★★✰✰✰ Strasbourg 1518 has been lauded as 'head buttingly confrontational' and an original 'dance for today'. It isn't. Familiar Bausch tropes don't really reflect 1518's psychogenic mania, which was communal, or today's experience of isolation, stress and tedium.
Tag - Nazareth Panadero
★★✰✰✰ It’s three hours long, not including the interval. But a tanztheater classic this is not...
★★★★✰ It's impossible to make coherent sense of a Bausch piece, whatever the source of her inspiration.
★★★★✰ How do you find the soul of a city? It was a challenge that Pina Bausch and her company took on again and again with their World Cities series of tanztheater works – and "Masurca Fogo", made in 1998, must rank as one of the most successful attempts.
Auf dem Gebirge comes from her gloomy period, when she was more concerned with the imagery her performers could dig out of themselves than with their abilities as dancers.
Herein lies one of the more unfortunate traits of Kontakthof: there is more madness than dancing...
The cast’s collective maturity serves the work well since the central theme of many of the 50 or so episodes concerns the passage of life; concentrating especially on memories of childhood and youth contrasting with images of old age.
Ten Chi is like a musical composition mostly in a minor key – an accumulation of moments and motifs without a strong sense of purpose. In fact, much of the recorded music seems half-heard in sleep. There’s a pervasive feeling of melancholy, of a culture beyond comprehension except in crass tourist terms.