Peformance Review: Der Fensterputzer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Der Fensterputzer Brian Kloppenberg Der Fensterputzer. By Pina Bausch. Tanztheater Wuppertal. Brooklyn Academy of Music. 11 October 1997. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Regina Advento and Jan Minarik in Tanztheater Wuppertal’s production of Pina Bausch’s Der Fensterputzer (The Window Washer). Brooklyn Academy of Music. Photo: Ulli Weiss. Since the premiere of Fritz in 1974, Pina Bausch has created over thirty evening-length productions with her company, Tanztheater Wuppertal. As the company’s name indicates, Bausch’s work owes as much to theatre as it does to dance, utilizing elaborate sets, costumes, props, and spoken text in addition to movement and music. She rarely utilizes plainly dressed dancers on a bare stage. Rather, women clothed in fancy dresses or slips and men wearing suits or dress shirts and pants might dance on a field of carnations, or splash around in a large, shallow pool of water, or in front of a giant wall of concrete blocks that crashes to the floor during the piece. Bausch’s dancers also talk to one another and the audience as well as executing strange scenes that involve any number of unlikely items, from chairs to leaves to cars to cups of coffee. Bausch is strongly influenced by the expressionism of both German and American modern dance, and employs frankly sexual and violent material. The female dancers are often violated by the male dancers, either being thrown around the stage like rag dolls or subjected to more subtle, sexually disturbing kinds of touch. Although the women rarely turn on the men, or the men on each other, Bausch will occasionally make a spectacle of male narcissism, offering a self-adoring man for the audience to admire and laugh at. Bausch packs each dance with a wide range of elements, which are often developed through improvisational collaborations with company members. Rather than following more traditional choreographic concepts of structure and development to communicate clear perspectives on certain themes, Bausch works in an associative, collage-oriented manner that resists straightforward interpretation. Thus, a particularly disturbing section of a work might be followed, without transition, by a passage of fairly abstract, dancerly movement. As a result, there is almost no sense of cause and effect in her work. Der Fensterputzer (The Window Washer) is a characteristic, if ultimately less successful, example of Bausch’s dance theatre. The sets are the most memorable aspect of the production, especially a large, mobile mound covered in red flowers designed by Peter Pabst. Although the work supposedly draws inspiration from the complex cultures of Hong Kong, only a few of its many short vignettes clearly evoke the city. A gloss on Chinese manners involves one woman who gingerly walks across the [End Page 385] stage and repeatedly asks the audience, so very politely, if she can help us. At the end of the first act, the dancers throw a riot of red flowers into the air to the sound of fireworks, suggesting a raucous Chinese New Year’s celebration. The work ends with a dire image: dancer after dancer climbing up and over the mound, struggling onward. In light of current events, the dance seems to imply that the forward march of history is profoundly changing Hong Kong, and its inhabitants have no choice but to move with the times. Most of the rest of Der Fensterputzer appears to relate less to Hong Kong and more to Bausch’s ongoing fascination with human perversity. A muscleman stripped to his underwear poses for the audience, and then dabs perfume on various parts of his body. A woman runs around the space with her shoulders hunched up around her ears and her arms held limply out at her sides. A man whips a woman who is on her hands and knees as they slowly cross the stage. Two women trip a single man repeatedly as he attempts to walk between them. Although Bausch rarely develops these kinds of scenes, she has used such material in other dances with accumulatively devastating power. Here they simply do not add up, the effect remains mere titillation. Thrown into the mix with these various theatrical vignettes are several sections of pure...