Frühlingsopfer and Café Müller

Frühlingsopfer (The Rite of Spring) marks the consolidation of Pina Bausch’s aesthetic. Based on Stravinsky’s eponymous score, this 1975 work stands as the cornerstone of Tanztheater Wuppertal and the true beginning of her legend. With it, Bausch transformed the drive of German Expressionist theatre into a radically new form of body theatre. The earth strewn across the stage exceeds mere decoration: it is a tangible resistance that modulates movement and clings to the skin. From the very first notes, the atmosphere is imbued with a hypnotic tension, evident in the strain and trembling of the performers. Each gesture inscribes in the dust the chronicle of the foreseen sacrifice.

Bausch transcends the pagan context to focus on an instinctive struggle of the sexes, where the woman assumes the role of object and victim. This antagonism underpins her entire dramaturgy. The choice of the victim—the young woman in the red dress—condenses the collective violence of the rite. Any girl could be chosen; all dance in terror. The thirty male and female performers sway between desire and domination, fear and surrender, as the circle opens and closes in an orgiastic movement fusing eroticism and destruction.

Frühlingsopfer is a torrent of primal force that sweeps the audience from the first chord. Stravinsky’s score, gliding from softness to abruptness with relentless power, fuels the wild energy of the tribal dance like a rhythmic engine. Striking the ground with frenzied force, the dancers convey the ecstasy of exhaustion. The climax shocks with its chilling intensity: the red dress, passed from hand to hand, becomes a death sentence circulating like a lethal virus. In her final, harrowing and moving dance, the chosen one for slaughter (Taylor Drury) embodies the progressive surrender to death.

Linear in structure yet agile, dynamic, and visually dazzling, Frühlingsopfer bears Bausch’s indelible stamp. Anchored to a narrative, this piece represents the pinnacle of her storytelling phase before she ventured into the abstract landscapes of later works. Here, Bausch immerses the spectator in suffering through a visceral choreography that moves from panic to dread. Rooted in the sensory, the piece fuses brutality and lyricism in a convulsive corporeal cry. This consecration does not celebrate spring; it lays bare human vulnerability in the face of desire itself.

Café Müller (1978) distils Bausch’s revolution in contemporary dance like few other works. Its apparent simplicity (a grey café littered with chairs and tables) becomes an existential trap. In this claustrophobic space, where no one can reach another, dance turns into a form of survival amid a stifling atmosphere of feverish reverie. These forty-five minutes of pure poetry on solitude and alienation, set to Henry Purcell’s music (arias ranging from melancholy to devastation), articulate a meditation on love and its ruin. The score expresses the lament that the performers cannot verbalise: the anguish of separation and the search for solace.

In this limbo, two sleepwalking women—or perhaps one split into two?—dressed in pale nightgowns like ghosts of a withered garden, move in perpetual alert. Three men in dark suits accompany them; one is the woman’s lover. Built on a constant state of tension, the piece unfolds in an oppressive juncture. The two dancers, prisoners of the sealed circuits of their psyche, execute an ethereal trance in distinct planes, one the discordant shadow of the other.

In Café Müller, trauma is intimate and psychological. Fragile, desperate energy spreads in time with Purcell’s ethereal and mournful music. Bodies collide, avoid, and seek each other in a suffocating dreamscape. It is the dance of beings haunted by a perpetual curse, a choreographed agony that is pure, searing poetry of movement. These cursed verses are constructed on obsessive loops: strikes against the wall, embraces, falls.

Destructive patterns and blind despair feed the repetition. They are spasms of a tormented memory repeating endlessly, spectres of a misunderstanding persisting even beyond death. Every embrace contains the seed of its own destruction and fuels a zombified sadomasochism, turning love into pure collision. The other two men try, in vain, to shield the pair from their compulsive and bitter past.

Symbols of emptiness and impossible contact, the chairs frustrate the expansive flow of movement. One dancer (Dean Biosca), in a remarkable feat, shoves them aside to prevent injury. Tension accumulates in choreographic loops repeated to exhaustion. The arrival of a redhead—a figure from the outside, bewildered yet drawn by the magnetism of events—introduces an echo of reality that does not reverse the nightmare. In this unresolved tension between pursuit and collapse, Café Müller functions as a diagram dissecting the chronic impossibility of connection. Far from offering comfort, Bausch places us before the murky mirror of our inner abysses. This materialisation of abandonment explains the piece’s enduring relevance. Decades on, its persistent echo continues to inhabit the silent repertoire of our defeats.

In the intimacy of a café or a primitive ritual, the body is the battlefield where the forces of desire, instinct, and destruction are fought. Pina Bausch guides the audience from introspective trauma to physical and collective shock without flinching. Half a century later, Frühlingsopfer and Café Müller reaffirm the essential: under Boris Charmatz’s direction, Tanztheater Wuppertal transforms every stage into a territory of searing emotion and lyrical delicacy through a new generation that has made Bausch’s legacy its own language.