A vital need to comfort by entertaining provides the intensity behind 1980 – A Piece By Pina Bausch, driving it forward so that while there is no plot or structure as such, it feels like a complete and continuous whole. This is a company clawing their way out of a void, carefully lifting their creator back to the sunlight. 1980 was the year that Pina’s partner Rolf Borzik died of leukemia and this tender, witty piece is often referred to as an elegy. It is noticeably less violent than many of her other works; even the stage is nonaggressive, carpeted green with real turf. A doe perches upstage throughout the whole piece, its head turned towards the audience, unable or unsure where to move.
Lutz Förster, the company’s current artistic director, says of 1980: “All the people involved in its creation tried to entertain and distract Pina. I felt freer to do anything stupid to cheer her up.” They did a good job; the three and half hour show is seriously diverting. The humour is often childlike or clownish; the extended sun-worship tableau begins with a man lying underneath blankets so that only his bare bottom is exposed. The piece is full of funny lines and fantastic comic performances. Mechthild Groβmann is particularly good as a swaggering joker, for whom everything is ‘fantastic!’
Nostalgia is present here too, as are hints of grief, but it is only on reflection that the piece begins to strike me as desperately, desperately sad. There is in fact almost no dance in the first half of the show and only a little more in the second. Does this reflect another sort of mourning? When someone as eloquent in movement as Bausch denies us their strongest mode of expression, the effect is a muting one, concordant with the effects of grief. Fans of Bausch may well mourn this lack, this absence of dance, but this is also the first time I have come out of a show at Sadler’s Wells keen to buy a copy of the script.
1980 is an iterative work that builds in intensity, from the rhyming songs that feature in children’s games to the recurring motif of badly celebrated birthdays, and a multitude of introductions and moments of parting. There is a feeling of time past or lost. It is like going to the house you grew up in and getting into the bed you slept in as a child, only to find you no longer fit. This happens literally to one character and he is confused. Is the bed too small? Is he too big? When did the change happen? The nods to the past are counteracted by present moments on stage; the cast play games for real and at one point they can be seen relaxing in attitudes suggestive of a rehearsal room at break time, just existing on stage: someone plays the harmonium, someone else sings along.
The beauty pageant is another cultural touchstone. The women of the company are introduced one by one, ordered to smile, turn round, give a little ‘winky winky’ to the audience. The absurdity of this process is mocked with an overblown competition among the cast (men and women) for who has the best leg. Elsewhere, the performers are made to represent their countries by saying the first three things that come to mind. Italy is reduced to: “Fellini, Mussolini, Tortellini”.
Sexual aggression, often present in Bausch’s work, is here replaced with a complex relationship of care between the genders, demonstrated through different ways of bestowing attention, between adults but also between parent and child. At times the performers use their bodies without sexual awareness, as children do, but they are unable to do this completely because of their inescapably adult bodies.
A woman cradles a sleeping man, smiling cheekily. She unbuttons his shirt, blows raspberries on his chest, takes down his trousers and playfully slaps his bottom. It is parental, unthreatening, but retains something sexual by the simple fact that they are adults. Similarly when a man changes a woman’s dress while she talks about her daddy, the male presence is protecting, nurturing, attending to the trusting child, but the scene is still one of an adult undressing an adult. ‘When I was tired he would always carry me’ she says, and he lifts her like a parent would. The total absorption of the embrace looks like love, simultaneously sexual and parental. It’s a line that Bausch’s work often treads, ground which is uncomfortable to explore.
Although a collaborative work at heart, the lasting images of 1980 are the most simple ones. A woman alone, dancing under a sprinkler, tracing the shape of her body with her finger. skipping in enormous circles, repeating ‘I’m tired’ in a sing-song voice, on and on until her voice and body match her call. These moments carry the ache of sorrow. We are all afraid, and cannot escape from fear and loss, but 1980 serves as a reminder that there will always be healing, as well as pain, in the world.
Read Maria Iu’s review of 1980 – A Piece by Pina Bausch.