New world order

When World Cities 2012 — better known as the current Pina Bausch season — was first presented, questions were raised about the apparently random order of the various pieces. Yet a chronologically structured retrospective would have deprived the event of the theatrically stimulating game of juxtapositions that the reordered version possesses. As with her non city-specific works, Bausch’s city-specific creations can be grouped in two categories: the more and the less danced pieces. The pendulum swung dramatically throughout the four decades in which Bausch worked, though not frequently. So a chronologically structured retrospective would have suffered from clumps of similarly formulated compositions.

A vibrant chiaroscuro is key to the success of the current season. Last week, the vivid contrast between Der Fensterputzer (The Window Cleaner) and Bamboo Blues revealed Bausch’s multifaceted creativity. Premièred in 2007, the latter belongs to her last creative chapter, which was characterised by a radical move away from the sombre Expressionist narrative modes of early Tanztheater works. As such, this lavish and at times carefree tribute to Kolkata is a fluid dance piece, constructed on a clever and at times subtly humorous game of variations on visual and choreographic themes.

Bausch’s trademark features pop up here and there. There are spoken moments, comic tableaux, vitriolic satirical explorations of gender issues, unsettling visual metaphors and interactions with the public. Yet all of these are carefully weaved into a dance continuum, and never stand out as isolated episodes, as they do in many other of Bausch’s works. Through this seamless choreographic fluidity, which interacts with Peter Pabst’s gauze-floating sets, opalescent images of Indian culture are evoked on stage, in line with that dream-like quality Bausch wanted to bestow on to the whole piece.