Swings between violence and comedy: Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof, at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed

When you take in the richness of a Pina Bausch production — the redolent staging, the eloquent, eccentric twists of the choreography — it’s everything and it’s something. Kontakthof, created in 1978, sounds the bell of hopeful passes and freighted expectations, centuries of hearts on the line, desperate to elude solitude. A keystone of her back catalogue, the piece illuminates the convoluted, often rotten thrusts of human desire, with special emphasis on women’s vulnerability in the dating game.

A gramophone pipes out vintage love songs as the ensemble to and fro across a dance hall in Bausch’s standard-issue suits and gowns. The title — a reference to the area of a brothel where johns choose their prostitutes — comes to the fore in the opening scene as the dancers present themselves for inspection one by one. The encounters that ensue reel with double standards. Strut too confidently in your heels and you’re a slut; teeter in them and you’re a wimp. How does a real man act? A real woman? How should they? The choreography swings between violent and comic, intimacies losing their discretion as they’re thrust into the spotlight. At three hours long, the point is made (and made again) that to have and to hold is no simple thing.

Bausch’s genius was bringing a charming streak to even the grimmest subjects. Here, polyglot rambles and poker-faced jazz pyramids light up the show, the group box-stepping with taut precision, adding sultry hip wiggles. Between the yanking and the groping, it’s easy to forget they can dance for real, but they remind us with an electric skate upstage, an exquisite tangle of limbs and hair and palms upturned in exultation.

100% Cuban from Acosta Danza, Carlos Acosta’s platform for young talent in Cuba, brings five recent works to the UK stage, starting with Liberto from Raul Reinoso, a duet about the ruinous endurance of slavery.