Deadline for applications is Tuesday 18 February to attend our free art-writing course, in collaboration with Bergen Kunsthall and Office for Contemporary Art Norway. I had my first Pina Bausch experience about six years ago when a friend bought me a ticket to Nelken Carnation.
I knew very little about the German choreographer and former dancer, and in truth was expecting to count the minutes until we could escape to a nearby bar. But by the time the curtain came down, the last thing I wanted was for the performance to end. I had witnessed a world that, somewhat bizarrely, made sense of my own and yet left me wanting more. Alsatians chased men in floating dresses through a field of pink carnations while a semi-naked accordionist re-appeared with the regularity of a broken clock; red-lipped women exploded with doubt and desire in clouds of chiffon love in Bausch's world is more complicated than any bureaucracy; dance less a solution to heartache than its catharsis.
Time was vague; the dresses might have been old-fashioned but intimations of the future lurked in the wings like a friend in need of advice. Scenes unfolded like fireworks, but the explosions were human. Eclectic music saturated an already lush atmosphere with an exhausted yet unresigned beauty.
I had never seen anything so nakedly and wildly imaginative. Who could be bored? Masurca Fogo Fiery Mazurka , commissioned for the Lisbon Festival in , was recently performed by Bausch's company, the Tanztheater Wuppertal, in London for the first time.
The company's previous appearance in the UK was two years ago, with the melancholic and mesmerizing Viktor Masurca Fogo is Bausch's tribute to the Portuguese capital and its culture. The piece, however, is not simply a homage to a specific place, but also Bausch's love song to the sea and the city, the head and the heart.
