I first saw Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof in 1982 when she and Tanztheater Wuppertal came to London for the first time. Bausch can be brilliant and she can be boring; sometimes at the same time.
The show lasts three hours and has in the past been performed by a cast aged over 50 and a cast of teenagers.
There are 22 dancers. The setting is a dance floor. The women are elegantly dressed in ball gowns. The men wear suits. The cast mill around and dance to tango music. The first act is interminable.
The dance floor becomes a sexual battleground. Men advance, with their chairs, on the women standing by the wall. The women spend most of their time trying to ward off the men’s unwelcome, brutal and humiliating attentions.
There is no joy, no love, and no affection; merely sad, drooping figures, barely moving. Sometimes they have their photograph taken. They pose stiffly. Nobody smiles.
A woman goes out of her mind and nobody helps her. A man takes off all his clothes to no purpose. Women mount a mechanical horse to pleasure themselves. We are shown the most boring documentary on ducks.
The cast sits on a long row of chairs, downstage, facing us directly and talking about their affairs; the microphone only picks up a fraction of what they are saying.
One of the most memorable images, certainly the most uncomfortable to watch, is of a woman being pawed by twelve men and she is in too great a state of shock to be able to do anything but submit.
The dancers regularly go into a routine, en bloc, or move very fast, diagonally downstage again and again and again. Or they might just walk round the stage in a circle, repeating the same gestures. The catchy love songs of the 1920s and 1930s, which are played whilst they do all this, is very much part of Kontakthof’s appeal.
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