Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch in Vollmond

Tanztheater Wuppertal are back in London with Pina Bausch’s Vollmond - her take on the madness of love in all its rich extremes…

Pina Bausch’s Vollmond. © Martin Argyroglo

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch
Vollmond (Full Moon)
★★★★✰ London, Sadler’s Wells
16 February 2025
www.pina-bausch.de
www.sadlerswells.com

You get to the end of Pina Bausch’s Vollmond in a mix of shell shock, gratitude and, most of all, wonder. The wonder of how love (the subject of Vollmond) can be explored in so many weird and bonkers ways. And the wonder of how some things, which nominally seem to have little to do with love, still connect with us and, to borrow from Marie Kondo, spark joy.

Peter Pabst’s monumental set is perhaps the strangest wonder of Vollmond, featuring a river crossed by a massive boulder, with much drizzle and rain, all set in a huge black universe. It looks so bleak, and yet love can emerge anywhere. And this, being Bausch, is no romcom or idealised love on display, but the very messy world of how love can mean very different things to different people and the madness that can be associated with a full moon (Vollmond’s meaning in German). Cue an almost never-ending series of cameo scenes showing unrequited love, self-love, controlling love, abandoned love, confused love, dominating love, superficial love, all-consuming displays of love, and the waiting for love, to list just a few takes. What you don’t actually get is what might be called normal, happy love, where we get a warm fuzzy feeling or goosebumps at the shared joy on stage — that’s for other choreographers. It’s not a criticism, just a reflection that Bausch mines any subject deep and wide; she was interested in the extremities.

It goes without saying that the Wuppertal dancers are brilliant dance actors, swaggeringly commanding the stage, alone or en masse. Inevitably, there are new faces, but some from the original 2006 production are still there, looking wonderful, their age bringing a realistic crunch. The men are dressed conventionally in shirts and trousers, while the women wear the usual Bausch attire of slinky cocktail dresses. The grown-up dress belies the fact that so much of what we see is childlike in its emotions and reactions to others — all done with subversive wit and perception. Time and again, we are happily surprised by the rabbits Bausch pulls out of her top hat, and we glory in its madness and humanity. I’m still smiling at the woman spanking her bottom with a coat hanger while eating a raw carrot, one of the more wild scenes.

But there are deeper sections that each of us might interpret differently. The playing with water and in the river can feel like the silliness of what lovers do on a balmy day, but also the act of jumping into love and abandoning oneself to it — the exhilaration as sparks and water fly. It’s the full-on madness of the title, and this is how Vollmond ends — 2½ hours after it started. My only criticism is that this final section of water abandon goes on rather too long, but the very final cameo scene is deeply touching as the company lies down, all the dancers separate and alone. Ultimately, love is a wonderful thing that we each appreciate in our own private way.