to dance not only with each other, but the phantoms of their former selves.

With Borzik’s archival footage projected on a gauze screen at the front of the stage, a tension arises between what Bausch intended Kontakthof to be – a piece navigating love, desire, and fear of rejection, in a dancehall, and the broader themes imposed by this revival – the losses of youth, love, and each other. And yet, mired in the old, the show presents something remarkably new.

As the dancers, now aged between seventy and eighty, first present themselves to the audience alongside footage of themselves from nearly fifty years ago, it is both moving and uncanny. Cast in shadows and aided by their monochromatic costumes, the performance has a dream-like, unreliable quality. Their projected selves loom much larger than they do, and it is hard to know which version of the people to watch – do you want the younger, ebullient selves, more technically proficient, but blurred by distance, or do you want the performers as they are today, older, stiffer, but alive and vital? The choice is not easy to make.

Many chairs that surround the dance floor are now empty, and remain so. Rather than reconstruct the piece on a smaller scale, the show’s director, Meryl Tankhard, instead presents fragments of the whole.

Said Tankhard, “Rather than replace our dear friends, I want their absence to be felt,” and in this, she keenly succeeds, creating a show that is simultaneously exorcism, resurrection, and elegy.

However, Bausch’s work, which has rarely held universal appeal, is only the more divisive for it. Amongst the solemn promenades, visceral soundscapes, and uncanny stillness is a profound meditation on loss.

That’s not to say there aren’t moments of levity. Before one of the more seductive movements, dancer Josephine Ann Endicott attempts to teach another, Arthur Rosenfeld, how to properly wiggle his hips, before promptly giving up and sighing, “It wasn’t good 47 years ago.” Meryl Tankhard’s and Josephine Ann Endicott’s pas de deux, girlish and joyful, is still as brilliant and perfectly synchronised as it was in 1978.

In the show’s second act, the screen moves to the back of the stage, smaller and confined. It lets the dancers, who introduced themselves at the end of Act 1, come into their own, not just as dancers, but as the people they are now, rather than who they were nearly fifty years ago.

As the dancers lose themselves in the performance, there is a real joy in seeing their eyes light up, and a growing confidence in their movements, the knowledge that they’ve been here before bringing a sense of security.

However, there are moments within Kontakthof that are genuinely distressing – the section in which Endicott breaks down into visceral, extended sobbing, and Tankard’s assault by the male dancers, continually poking, prodding and touching. When her younger projected self is forced to the floor, Tankard remains standing. It should be a defiant moment of her breaking some kind of cycle, but so broken is she by her defilement that it brings little catharsis.

At one point, the ensemble sings My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, a prayer that a loved one will return, but, of course, the loved ones projected onto the screen cannot. 

As the performance continues, the dancehall becomes increasingly abandoned, to the point that it feels like its visitors are long overstaying their welcome. Dances for two are now dances for one, or vanish altogether. The movements of those who have been left alone did not quite align with what they once were, their footwork not in time, the position of their arms in the wrong place. At certain points, some dancers would look at their younger selves on the screen, trying to match them, but rarely succeeding.

Much like memory, dance is a monster.

Lily Hyde

Lily Hyde is a cultural and dance writer based in London. Her writing has appeared in The Fence and The Creative Independent, and she runs the cultural newsletter, Falling Upwards. She is currently writing her first novel.