Pina Bausch Choreographs Blaubart: A Transgressive or Regressive Act?

German Life and Letters 57:1 January 2004 0016–8777 (print); 1468–0483 (online)

PINA BAUSCH CHOREOGRAPHS BLAUBART: A TRANSGRESSIVE OR REGRESSIVE ACT? MEG MUMFORD ABSTRACT

Pina Bausch’s Blaubart – Beim Anhören einer Tonbandaufnahme von Béla Bartók’s Oper ‘Herzog Blaubarts Burg’ (1977) marked the beginning of the choreographer’s trademark challenge to the boundaries between dance and theatre through collaborative improvisation and verbal expression. Given the extent to which the piece is transgressive, it is intriguing that it should be so strongly permeated by a musical setting which has often been described as a regressively misogynist appropriation of Charles Perrault’s fairytales (1697). As Mererid Puw Davies has pointed out, Balázs’s libretto and Bartók’s opera Herzog Blaubarts Burg (1910/11) belong to a bleak canon typified by tragic, non-utopian endings, a sympathetic portrayal of murderous Bluebeard and the disempowerment of female protagonists. When Bausch’s work toured North America in 1984 it received much negative comment because of its unremitting presentation of violent gender relations and its cultural specificity. The following study questions whether the production is regressively bleak, contending instead that the experience of a fatalistic vision is dialogically opposed to a more utopian constructivist critique of learned sadomasochistic behaviour. It also explores the way Bausch’s Märchen articulates the interrelationship between gender and national cultural concerns, both darkly embodying and critically resisting the dynamics of authoritarian civilising structures.

When Pina Bausch took her ‘Tanztheater’ version of Blaubart, together with Café Müller and her choreography of Le Sacre du printemps on tour to North America in 1984, her work received much negative comment with regard to both its presentation of gender relations and its cultural specificity. Bausch was charged with entrapping her performers within the frame of patriarchal society through her presentation of the debilitating nature of heterosexual roles as inevitable.1 The violence of male-female interactions and the seemingly relentless victimisation of women prompted some critics to accuse Bausch of indulging in barbarism and a pornography of pain.2 On the subject of cultural specificity, numerous commentators referred to the German nature and context of her work, and/or used stereotypical descriptors such as ‘nihilistic’, ‘serious’, ‘disturbing’ and

1

Marianne Goldberg, ‘Pina Bausch, at Brooklyn Academy of Music, June 1984’, Women and Performance, 12, 1 (1984), 99. 2 See, for example, Alan M. Kreigsman, The Washington Post as quoted in ‘Pina Bausch in America’, Ballet International, 7, 11 (1984), 18; and Arlene Croce, ‘Dancing: Bad Smells’, The New Yorker, 16 July 1984, 82. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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‘tedious’.3 John Rockwell’s review of Blaubart for The New York Times provides an extreme example – with xenophobic overtones – of this tendency. After introducing Bausch as an artist ‘characteristic of her country and time’, Rockwell described the piece as ‘full of hollow-eyed Expressionist zombies, straight from an Edward Gorey cartoon’ and ‘Teutonic fetishes – sadistic violence, dark, stringy hair; sad-sack postures’ which ‘would have been risible had they not been charged with such searing intensity’.4 These responses to the ‘Tanztheater Wuppertal’ tour draw attention to two intriguing aspects of Bausch’s Blaubart. The first is the apparently onesided fatalist emphasis of her retelling of the fairytale. In many ways the work seems regressively to reiterate what Mererid Puw Davies has described as ‘the canonical bias towards more earnest, violent or tragic’ treatments of the tale which ‘involve a scepticism towards the ideas of subversion and change’. The regression is surprising given the tendency towards texts ‘more complex in their mix of utopianism and fatalism’ which Puw Davies has argued is more typical of German women authors dealing with the ‘Blaubart’ material.5 One of the aims of the following study is to explore to what extent Bausch’s version is as monolithically bleak as was suggested by many commentators. The second aspect examined here is the relation of the piece to German cultural concerns. While the critics do not bring the portrayal of gender and national cultural issues together, they are deeply interrelated. Bausch’s depiction of male-female relations shares many of the psycho-social concerns of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German treatments of the Bluebeard story. In particular, her version appears both to embody and to resist critically the repetition of authoritarian civilising processes. REGRESSIVE AFFIRMATION OF A BLEAK CANON?

