Sweet Mambo, from 2008, is the fourth Pina Bausch piece that has come to Hungary. Anybody who has already seen Nelken, Café Müller and the Wiesenland, which makes references to Hungary, may know Bausch?s world, but could still be surprised.
The stage for the performance is extraordinarily Spartan. The dancers and their bodies are the only other ?props? besides a curtain floating, dreamlike, above. Their persons as well as the dance itself, more specifically the choreography, are working elements of the performance more so than in the earlier pieces. One notes among the actions to what degree the individual dissolves into movement, of course always with the sense of transformation into some internal form. Perhaps Bausch searched for these extreme and bare personal forms ? deep forms that go beyond differences, showing the sameness of people as creatures - in her company when creating the work, in her own questioning way. Her figures and scenes open borders, open to a new whole.
Theoretically, it could be approximated to theatre: there is much literature available on this, in fact, a monograph on Bausch by Lívia Fuchs, has just been published by L?Harmattan. Of course, there are other ways, because the artist, in the end, entrusts everything to the viewer and does not insist on a common reading. Bausch insists only on truth, which she searches for in her performances, and the phases of this search are depicted on the stage. Philosophical impasses, experiments with uncertain forms and lavish ?appended scenes? in externalities cannot be found in oeuvres that are already closed. Despite the closure, something still remains open, the oeuvre is alive in the sense that Bausch performances today are performed as they originally were with unique features of her earlier workshops. Despite Bausch?s death, the company continues to undertake its task, that is, watching the stage nothing has changed, the same bodies and faces are there....It appears that the current artistic directors, Robert Sturm and Dominique Mercy (who feels the repertoire in her muscles) handle the future and the past with appropriate sensitivity. They want as many people around the world to get to know as many works of this extraordinary stage personality as possible. The grandest product of this endeavour could be the performance of the ten Bausch works on the cultural programme that will be part of the Olympics in London.
The slowly turning title of Sweet Mambo is just like the dance, but apart from that, the fact that the basic rhythm appears in the accompaniment is rather a playful but distant analogy for life. It is not the first time Bausch started something new from some small element taken from a partners dance. These movements that serve as pictures of internal or external relationships can be of any type in the end, just as the text in the performance could be lyrical, absurd or untouched excerpts, just as the objects or tools on the stage can be anything. With Bausch, anything can be elevated to sovereign poetry. Hers is the curtain floating over the stage, the face of Zarah Leander on the celluloid, hers is the spreading water, the clattering bucket, the scream of the woman falling to the ground, hers is the naked back, the sensually smoothing hand of the man, the women?s clothes several sizes too big?.Hers is everything, and out of the manifold, will always come the one, the work. Even today, in the present.
Author: Márta Péter
