The Stage

Pina Bausch - Nelken

Published Thursday 17 February 2005 at 12:20 by Katie Phillips

They remind some people of weddings, some of funerals. Some people love them and some think they smell like medicine. Here, the stage is bathed in them - pink ‘Nelken’ (German for carnations) planted upright so that the dancers must watch their footsteps as they tread carefully through the sea of pink petals. Although, by the end of the performance, the flower bed is in carnage.

Bausch presents us with visions, images, sounds and smells that give a fair amount of leeway for the imagination to run wild amongst her constructed field of flowers. From the intricate gesturing of a Nina Simone song in sign language, through suited men falling from scaffolding structures, to exhausted dancers rubbing their faces in piles of freshly chopped onions, Nelken is a two-hour rollercoaster ride of profound dance madness.

The cast of 25 commence a game of ‘Grandma wolf’, their childish antics fast descending into a parody of the exercise of political dictatorship and an uprising of childhood voices. In a sequence oozing with absurdism, grown men in pastel taffeta party frocks try to bond in a ring-a-ring-of-roses style sequence. Occasionally Alsatian guard dogs patrol the stage and a sinister figure checks heartbeats and passports.

Dabbling in religious imagery, levels of obedience (a distraction is always provided) and a menacing, ever present threat, the performance teeters on the fine line between humour and fear. Sometimes intricately placed, sometimes chaotic, sometimes out of control, the dancers sway and rock together, run madly around the stage shouting obscure messages before jumping into the auditorium to hug the audience.

Although the piece is now 20 years old, and perhaps not as groundbreaking as it once was, the Bausch phenomenon obviously still has its bite (as well as its bark), and this performance will certainly leave London audiences hungry for more of the same.