Produced by
Tanztheater
Wuppertal
Choreography and
Direction by
Pina Bausch
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Palermo Palermo
Sadlers Wells
10 - 20 February 2005
It becomes apparent, after a while, that there are many narratives in a Pina Bausch piece. They are about human experience always, and in amongst the poignancy and pain that attends human experience and provides its main colouring, there is much comedy, irony, wryness and pleasure. Brilliantly, Pina Bausch reveals all these layers, stripping them to the essentials each time.
"Palermo Palermo" was commissioned for that city, and those who know it recognise the litter and rubble that covers the stage as a signature of that place. The light frocks of the women, and their power of command in the personal sphere, might also be Sicilian; everything else is universal, and comes straight and recognisably from Pina Bauschs extraordinary imagination.
It is an imagination shaped and filled by the idea of what movement and posture are capable of expressing. Sometimes the members of Pina Bauschs Tanztheater Wuppertal troupe actually dance, and when they do it is a distinctive feature that their arms do most of the dancing, in intricate and rapid interlacing movements that almost invariably express anxiety, agony, complication, need and sometimes fear. Pina Bausch is thus a psychological dramatist, an arranger of mime, but in ways that transcend every known form of artistic expression except, perhaps, performance art itself; save that her performers are trained and expert, and the long complex structure of "Palermo Palermo" has a truly inventive mind at work in it, so that unquestionably what one sees is real art, if such a thing still exists.
Every one of the few visits to Sadlers Wells (far too few: would that the Tanztheater Wuppertal were more regular visitors) has been special, and has changed peoples thinking about dance and dance theatre. This production of "Palermo Palermo" does so too.
AC Grayling
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