Precious nonsense: Pina Bausch’s Nelken, at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed

Fifteen years after her death and the shrine to Pina Bausch is still thick with incense and adulation. Whether one acknowledges her as a genius or not, there’s no doubt that her influence has been baneful – a cult that has spawned a thousand imitators, all following her absurdist idiom, all mesmerised by subversions of everyday logic, all ultimately trapped in a vacuous dead-end aesthetic in which anything goes, the weirder the better. ‘Nonsense, yes,’ cries the aesthetic Lady Saphir in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. ‘But oh! What precious nonsense!’

Rejecting ballet for a theatrical expressionism that dug deep into the darkness of the psyche, Bausch’s creative process was based in asking her dancers questions about themselves, with the movement evolving from their answers, ‘never from the legs’.  The mood is confessional. A lot of memories, a lot of wails and shrieks, trances and silences, are incorporated into collages that run the gamut from slapdash farce to earnestly tragic. One can’t deny the almost religious dedication and panache with which a 16-strong company made up of confident personalities executes this ritual, but there can also be something frustrating and tedious about material so impermeably introspective, if not cabbalistic.

Nelken (Carnations) is one of Bausch’s most celebrated works, dating from 1982 and now immaculately revived by her heirs. On a platform stuck with thousands of (artificial, I hope) blooms, a lone man in a suit faces the audience and in sign language robotically mimes his response to Sophie Tucker singing ‘The Man I Love’. Then a woman in evening dress spoons mud over herself before collapsing into conniptions. And so on, and on. ‘It gives a superficial view of everything in society being beautiful – but actually it’s very controlled,’ according to a programme note.