Adelaide Festival Review 2025
Caída del Cielo, Rocío Molina. Her Majesty’s Theatre, 28 February 2025.
Club Amour, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch + Terrain Boris Charmatz, 14 March 2025.
This year’s Festival had a solid dance program, despite interim director Brett Sheehy’s scramble to put it together after the sudden departure of Artistic Director Ruth McKenzie last year. The free opening event, Stephanie Lake’s Mass Movement, featured approximately 1,000 community dancers in Elder Park, and the Festival also featured two other Australian works. Australian Dance Theatre premiered A Quiet Language, created by Daniel Riley with assistant choreographer Brianne Kell, which was sparked by an investigation into the company’s founding and legacy. I am unable to review this work because I have a conflict of interest, having served as a researcher on the project, but would like it noted that it received laudatory reviews elsewhere. Lucy Guerin’s duet, One Single Action in an Ocean of Everything, which premiered at Rising in 2024, proved to be a dramaturgically taut, witty, and inventive addition to the program.
Both works I review here raise the question of dance legacy. Rocío Molina’s Caída del Cielo pushes the boundaries of the flamenco tradition, whilst the Tanztheater Wuppertal +Terrain Boris Charmatz’s triple bill, Club Amour, raises the question of how Pina Bausch’s immense legacy can be both preserved and contemporized.
The curtain is up as we take our seats for Caída del Cielo, revealing a white stage floor and screen across the back of the stage, with musical instruments on stands. Four musicians enter and play some rock music under red lights, then a blackout ensues. Eventually, the lights come up, revealing Rocío Molina dressed in a white sevillana dress with an immensely long ruffle, standing motionless downstage right. After a long pause, she begins to sway slightly, extending her arms, which segues into an extended sequence during which she drags herself along the floor as an image of the moon is projected onto the screen. Removing the dress, she is dressed by one of the musicians in a Toreador outfit, and starts to dance, alternating between floor moves and insanely percussive footwork. Molina reveals herself to be a stunning flamenco dancer, her tiny feet pounding out complex rhythms accompanied by her musicians on electric guitar and drum kit in addition to the traditional clapping and voice. But while her dancing is superb, the show is conceptually weak. Billed as cycling through ‘multiple incarnations of the feminine archetype’, what we are actually shown are sexist stereotypes: after the Moon goddess, we are treated to a dominatrix with a chip packet comically plastered on her groin, a kittenish vamp, and a suffering woman whose skirt smears the stage with a dark liquid—oil or perhaps menstrual blood—before ending with a Carmen Miranda-like figure adorned with flowers and grapes who races around the auditorium, throwing flowers at the audience. With its inclusion of rock music, reference to sexual subcultures, and playfulness, this overlong work is clearly attempting to modernize the genre of flamenco, yet its dated sexual politics work against this end.
Since the early death of Pina Bausch in 2009, Tanztheater Wuppertal has had five artistic directors, which perhaps says something about the difficulty of leading a company with such a momentous inheritance. Club Amour is indicative of this problematic situation. Comprised of Café Müller, Bausch’s iconic 1978 work inspired by her parents’ café, it also includes Aatt enen tionon and herses, duo, two works by the latest director Boris Charmatz, made in the 1990s on his own company, Terrain. Aatt enen tionon and herses, duo are viewed with the audience on stage of the Festival theatre, whilst for Café Müller we are seated in the auditorium.
Aatt enen tionon features three dancers (Christopher Tandy, Dean Biosca, and Eli Cohen) placed one above the other on a tall three-tiered platform, with three large white moon lanterns around it. Loud music by PJ Harvey is interspersed with periods of silence and long vocal OM sounds. At the beginning, they limber up and jump around their platforms, dressed in tracksuits. For no apparent reason, each removes their pants, remaining naked from the waist down for the duration of the forty-minute piece. They proceed to jump and lunge, throw themselves down onto the wooden platforms, huddle over, and so forth. No attempt is made to express much in the way of emotion, nor to make contact with each other. The movement language is ugly, undeveloped, and repetitive, the shock value thin, and if I were not reviewing it, I would have walked out.
Having stayed the course, however, I am relieved to find herses, duo a more engaging work. A duet set to an electronic score by Stefan Fraunberger, it is danced entirely naked by Charmatz himself along with Johanna Lemke. The couple appears suddenly at the edge of the open space around which we are arrayed, then proceeds to explore the possibilities of bodily connection. Movement is largely confined to the floor as they roll over each other, often using their feet as points of contact, only occasionally standing up and breaking apart. Although there is nothing particularly inventive in the choreography—it recalls some of the Judson Church experiments of the 1960s—there is a pleasure to be gained in seeing Rodinesque details of musculature and posture as their flesh is illuminated by a powerful down spot. It is, however, a work oddly lacking emotional intensity or intimacy, despite the physical proximity of the two naked dancers.
Set to several Henry Purcell arias, Café Müller is one of Bausch’s most iconic works, exploring the interactions of a group of people confined in the eponymous café. A sleepwalking woman in a long nightdress is revealed in the dim lighting, feeling her way through the space crowded with chairs. Another sleepwalking woman joins her, careening dangerously, her path through the chairs cleared for her by an attendant man. A third woman appears, this time with her eyes open, dressed in an overcoat and high heels, her little skittering runs hither and thither betraying her anxious and tentative state. The passionate embrace between the second sleepwalker and a young man is repeatedly interrupted by another authoritative male who forces certain interactions upon them, until they become habitual patterns. While the first sleepwalker, a role originally played by Bausch herself, remains separate from the interactions of the others, the five performers try to connect with each other but fail repeatedly. Bausch uses repetition to create humour, tenderness, and pathos as the neediness of the characters runs aground in their obliviousness to each other’s needs. The work is given a solid performance by the company, although perhaps lacking the intensity that can be seen on video recordings featuring Bausch herself. The absence of the original set, Rolf Borzik’s dilapidated café, also detracts somewhat, as it added a sense of claustrophobic confinement.
The news that Charmatz and the company had parted ways just three years into his eight-year contract, with a non-disclosure agreement in place, was announced just before the opening of the Adelaide season, but is not surprising given the aesthetic chasm between his work and Bausch’s. Whereas her works subtly explore human emotion, revealing anxieties and longings, desires, disappointments, and griefs through performers who are fully present as individual human beings, his appears—on the basis of the two works seen here—to be grounded in an exploration of bodies. This raises the question of the future direction of the company: can it find a way to preserve Bausch’s legacy and to refresh it, while continuing to innovate in a manner more congruent with her aesthetic? Meryl Tankard’s Kontakthof-Echoes of ’78, which reimagines Bausch’s piece with some of the original cast interacting with film footage of their younger selves, was a huge hit at Wuppertal last year and has been selected for the prestigious Berliner Treffen Festival with further European seasons to follow, offering one way forward. It appears urgent that the Board of the Tanztheater Wuppertal give deep consideration to how they wish to preserve and develop Bausch’s legacy before appointing the next artistic director.
-Maggie Tonkin