The Brooklyn Rail

Since the death of Pina Bausch in 2009, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch has gone through five successive directors. The latest, French experimentalist Boris Charmatz, is the first choreographer in his own right. On September 8th, he premiered Liberté Cathédrale, his first work as the new leader of the company.

1.

Dancer right in front of me / he takes my hand and touches it to his beating heart / holds me there / heart clanging through skin and mesh tank top / we look at each other / our looking at each other becomes a thing / I resign myself to the familiarity of this moment / the calculated poignancy / my hand is wet with him drip drip / sweat from chin falls onto my arm / still clutching his heart.

2.

The death of a titan necessitates a total swerve, a reinvention from the wreckage of incomprehensible loss. Questions arrive in the wake: do you search for a substitute, a new figure to become the lodestar? Or could you think about another way to live?

We’re seated in chairs on the border of the Mariendom—a fifty-five year old Brutalist cathedral in Velbert, a small German town in the Rhineland renowned for the manufacturing of locks and fittings. From both inside and out, the cathedral is a concrete mountain. What of the choice to leave Wuppertal and come to Velbert, twenty minutes away by train? Charmatz has taken us from the town where Pina Bausch is etched into the pavement to a place of gathering and worship, of the enlivening of the dead through ritual and inscription. The setting is both a parable and an instruction: be careful with the spirits of the dead. In lieu of cyclical worship, Charmatz has taken the regional train and gone somewhere else.

Liberté Cathédrale unfolds in five parts. Within the clear quintuple cut—defined by blackouts, silence, and the performers retreating to the edges to drink from water bottles—the individual parts themselves are amorphous. The work is a demonstration of practice as performance, with little regard for conventional dramaturgies that rely on contrast, sequencing, and the impression of narrative through variation. Instead of one thing after another, everything happens at once and keeps going for a long time, past the point of conceptual and physical exhaustion. Running, singing, dancing rhythmically, carrying weight, or balancing: Charmatz renders the conceit of each section and then makes the work sweat, squeezing possibilities from each practice until the idea gasps. The viewer is left to tread water, and to track their own oscillation between frustration and enchantment. I’m left to think about our social terror of boredom, of the non-productive nothing-space. I’m left to think about the profit-driven algorithms that govern our bodies’ attentions.

3.

The low-level keen of an alarm quietens pre-show conversation. From the hanging silence, twenty-six dancers surge out in a roar-run-beginning. They sing a keenly deconstructed rendition of the second movement from Beethoven’s Opus 111 while running—no, sprinting—through the stone expanse. It’s spare yet rich, this tsunami of voice and movement. Highly-stylized idiosyncrasies appear in the way different performers pause between sprints, as if demonstrating for us their commitment to heterogeneity. Whilst the scene signals a certain kind of choreographic transgression, there’s no inquiry here: it’s experimentation sucked clean and crystallized into total knowing. In that sense, Liberté Cathédrale is like Christianity, and the structures that house it. There are no questions left—only extreme beauty.

Throughout the five sections, there is a dogged commitment to the isolation, and subsequent study, of what the dancing body might do. Each action is thrust into tenaciously; the dancers wring incandescence from the guts of motion. Perhaps it was the church, but there was a spiritual dimension to Liberté Cathédrale’s portrait of bodies differently alive. Nowhere was this more visible than in the second section, when the performers danced intricately repeating patterns to the polyrhythmic tolling of (recorded) bells. It was the closest I felt to the Emily Dickinson passage Charmatz quotes in the program notes: “Not knowing when the dawn will come, / I open every door.”¹

4.

Mariendom was lit simply, yet forcefully, by Yves Godin. With pillars of stark light, Godin gave each section a different hue or shading, so that the same performers and space were seen distinctively anew. Godin’s austerity was a far cry from the meretricious costuming by Florence Samain, who assembled an affected mix of clothing by interweaving corporate and sporting attire. In the oddest instance, a blazer and sneakers were worn over a cerulean leotard swimsuit. It was a telling example of the work’s commitment to announcing its own radicality.

Liberté Cathédrale runs for two hours and is physically grueling for the brunt of it. Much of the dancing requires extreme athleticism—repeated jumps, falls to the floor, and vertiginous sprinting. The choice to stage this kind of work on a stone floor with only sneakers for protection is baffling. Is it a denial of the performers’ mortality? A disregard for the embodied repercussions of what the dancers are being asked to do? This choice—because it is one—became central to my experience of the piece. It is hard to watch real people dance and not think about the moment after.

5.

One mouth open / simple sequence of walks turn falls / then joined by many mouths / still open minutes later / committed to the hole in the middle of the face / the hole emaciating their agency / gutting a hatch in their human faces / after all we are in a church so / what better place to think about pain worship damnation horror
what you give and what you get

1. Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Johnson H. Thomas (London, Faber: 1970).