There is some absolute beauty in Vollmond, one of the last pieces made by pioneering German choreographer Pina Bausch before her death in 2009. A curtain of water dramatically falls from the sky, shimmering in the light, plumes of the stuff arcing into the air and crashing against the giant, monolithic rock that dominates the stage (designer Peter Pabst is almost as much an author of this work as Bausch). Water is a recurring theme in Bausch’s work and here it rains down, spurts from mouths, is thrown from buckets and poured into overflowing glasses, impossible to catch or control.
Bausch’s other great recurring theme is the endless cycle of flawed human habits (Vollmond means “full moon”, more cycles) and the power play and pettiness between men and women. Her men are always smartly dressed in shirts, her women ever glamorous in spaghetti-strap gowns and long, swishing hair – yearning nostalgically for a more glamorous era while deriding its mores.
Vollmond looks at love, especially courtship, ritual and flirtation, but it is lighter than some of Bausch’s other works and less biting as a result. The cruelty, the bind that couples get themselves into, is played down. There’s a lot of comedy. A woman balances a plastic cup on her head; a man goes to shoot the target but his gun turns out to be a water pistol. Some of it could be in any surreal skit show, as if Bausch were Vic and Bob’s weird sister. There’s a very funny scene about how long it takes to undo a bra clasp. In some ways, this is Bausch at her most accessible (although, as ever, these repeating cycles go on longer than they need to).
The mode of performance is all affectation; that’s just the way of Bausch – the never-quite-sincere smiles, the gnomic pronouncements, the odd, tightly choreographed behaviours. But, perhaps counterintuitively, what never feels affected is when they dance. Then they are unbridled, they are fully themselves. Some of the newer dancers of the ensemble are bewitching movers, Nicholas Losada and Maria Giovanna Delle Donne being two striking examples. When they are solo, it feels unscripted – they are free, and that really is beautiful.
• At Sadler’s Wells, London, until 23 February
