Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch

Between Ruins and Tenderness

A powerful and resounding opening to the season with Pina Bausch’s Café Müller and The Rite of Spring

Premiere review by Klaus Dilger

They seem to have “always belonged together” – two works gazing at life from utterly opposite directions, yet finding a shared understanding of fate and the endless struggle to overcome it. And indeed, it is also true that neither piece alone constitutes a full evening’s programme.

Both Café Müller and The Rite of Spring were originally parts of multi-work dance evenings. In 1978, Café Müller was both title and highlight of a four-part programme featuring choreographies by Pina Bausch, Gerhard Bohner, Gigi-Gheorghe Caciuléanu and Hans Pop. The Rite of Spring had appeared three years earlier in an evening that included Der Zweite Frühling (The Second Spring) and Wind von West (Wind from the West).
Since 1980, Tanztheater Wuppertal has presented Café Müller as a double bill with The Rite of Spring – a pairing that has become iconic.

A Question of Casting and Restaging

Café Müller is one of the very few works in which Pina Bausch herself continued to dance, even after taking over the company that would later bear her name in 1973. Since her death in 2009, every revival of the piece has been haunted by one essential question: how to embody her presence in her absence? And, inevitably, by the quality of the casting – as again for this opening of Tanztheater Wuppertal’s new season.
But there is far more at stake.

Cafe-Mueller_Pina-Bausch©Klaus-Dilger

“Bold restagings of great artworks can cast new light upon them,”

wrote Lilo Weber in 2023, quoting fellow critic Nicole Strecker, who had expressed a similar sentiment in 2017:

“Remember me, remember me, but ah / Forget my fate.”
What a heartbreaking sound in the Wuppertal Opera House. Dido’s lament moved us when Pina Bausch was still alive and drifted, sleepwalking, through her Café Müller. Since her passing, the aria from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas has become emblematic. Café Müller will always remain the work in which Pina Bausch is most missed – and yet most powerfully present,” wrote Strecker then. How right she was.

But what, and whom, are we remembering? And what does it mean to remember at all?
Great works of art are defined by their silences – by the spaces they leave open for others. They invite endless reinterpretation, can be read anew by different people, in different times, under different circumstances – and yet they retain their urgency.
That holds true for all of Bausch’s works, not least for Café Müller; and for The Rite of Spring, which since its 1975 premiere has been passed down to younger generations of dancers, and even to other companies. Yet such openness only reveals itself when a restaging truly lives – when it breathes in harmony with the artwork as its creator conceived it.

Cafe-Mueller_Pina-Bausch©Klaus-Dilger

**In Café Müller, those silences are alive**

The piece unfolds in a desolate café – chairs, tables, a revolving door, white walls. A world of echoes, where two women seem to mirror each other on separate planes of reality.
Bausch herself appeared on stage in the premiere, barefoot, in a long white dress, eyes closed, groping her way through the room, moving more in small, tentative steps than in strides. Her movements seemed unsure, almost blind – palms and shoulders turned forward, breastbone caved in, as if her heart hurt. Everything signalled longing rather than defence. Only her long arms moved freely, circling and floating softly, as if inspired, whenever she found a brief place of safety to pause.
An image that has burned itself into the iconography of dance theatre.

Taylor Drury revived this image with great conviction in last weekend’s premiere – as did Emily Castelli, her dreamlike counterpart, a somnambulant lover searching through that stage café, which is far more than a setting. It is a place of memory, of dream and trauma alike – an inner landscape where people meet yet fail to connect, where closeness is sought and constantly lost.

Dean Biosca excels as the feverishly protective man in the dark suit, frantically clearing tables and chairs from her path while Castelli – arms wide, blind, and seemingly aimless – moves through the space.
The tension is suffocating. Gradually it becomes clear that this very act makes the coexistence of different planes of being and time possible at all.

Later, Biosca’s care extends also to Taylor Drury; and to Christopher Tandy, the magnetic centre toward whom Castelli gravitates, until the two collide in an almost lifeless embrace.

Cafe-Mueller_Pina-Bausch©Klaus-Dilger

As if embodying fate itself, a man (Reginald Lefevbre) steps barefoot yet dressed in a suit, white shirt open, from a mirrored door at the right side of the stage. He immediately begins to arrange the couple before him: separates their embrace, aligns their heads, mouth to mouth – a dead kiss – then guides the woman’s left arm around the man’s shoulder, positions his own elbows and hands at right angles, lifts the woman, lays her into the man’s arms, and exits.
Tandy struggles to hold the burden as long as possible, but she slips from his grasp, falls, rises swiftly, only to fling herself again into an embrace.

Lefevbre returns. Again and again the woman is lifted and dropped, lifted and dropped – an endless loop of trying to hold and be held. Ever faster, until the will to endure is consumed by exhaustion.

For a moment, Tandy finds support from Lefevbre, whose hands become steps as he carries him by the feet across the space. Then Tandy sinks to his knees, and the two merge into a silent, frozen pose – tender, sorrowful, unresolved.
He throws himself into a series of aimless movements, like fragments of ritual, each abruptly halted by a crash against the wall or a sudden fall, while Biosca tirelessly clears chairs and tables from his path.

