Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch + Terrain Boris Charmatz (DE/FR)
Nelken. Ein Stück von Pina Bausch

“For love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave.” A sentence lifted from the 1982 programme booklet, quoting the Song of Solomon. Nelken, this “fantastical ideal of fortune”, as it was described back then, is one of those legendary feasts of imagery by Pina Bausch that not only established her fame but also an entirely new genre: “Tanztheater”. In the famous set of thousands of carnations, 19 dancers perform in breathtaking variations a battle between the pleasure of ingenuous play, of unconstrained bodily existence, of the radiating bliss of love as well as violent principles of order. Images emerge and vanish which later became part of the repertoire of entire generations of great directors: toy buckets, dirt, water, rabbits, real German shepherds, stuntmen, sign language come and go to the music of, among others, George and Ira Gershwin, Louis Armstrong and Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. But hardly anyone succeeds in staging the ambivalences of happiness with as much intimacy, humour, sincerity, playfulness and elegance as Nelken. There was talk of “dances on the volcano”, and nothing less returns with Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch + Terrain Boris Charmatz’s 2024 version of Nelken, a restaging with a new ensemble. A masterwork – and those who’ve seen it understand Pina Bausch’s famous sentence: “Dance, dance, or we are lost.”