Café Müller and The Rite of Spring

Overview

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch will undoubtedly create a new generation of devotees to their founder, the "high priestess of dance theatre" Pina Bausch, in the dazzling double showing of two of her most important works.

Café Müller/The Rite of Spring is the ideal pairing to showcase the work of such a figurehead, whose vision "reached both the heights and hell of human nature." Using her lifelong directorship of the Wuppertal Opera Ballet to completely revamp the company to reflect a new style of Tanztheater, the small town of Wuppertal is now a mecca for artistic pilgrims of dance.

Café Müller, created in 1978 and The Rite of Spring, created in 1975 stand at odds to each other, but outline her choreographic sensibility in an intense pairing. Rite is described as "hot, dark and terrifying," and sees some 32 dancers confront each other within a primitive sexual divide. Bausch covers the stage in thick soil, and sees the dancers fall and run until their bodies are smeared in a savage, biological scene that leaves audiences reeling. Café Müller is somewhat more intimate, based on childhood memories of Bausch's own parents. Seen by some as a melancholy study of lost souls, the piece gradually takes on more of a focus of Bausch's remembering as the piece is danced by a character playing her adult self.

Adjunct to this New Zealand Festival event is Talk to Her, a film by Pedro Almodóvar about Bausch. It screens at the City Gallery on Sunday 13th March at both 11am and 2pm.