Here, every performer fights a desperate battle for being, for fulfilment, for the chance of connection – even the gaudy, tiptoeing figure in the red wig, tripping through the space on high heels beneath her green dress and black coat. Her fleeting intermezzo with Tandy is short-lived, for Castelli and Tandy find and lose one another again and again, tenderly carrying each other for a turn before shattering once more against walls, doors, mirrors – against resistance itself.

This physical repetition becomes emotional torment – and at the same time, an act of persistence. However painful the repetition, it speaks of the yearning to understand something that reason cannot grasp.

Cafe-Mueller_Pina-Bausch©Klaus-Dilger

Music as a Chamber of the Soul

Bausch sets Café Müller to the music of Henry Purcell – mainly arias from The Fairy Queen and Dido and Aeneas. These baroque sounds, weighted with melancholy and dignity, lend the work its peculiar timelessness. The music does not comment; it amplifies. It opens an inner space in which bodies become shadows of themselves.
When Purcell’s lament “When I am laid in earth” sounds, the piece seems to pause: pain turns to ritual, ritual to silence, silence to beauty.

As in much of her work, Bausch forgoes linear narrative. Her figures have no names, no psychology, no development. Instead, she reveals states of being – loneliness, fear, desire, dependency, memory. The audience is not guided but invited to recognise itself in these scenes.

Café Müller is not a story but a choreography of the soul. It is as though Bausch brings the unconscious to the stage – not as symbol, but as embodied experience. Her dancers are not interpreters; they are vessels of sensation.

Cafe-Mueller_Pina-Bausch©Klaus-Dilger

Between Ruins and Tenderness

Bausch’s Café Müller is a choreography of destruction – yet beneath its despair lies a fragile, indestructible humanity. The body becomes the site of truth. When two people embrace and remain infinitely alone, there is no hopelessness in it – only a painful clarity: we are vulnerable in our incompatibility, and yet we love all the same.

Amid the wreckage of communication, within the movements of failure, arises that fragile beauty which makes her work so imperishable.
Forty-seven years after its premiere, Café Müller remains a key work of dance theatre – radically intimate and universal at once, a piece about memory, connection, and the impossibility of escaping oneself.

Perhaps it is the quietest and at the same time the loudest work Pina Bausch ever created: a cry almost inaudible – and therefore never forgotten.
Taylor Drury, Emily Castelli, Maria Giovanna Delle Donne, Dean Biosca, Reginald Lefevbre and Christopher Tandy have made that cry heard once more.

Das-Fuehlingsopfer_Pina-Bausch©Klaus-Dilger

**Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring: Earth, Body, Ecstasy**

Pina Bausch’s interpretation of Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, created in 1975, stands as another milestone of dance theatre – and her last fully choreographed work.

For her sacrificial ritual, she created a world of earth, sweat and trembling bodies. The stage, covered with raw soil, seems to breathe. Every step sinks into it; every fall leaves a trace; each movement stains the dancers’ skin. This is a place of ritual, not representation – what happens here is transformation.

Bausch’s Rite of Spring is among the most intense works in the entire dance theatre canon. It is not simply choreography; it is eruption, collective exorcism. The dancers’ bodies become both victims and witnesses of a hidden violence – of the eternal cycle of life and sacrifice that demands renewal.

Her version differs from all others in its radical theatricality and uncompromising truthfulness. There is no abstraction, no safe distance between stage and audience. The dancers – women in plain beige slips, men bare-chested and gleaming with sweat – inhabit a landscape that shreds illusion. They do not perform the ritual; they live it.

The earth itself becomes an adversary: clinging, resisting, devouring. Every fall, every gasp, every collapse is amplified by the sound of soil against flesh. It is elemental – a choreography that demands total surrender.

And yet within its brutality, there is a strange tenderness. Amid the heaving, gasping mass of bodies, human vulnerability is laid bare in its purest form. Bausch transforms the myth of the Chosen One – the girl who must dance herself to death to secure the fertility of the earth – into a mirror held up to us all. Who decides what must be sacrificed? What do we destroy in the name of renewal?

In Bausch’s universe, violence and beauty are inseparable. The ensemble scenes, driven by Stravinsky’s merciless rhythms, explode with primal energy, while the solo of the Chosen One pierces the storm with fragile, devastating intensity. Her dance is a cry of terror – and a rebellion against the erasure of selfhood.

Tanztheater Wuppertal revives this timeless creation to open its new season. Nearly fifty years after its premiere, it speaks to a present that again sacrifices its youth to sustain systems that have lost their soul – in war, in economics, in the destruction of the environment.

Bausch’s work endures because it shows us that the body remembers what society denies or forgets. Her dancers do not illustrate ideas; they embody the forces that move beneath civilisation’s surface – desire, fear, submission, resistance. The trembling of a hand, a sudden breath, a body collapsing into earth – when the women drive their elbows like blades into their own abdomens, these are not stylistic gestures but existential necessities: acts of survival, of dignity.

At the premiere, Tsai-Chin Yu gave a deeply convincing performance as the Chosen One. Nineteen company dancers and fifteen guests, in a restaging by Azusa Seyama-Prioville, Barbara Kaufmann and Kenji Takagi, electrified the audience with the overwhelming force of both music and choreography.