This afternoon I went to see the newest Tanztheater Wuppertal production at Sadler’s Wells, Bon Voyage, Bob, written by the Norwegian playwright Alan Lucien Øyen. I am sorry to say my mother and I walked out half way through – please note, I normally hate people who can’t manage a full performance, but after over an hour and a half of this we couldn’t take any more.
I have loved Pina Bausch and her Tanztheater since my mother took me to see my first performance, when I was still a teenager. I was even lucky enough to see her dance before she died in 2009. She painted magical moving pictures with her troupe of talented dancers. Her sets consisted of water, sand, chairs and tables. The dancers would manipulate these static objects using only the subtle and artful twists and turns of their bodies. Female dancers, dressed in colourful evening dresses and with their hair worn loose, acted as brushes in their master painter’s transporting compositions. What always stayed with me were the simplicity of means by which Pina used to choreograph her enchanting creations.
Every year I buy tickets to see the Tanztheater in London. This year was no different, I was so excited to see my favourite dance company and the new choreography of Bon Voyage, Bob. However, there were about five minutes of dance to be seen: three or four expressive sections of solo dancers loosely throwing their bodies around to trance music that wouldn’t be out of place in a Berlin nightclub. There were recognisable Pina tropes – the half crazed laughing lady with curly hair running around the stage and a woman having her head moved by a man, almost falling over but saved by the chair he places beneath her swaying body.
Unfortunately, as the piece was created by a playwright, there were large sections of nonsensical dialogue about death and suicide. We were forced to suffer repetitive sections of a man talking about killing his father with 15 stabs of a kitchen knife and listen to numerous conversations about loss and grief. These long non-sequitur speeches were all conducted around an overly complex set, which was moved constantly by the ‘dancers’ to show different interiors. Trying to capture the ‘je ne sais quoi’ of Pina’s time, there was a moment of audience participation, where we were invited to shout letters in a game of Hangman, which was quite amusing but lacking in substance.
Essentially Øyen was working with a troupe of dancers when he should have hired a cast of actors. The spectacle captured the audience’s attention by promising a Tanztheater Wuppertal special, but there was barely any dancing. We were treated instead to a rather poorly choreographed series of monologues that wouldn’t go amiss in an adolescent Drama production.
When the male dancer finally scrawled PAUSE across the blackboard for the interval we knew we couldn’t sit through another hour and forty minutes of this bizarre nothingness. All in all, it was a very disappointing tarnish on Pina’s legacy.
Mala Yamey 