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Three kilos of chopped onions, several hundred cardboard boxes, four German Shepherds and 8,000 pink silk carnations. Designer Peter Pabst’s surreal shopping list is, of course, the recipe for Pina Bausch’s Nelken (Carnations), which began its sell-out run at Sadler’s Wells on Wednesday.
Since Bausch’s death in 2009 her company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, has had a sorry succession of artistic directors. The fifth, Boris Charmatz, took over in 2022, adding his own brand to the company logo. His 2024 season combines old favourites — Nelken, Viktor, Café Müller — with works created for his own Terrain project.
Nelken was co-created by its 1982 cast, and the ghosts of those performers, manic caricatures of the human condition, live on in the never-ending stream of absurdist vignettes. A woman tickles the feet of a man at prayer; four stuntmen crash-land into a pile of boxes; an angry official demands to see passports; weeping men rub raw onion into their eyes.
There is more theater than tanz. The audience is briefly indulged by Simon Le Borgne (ex-Paris Opera Ballet) with some throwaway manèges, entrechats, chaînés and double tours, but the take-home routines are Bausch’s trademark line-dances synced to the easy-listening playlist: Franz Lehár, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith. The women are chic in their killer heels and bias-cut satin, the men swap between sharp suits and frumpy Fifties frocks. They regularly unite for a seated routine or hand-jive from wing to wing in the now famous (and viral) “Nelken Line”. Mysterious, frequently exasperating but consistently absorbing.
★★★★☆
To February 22, sadlerswells.com
Back in the last century, the Royal Ballet often exiled new work to its small-scale regional tours (the dismal Dance Bites) or sandwiched the occasional novelty between two more bankable pieces. Given that the Royal Opera House now boasts two splendid studio theatres in which to test-drive new material, Royal Ballet director Kevin O’Hare’s decision to present four premieres on the main stage as part of this month’s Festival of New Choreography is certainly a massive vote of confidence.
Boundless, Gemma Bond’s snazzy (if derivative) ensemble, was led by Yasmine Naghdi and the unfailingly impressive Ryoichi Hirano. It was nattily dressed in Charlotte MacMillan’s sawn-off, gunmetal tutus and lent a snarling energy by Joey Roukens’s brassy, percussive In Unison.
Joshua Junker’s Never Known deploys its 20 dancers with confidence (and a large pinch of Crystal Pite-style clustering) to a (taped) score by electronic classicist Nils Frahm. For What It’s Worth, by Ballet Black’s Mthuthuzeli November, made zestful use of a high-kicking Mayara Magri and under-exploited soloists such as Leo Dixon — a vision in Yann Seabra’s fuchsia silk pyjamas — and Joonhyuk Jun.
Jessica Lang’s Twinkle uses a mix of Brahms’s “Lullaby” and Mozart’s playful variations on “Ah! vous dirai-je, maman” (aka “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”) played on piano from a platform upstage right by Kate Shipway. Lang responds with unabashed delight to these simple-seeming melodies, flooding the stage with movement, dancers flitting in and out of ensembles and partnerships with Robbins-like wit (and quoting saucily from Frederick Ashton’s Les Patineurs). For Lang, “The dancer is the fundamental inspiration” and Twinkle’s muse is unquestionably Fumi Kaneko whose gleeful jump and quicksilver phrasing are a perfect expression of the score.
★★★☆☆
To February 21, roh.org.uk
