It’s bitterly cold in Wuppertal. Snow sticks to the carriages of the Schwebebahn, the suspended railway that rattles around the hilly industrial city in North Rhine-Westphalia. But in the bar of the opera house, dancer Regina Advento breaks out a smile as she recalls a sun-drenched trip to Lisbon.
Advento made the journey 20 years ago with other members of Tanztheater Wuppertal, the company led by trailblazing German choreographer Pina Bausch, who was creating a series of travelogues, international co-productions inspired by cities. It was a special time for Advento: they had toured to her native Brazil just before landing in Portugal in late summer to create a show for the Lisbon Expo of 1998. The dancers hit the town in the name of research. “We were free to choose what we wanted to see,” Advento explains. “We were open to everything, seeking new experiences and challenges.” They had a loose brief from Bausch: go where your eyes and ears take you, see who you meet and what you feel.
The result, created back in Wuppertal that winter, was Masurca Fogo, one of Bausch’s breeziest, warmest shows. Next month it returns to Sadler’s Wells, London, 15 years after it was first performed in England. Set to music including fado and Brazilian percussion, Masurca Fogo is named after a tender dance from Cape Verde, the former Portuguese colony, and features a striking set design that suggests coastline. “Sometimes people are expecting an explanation of the country,” says Advento. “Pina does her own picture of the country – it’s like an impressionist painting.”
In Masurca Fogo, her dancers sunbathe, play games and, in one glorious set piece, deftly assemble a hut then squeeze inside for a dance party that continues even as they dismantle it. Several of the show’s vignettes sprang directly from the Lisbon trip. At a market, Advento watched traders ever ready to whisk their wares into baskets and walk away when the authorities came past. She re-creates the scene, playing a skittish fish seller, laden with buckets and balancing one on her head.
When creating a new show, Bausch typically asked her dancers to respond to certain questions or phrases. One of these was “the little assassin”, based on the painting of the same name by Lisbon-born artist Paula Rego. I’m keen to know the origin of one scene in particular. As two dancers slip-slide across the stage in a makeshift paddling pool, Advento is wheeled on in a bathtub in which she busily washes dishes. A rather lifelike walrus enters the stage and shuffles around. Meanwhile, kd lang sings Smoke Rings on the soundtrack. I’m not quite sure which bit to unpick first.
Advento says the tub was inspired by the domestic setup of two of the dancers. “I heard that they had a house where they didn’t have a lot of water. So they kept the water in the bath to do the dishes. I don’t know if that’s real, or if they talked to Pina about that, but this picture suddenly came into the piece. We didn’t see it through our improvisation.” And the walrus? “It, too, suddenly appeared one day!” How does it move? Is someone inside it? “Can I tell you about that?” she wonders, before roaring with laughter: “Perhaps you can do an audition for it.”
Live animals, too, are often given guest roles in Bausch’s creations: Viktor (1986), which the company revived this month in Wuppertal, features a couple of sheep and a dog auction. When I first saw Masurca Fogo, a chicken flapped its way off the stage and into the front row. It turns out the bird was Advento’s idea. “At my grandmother’s home in Brazil, in the mountains, she has chickens everywhere. You’d go out with the corn and they’d come from all around. I told Pina I would like to do that. In the process, she had the idea that Beatrice [Libonati, another company member] would do it.”
This is how Bausch’s shows came together: memories, dreams, observations and confessions – from the choreographer and her dancers – were all pulled together to create scenes that feel intensely personal yet somehow universal.
Masurca Fogo had its premiere in Wuppertal in 1998. Four years later it reached London and, in the same year, the show’s Cape Verde couples’ dance was featured in the final scene of Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her. The Spanish director has said he was impressed by the show’s “vitality and optimism, its bucolic air and those unexpected images of painful beauty which made me cry”.
Almodóvar’s film is bookended by Tanztheater Wuppertal performances. In the opening scene, we are introduced to the main characters as they sit side by side watching the devastating Café Müller (1978) in which the dancers – including Bausch herself, with her eyes closed – haunt a stage littered with chairs and slam their spectral bodies against the wall.
Bausch’s early creations were frequently barbed with images of despair, cruelty and humiliation – what the New Yorker critic Arlene Croce called “the pornography of pain”. Advento was dancing with the Brazilian company Grupo Corpo in 1990 when word reached her about this “crazy German choreographer” who was coming to São Paulo and Rio, touring a show and holding auditions. Someone gave her a ticket to see them perform the gruelling Auf dem Gebirge hat Man ein Geschrei Gehört (On the Mountain a Cry Was Heard). You’d be hard pushed to find a darker, starker introduction to Bausch’s style of dance-theatre: on a stage covered with a thick layer of mud, the dancers are trapped in enigmatic and aggressive rituals.
What did Advento make of it? “I was really unsure. Grupo had a real energy, a drive. We were really like” – she breaks off to beat out a rhythm with her fist – “quick, quick, jump, turn! And then I saw Gebirge and said, ‘There is no dance!’ But I had a feeling I needed to go this way. The next piece I saw was Iphigenie auf Tauris [Bausch’s 1974 dance version of Gluck’s opera]. It was completely another world. And I knew this was the place.”
Bausch had originally been looking to audition male dancers to replace a South American member who had left, but Advento was relieved to find that the audition became open for female dancers too. She joined the company in 1993. Advento had been dancing since the age of nine but she says that as a child, in Minas Gerais, south-eastern Brazil, she “didn’t like it so much. I hated it actually. I was very masculine. I didn’t fall in love with dance. It was suggested as therapy for me because I was very aggressive. For me it was nicer to play soccer with my friends.”
These days, she is dancing in fewer shows but plays a vital role in passing on the history and spirit of the company to the younger performers who have joined the ensemble since Bausch’s death in 2009. Gradually, new choreographers are being invited to collaborate with Tanztheater Wuppertal, which has a new artistic director, Adolphe Binder. The Pina Bausch Foundation is also granting permission to others to stage their creations. This year, English National Ballet will become the first UK company to perform her thrilling version of The Rite of Spring.
When she moved to Germany, Advento spoke only Portuguese. Now, she sings in five languages. She has a colourful side career as a singer and, for the company’s 40th birthday celebrations, devised a musical odyssey through their shows – accompanied by a band, she performed a night of jazz, bossa nova, folk, fado, chanson and pop.
As well as singing, she has developed her own work as a choreographer. A recent project was inspired by an examination she had at hospital. Minuten Beat, performed as a duet with a breakdancer, was created around the sound of her heart beating at different rates. And Advento has been busy studying dance therapy too, all these years after her first hated dance sessions as a child. She beams as she adds: “The work of Pina, too, was always therapeutic for me.”
- Masurca Fogo is at Sadler’s Wells, London, 9-12 February. Box office: 020-7863 8000.
View all comments >