That this was the London premiere of Pina Bausch’s penultimate work for Tanztheater Wuppertal, made in 2008, was surprising given Sadler’s Wells long association with her company. Sweet Mambo was experimental, even more so than usual, since Bausch set aside a small group of dancers to work in isolation, creating episodes to the same questions that she set for Bamboo Blues, the second-to-last of her Cities series, made following a visit to Kolkata. The two works shared the same set, bare but for Peter Pabst’s billowing, silvery-white drapes, like sails from an enormous schooner.
What was particularly remarkable about this London premiere, almost 18 years after its creation, is that seven of the original cast were reunited for these shows, bringing all the benefits of having made the work on their own responses to Bausch’s enquiries. Many of the cast are now in their 60s and one, the mercurial Nazareth Panadero, was a remarkably agile 70, still possessing the most powerful gravelly voice, and unabashed at having her strapless off-the-shoulder evening gown unzipped to reveal slightly more than her shoulders.
In Sweet Mambo, Panadero has an alter-ego, a blonde-wigged, bespectacled commentator with goofy, false white front teeth who regularly crossed the stage to speak daft nonsense into a hand-held microphone before disappearing just as quickly. One episode had her bring on an unfilled plastic, water-cooler bottle, declaring that she, too, felt so empty. As an antidote to sinister behaviour elsewhere on the stage, Panadero brought the lioness’s share of comedy, with her rasping laugh. In one scene she laughs into a plastic keep bag, sealing it up to use later.
Sweet Mambo is vintage late Bausch. The design statement is conditioned by Pabst’s one big idea (the billowing drapes, which surrounded the stage’s three walls with four more lowered from the flies, largely as mechanisms for the men to hide within) and by the late Marion Cito’s elegant and sexy evening gowns. Given the number of costume changes among the seven women, it seemed that there must be a wardrobe of several hundred dresses for this production. The men, in contrast to the colourful gowns, are permanently dressed in black.
In addition to Panadero, the cast included several other Bausch veterans: Andrei Berezin, Nayoung Kim, Daphnis Kokkinos, Helena Pikon, Julie Shanahan, Julie Anne Stanzak and Aida Vianieri. As a long-time Bausch aficionado, it was a huge pleasure to see these charismatic masters of Tanztheater back on stage.
Although most performers enjoyed their own solo as regular punctuations in the group proceedings, some of these stalwarts were more prominent than others. Shanahan was key to almost every poignant episode of melancholia. Twice, she ran with increasing desperation towards someone, just offstage, loudly calling her name, only to be grabbed in mid-flight by Berezin and one of the younger cast members, Alexander López Guerra, and roughly carried back to her starting place. When she eventually escaped from her gaolers’ grasp, the person calling her name had disappeared. In another episode a table was forced into her midriff, and she had to collapse to the ground to avoid being ‘run over’, and as the interval approached, she was soaked by tipping buckets of water over herself that were handed to her by the men – another reason for needing so many gowns.
From the opening dialogue of Naomi Brito, a tall trans woman from Brazil, speaking confidently to the audience and asking us to remember her name, followed by her languorous, exquisitely sensual solo, this was a work about strong women, often overcoming sinister low-level abuse from the three men in black, rising above it and in one sequence with the four additional curtains using them as chairs to lounge upon.
Stanzak was also often to the fore and her authoritative confidence began with a partygoer’s lesson, champagne flute in hand, advising the audience to say the word “brush” silently when out with the paparazzi since it gave the mouth a pleasing shape and smile. Later, she was dragged around the stage by her hair, although seemingly at her own request.
Many, but by no means all of the episodes in the first act are repeated after the interval but somehow the liveliness of these performers makes it not seem repetitive. Large tracts of the live action are against a background projection of scenes from a 1938 German film, Der Blaufuchs (The Blue Fox), a comedy in which a bored wife contemplates an affair. Just like the interlude of a grainy nature film about ducks in Kontakthof (1978), this film seems to serve no obvious purpose other than adding a touch of the surreal, although the relative permanence of the intriguing, albeit silent, projections on the wavy drapes was a distraction rather than an interlude.
This was one of those rare evenings that felt very special, unique in the sense of watching history revisited in the present day.
