Grim realities

It was somewhat weird that Pina Bausch’s Palermo Palermo opened on the same night as Spain’s victory over Italy in the Euro 2012 final. After all, the Sicilian capital was long dominated by the Spaniards. Yet in Bausch’s Tanztheater vision of Palermo there are no references to such history, bar a few Spanish-looking steps set to the Spanish-influenced Sicilian music in part one’s frenzied finale. What one gets instead are more or less explicit flashes of the city’s more contemporary and often grim realities: from the mafia ritual of kissing the boss’s hands, to garbage piling up in streets, via evocations of Sicilian mourning, immigration and emigration.

The evening starts with a collapsing wall, the visual metaphor of all visual metaphors and one of Bausch’s most striking coups de théâtre. In line with her passion for creating challenging performance spaces and surfaces, the debris generates unpredictable and unrepeatable movement patterns, forcing the performers, including a dog, to make impromptu choices on how best to walk, run, climb and balance on the objects.

Other unequivocally Bauschian trademarks punctuate the performance, often overwhelming the more city-specific metaphors mentioned above. Which is fine if you are one of those Bausch novices who flocked to see the company in the wake of Wenders’s trendsetting movie or if you are a Bausch diehard. But it is not so fine for those who have been, theatrically speaking, around the block a few times or have seen more than one performance in the current World Cities 2012 season. Indeed, what transpires from this unique retrospective is that Bausch’s approach to specific geographical realities was somewhat formulaic. Which does not do her justice, for she also created non-formulaic masterworks such as Rite of Spring, Café Müller, 1980, Bluebeard, Kontakthof and Nelken.