In Lynn Garafola’s outstanding new biography of Bronislava Nijinska, she points out how little of the work of this important pioneer of neoclassical dance has survived. Only Les Noces and Les Biches have been preserved as she created them – and they are rarely performed.
It’s a problem the heirs of Pina Bausch face today. The choreographer, who died in 2009, undoubtedly altered the course of contemporary dance, but without her presence and in the absence of dancers who remember her requirements, how do you make sure that her significance and her repertory persist? More crucially, how do you keep her relevant?
Part of the answer is provided by this wrenching revival of her 1975 version of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring through a collaboration between Sadler’s Wells, the Pina Bausch Foundation and École des Sables in Senegal, which has recruited dancers from 14 African countries to introduce Bausch’s work to the continent for the first time and European audiences to a talented cohort of performers.
The production has been through hell and high water to get to the stage. Always an ambitious undertaking, its initial tour was derailed by Covid days before its premiere. A version of the piece filmed on the beach outside the dance school in Toubab Dialaw as the light faded gave a tantalising glimpse of the passion and power its new cast gave it, but all live performances were shelved.
Even now, when it is finally touring in Europe, it has been affected by the pandemic. Positive tests meant that only 24 dancers appeared on the Sadler’s Wells stage (normally there are a minimum of 26 to 28 out of a company of 36) and a companion duet for Germaine Acogny and Malou Airaudo had to be cancelled.
But even in a curtailed form, the programme packs a devastating punch. Choreographers have been making versions of Rite ever since Nijinsky’s first production for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (another lost work) caused a riot in Paris in 1913. Sometimes they are a bit polite or too balletic. But Bausch catches the raw ferocity of the sound, with the downward thrust of arms that splice the air in terror and legs that stamp in relentless rhythm. The floor is covered in heavy brown earth, slowing the bodies that arch against it, making each step towards survival an effort of desperation.
She conveys, too, the way that this is a rite of sex and death. Renewal comes only with sacrifice. The dancers – women in white shifts, men bare-chested in black trousers – are separated and wary until the victim is chosen. Then they throw themselves against one another in messy, greedy jumps and lifts.
But it’s the work’s genius that this visceral movement is contrasted with passages of crafted beauty, of arched arms and delicately splayed fingers. It’s both real and a work of incredibly structured dance, and here the dancers endow it with deep humanity and supreme skill. When Anique Ayiboe becomes the chosen one, she dances as if her life depended on it and ends the evening, face down in the dirt, traumatised and finished.
It’s extraordinary. It’s a tribute both to Bausch and to the commitment of these dancers that it feels unbearable to watch and impossible to tear your eyes away. This Rite will live for ever.
