The shock of the old
A troupe of senior citizens have breathed new life into Pina Bausch’s work. By Clifford Bishop for The Sunday Times.


In the struggle between the generations, dance is a weapon of mass destruction. For every parent who splutters about the orgiastic excesses of the young, there is a teenager reduced to squint-eyed embarrassment by a dad’s attempts at disco or a grandma’s knicker-flashing knees-up. There is something unsettling about seeing the elderly get up to dance — elderly, of course, meaning anybody older than ourselves. It prompts the question: what else are they getting up to? At the same time, it is slightly too stark a reminder that, as we get older, it is not our appetites that wane, only opportunities for satisfying them.
Pina Bausch, who practically invented modern European dance-theatre, understands the waxing and waning of human appetite better than anyone.

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Growing old disgracefully

How a bunch of untrained 60-somethings are breathing new life into a Pina Bausch classic.

Judith Mackrell
Wednesday November 27, 2002
The Guardian

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This is brilliant.. I love it!! Brava Pina!!

Review in the Independent.

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Kontakthof
Barbican, London

Judith Mackrell
Saturday November 30, 2002
The Guardian

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Kontakthof
by Debra Craine
The Times

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There's life in the old legs yet
Pina Bausch's Kontakthof gives performers supposedly past their sell-by date a chance to shine. By Jann Parry for The Observer

Come the Christmas season, dance companies regret their limited age range: festive ballets, like pantos, require children and oldies. There's nothing more embarrassing than grown dancers frolicking in short pants and party frocks or youngsters affecting wrinkles and an arthritic stoop.

Pina Bausch has gone for the real thing in a revision of her 1978 Kontakthof, now performed by the (mainly) over-65s. Though not intended as a Christmas show, its enforced conviviality is timely: these are people brought together to stave off loneliness. They meet in a bleak community centre that serves as a dance hall or cinema. They parade their attractions and inadequacies, trapped in a timeless limbo. The schmaltzy tunes date from the Twenties and Thirties; the outfits are more or less Fifties. What dates this generation, though, is the social convention of dancing in couples or as a unison group, situations ripe with the potential for humiliation.

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Shock, horror, probe! Clement Crisp doesn't enjoy a Tanztheater performance. Why does the FT torture him this way?

Old dogs, no new tricks
By Clement Crisp
FT.com site; Dec 02, 2002


Ars longa, we are told. And never more interminably longa than with Pina Bausch's Kontakthof, which turned up at the end of the week at the Barbican. This is the Theatre of Tedium, the subjugation of an audience by boredom, narcolepsy as (huh!) art.

Twenty years ago, this study in the games people play (though these never rise above the level of Noughts and Crosses) had a certain maniac credibility because Bausch's cast were professionals, adept at moving and at endowing even the most stupefying moments with a sardonic wink.

Now the piece has been revised and lumbered with a cast of senior citizens from Wuppertal, where Bausch has her lair. Beloved parents and grandparents, men and women of mature and fascinating experience they may well be, but - dear heaven - performers they ain't, not even with imagination stretched to the utmost.

They are required to trudge and scuttle over the stage (that trotting motion seen as the elderly hasten for a bus); to indulge in slap and tickle; to talk (mein Gott, der eccents are as thick as vun of your London pea-zoupers). The grey-suited men are, shall we say, willing but theatrically insecure. The women offer powerful evidence that couture and coiffure have passed them by.

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Review in the Sunday Times.

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"Kontakthof" must go down as a prime contender for the work that has most seriouslt split the critics in 2002.

Kontakthof
By Gavin Roebuck for The Stage

If it is audacious to take the professional stage, fill it with amateurs, present it as a contemporary dance piece and sell fullprice tickets, Kontakthof, by Pina Bausch, is guilty of just that.

Most of the 26 performers are more than 65 years old and bring their emotional experience of life to the work. Though none of the performers had ever appeared on the professional stage before, they all achieved a high standard of coordination and precision, although choreographer Bausch clearly thinks technique is not involved in making a dancer. Bausch's work might best be described as movement rather than dance for there was no virtuosity, interesting use of rhythm, steps or patterning.

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