Archives quotidiennes : 27 juin 2024

As we trod in a daze down the stairs of the Palais Garnier after an uninterruped 1 hour and 50 minutes, the elegant Italian who had been sitting next to me apologized for having repeatedly kept checking the time on her bright phone in the dark. Ten minutes in, she’d already felt as if she was being personally tortured. Her day had already been long and painful enough. Then a delightful older Parisian lady I know bounced over and declared emphatically that she had been practically lifted out of her seat and insisted she we would go out for a drink to celebrate such a galvanizing theatrical experience. A usually luminous young woman we three know seemed out of breath: energized, confused, and alarmed. Before she carefully slipped away from us, Maria whispered that her thoughts — About men? About women?  About anything? — had just been turned completely upside down by this, the first time she had ever seen a ballet by

… Pina Bausch.

That something invented in the 1970’s by a woman could still either torment or vivify the women of today means that this ballet has not lost its relevance.

You could drive a person crazy
You could drive a person mad
First you make a person hazy
So a person could be had!

The hook in Pina Bausch’s Blaubart/Barbe-Bleue is that of how soundscape and space and movement and emotion cannot be disconnected.  We witness the endless, yet intermittent, manipulation of an onstage reel-to-reel tape wound and rewound by a very powerful — but very confused — everyman. At the push of a button, the machine burped out tiny slivers of Bartok’s original opera. And then another push of the button killed it off. Then repeated, repeatedly.

Therefore: beware, this ballet is a long haul, and might just drive you crazy. If you edited out the incessant repetitions of Bartok phrases and Bausch phrasings, the whole evening could have been ding-dong bell and over and let’s go out for that much-needed drink in fifteen minutes flat. This is definitely not a “date-night” ballet. Or maybe it is?  At least as a warning sign?

You’re crazy
You’re a lovely person
You’re a moving
Deeply maladjusted
Never to be trusted
Crazy person yourself

 From the start, Bluebeard is in some kind of combat of egos with a woman in a flesh pink dress. She’s not taking this abuse lying down (well, actually often she is, when she’d not plastered against a wall or slithering off a chair).

Slinky dresses, out-there loud femininity always mattered to Bausch, as did deconstructing men from XL jackets down to their smalls and uninhibited display of tiny biceps. Deconstruction of any and all stereotypes had always been this choreographer’s thing. Bausch relates to my generation’s  view of male/female relationships: OK, let’s just admit that we the same but different, that we are all are messed up, that we are all brilliantly confused? Is a middle ground even possible?

A person that
Titillates a person and then leaves her flat
Is crazy
He’s a troubled person
He’s a truly crazy person himself

I was completely taken in by Bluebeard’s and Judith’s passionately intense symbiotic disharmony. The interiority and unstoppable feral energy of their repeated actions bound us to their toxic relationship.

At the start, SHE is the one pulling and manipulating his seemingly dead-weight body, yet HE is the one that keeps insisting upon collapsing upon her over and over and again and again. As we near the end, it takes HIM an excruciatingly long time to drag HER limp body, lying heavily inert upon his stomach –  as awkward and heavy as dead bodies truly are –  backwards and to and fro and to and fro and to across the stage. Their all-out performances were more than hypnotic, they were witchcraft. Against your will, you sank — increasingly defenceless and desperate for air — under their spell. 

Takeru Koste as Bluebeard channeled a long career built out of honing his craft in little actor/dancer parts into this one great big theatrical presence. This was clearly the role of a lifetime. Léonore Baulac gave us all the colors of Judith.  She can be one of the most reactive dancers when she is galvanised by a partner’s body and eyes.  

I think Koste and Baulac’s determined commitment to making their combat of the sexes wear us down took twisted control of everyone in the audience (even the reluctant lady). I can honestly say that the choreography works in the sense that I felt rubbed raw by the incessant re-re-re-re-enactment of the claustrophobia that an obsessive relationship creates.

Spoiler alert: if you’d seen Baulac’s Juliet when the Capulets force her into her wedding dress, you will relate to her face when Koste’s Bluebeard carefully and slowly and literally smothers her body in layer upon layer of his other dead wives’ dresses, leaving her almost unable to move. Almost. She resists fate for one more time. And I cannot get the image out of my head of this Judith rushing to and fro in one last burst of exhausted febrility. Larded in fabric, Baulac scuttled about upon her tiny footpads. She was like a mouse that still tried to run away after its head had already been partly chomped off. That’s when my heart, already heavy, broke. Along with hers.

Then you leave a person dangling sadly
Outside your door
Which could only make a person gladly
Want you even more

 The thing with Bausch that I think many of us always wired into was the fact that she pitied men and women in equal measure. We are always pushing and pulling at each other with extreme pitiless energy, always arguing. Here the twenty demi-soloists (the slaughtered wives and the previous incarnations of Blue?) were more than perfect and utterly out there as they theatrically fell, or crashed into or artfully dangled from the walls. I guess I need to mention the stage covered with a forest of dead leaves to swish and the occasional dead pillow.

What is wrong?
Where’s the loose connection?
How long, O Lord, how long?

As we left the theatre, my three girlfriends finally asked me: “well?”  I don’t think anyone was ready for a comment on the recorded music – of all things — not the dance. Clearly, the music is sliced up just the way each of Bluebeard’s wives had been. But one aspect of the music above all would have been my complaint way back in 1977, too. I hate the heavy German translations of “obscure” languages. The vowels and consonants and sonorous lines go poof. None of my three friends reacted to my plaint, until I said, “what would you think of someone dancing to something inspired by Rigoletto, Carmen, or Onegin if sung in German?” Pause the reel, please. I must confess that I have been listening to Bartók since I was a child and so I’m a bit of a purist.

Knock-knock! Is anybody there?

Knock-knock! It really isn’t fair.

Perhaps Bluebeard the dancer was really playing around with a real console onstage in 1977? Trying to get any kind of recorded music to work way back then, even just in the rehearsal room, must have indeed been an additional challenge, and now it still is but in a different way. I recently saw a reel-to-reel console in a museum of technology! Why are we so good at advancing technology but so lousy at ending feminicide?

Not only the German bothered me, but the deliberately bad quality of the sound bothered me. Of course, that was Bausch’s point:  in most cases, our lives are just as bad as tinny musical phrases repeated over and over again unto toxicity. The words we spit at each other mean nothing. The real melody is always just out of reach.

You impersonate a person better
Than a zombie should

Quotes (out of order) from Stephen Sondheim’s Company.