The fatalistic overtones of Bausch’s 1977 Blaubart – Beim Anhören einer Tonbandaufnahme von Béla Bartók’s Oper ‘Herzog Blaubarts Burg’ are in part attributable to the musical setting referred to in the title. As Puw Davies has pointed out, Balázs’s libretto for Bartók’s opera Herzog Blaubarts Burg (1910/11) may well be the first text in the European tradition to resist any utopian perspective.6 As such it belongs to the bleak canon typified by tragic, non-utopian endings, a sympathetic portrayal of murderous

3 Anna Kisselgoff, ‘Is Bausch’s Vision True to Life?’, The New York Times, 8 July 1984, 12H; Erika Munk, ‘A Lake of Tears’, Village Voice, 3 July 1984, 94; ‘Pina Bausch in America’, 16; ‘What the Critics say about Tanztheater’, TDR, 30, 2 (1986), 80–4. 4 John Rockwell, ‘Mixed-Media “Bluebeard” Draws on Operatic Past’, The New York Times, 12 July 1984, C18. 5 Mererid Puw Davies, The Tale of Bluebeard in German Literature: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Oxford 2001, pp. 245, 253. 6 Ibid., p. 166.

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Bluebeard and the disempowerment of female protagonists. In this case the female figure – her name, significantly enough, is Judith – masochistically seeks and accepts her fate as the fourth woman to be entombed alive in the seventh chamber of Bluebeard’s underground Gothic castle. Because of its emphasis on Judith’s mission to open the dark castle and thereby ‘enlighten’ the bloody society created by men, the opera is, according to Village Voice critic Erika Munk, ‘peculiarly more “feminist” and more political than what Bausch makes of it’.7 While the decision to engage with the opera was not in the first instance Bausch’s, it was nevertheless one she agreed to and pursued with great intensity. According to Jochen Schmidt it was the Wuppertal Theatre which presented her with the suggestion that she take on the ‘Blaubart’ myth, using Bartók’s opera and Offenbach’s operetta for the purpose of a serious and comic treatment respectively. Apparently Bausch became so engrossed in the Bartók, developing the one-hour opera into an uninterrupted two-hour study which was premièred in January 1977, that no space was left for the Offenbach.8 During the choreography process, Bausch used the idea of the tale as she knew it from Märchen collections, including Perrault’s 1697 version.9 Given her interest in portraying yearning and desire for love it is not surprising that the ‘Blaubart’ material and the opera appealed. Bausch remains close to Balázs’s libretto thematically, particularly in her emphasis on the doomed relationship between Bluebeard and Judith. However, her characterisation of the two protagonists and her provision of a social context via the ensemble dancers and scenography deviate from the libretto in ways which serve to defamiliarise the couple’s sado-masochistic relationship and its historical specificity. Bartók’s music played an important role as an audio-visual phenomenon, manipulated by the Bluebeard dancer who controlled a tape recording of the opera from a table-like box on wheels. However, while the German translation of the libretto was forcefully omnipresent (a version was used with a forward placement of Hertha Töpper and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s voices against the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra which, according to Rockwell, made the words more comprehensible to a German-speaking audience), Bausch did not, as is the case in linear story ballets, subordinate the dancers to the narrative of the words and music through illustrative choreography. Rather, her emphasis on the piling up of images which relate associatively or ironically to the narrative, and the dismemberment of the music

7

Munk, loc. cit. Jochen Schmidt, Tanztheater in Deutschland, Frankfurt a.M. 1992, pp. 50–1. The choice of Bartók’s fatalist version for the serious treatment, rather than, say, the operatic setting by Paul Dukas of Maeterlinck’s more utopian text Ariane et Barbe-bleue (1899), supports the canonical bias described by Puw Davies. 9 Katia Canton, The Fairy Tale Revisited: A Survey of the Evolution of the Tales, from Classical Literary Interpretations to Innovative Contemporary Dance-theater Productions, New York 1994, p. 116. 8

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through Bluebeard’s constant stopping and rewinding of certain passages, distanced her work from the opera both formally and thematically. ETERNALLY DOOMED LOVE?

Where Bausch’s Blaubart comes into thematic contact with the libretto is in its exploration of love as a source of tension and paradox. Balázs’s main focus is the impossibility of male-female union. Both of his protagonists struggle with a desire for intimate psychological communication and a fear that the consequent knowledge will bring the end of their relationship. Bluebeard unwillingly gives Judith the keys to seven chambers with locked doors, symbols of his psyche’s deep recesses. However, at the fourth and fifth door it is he who urges her to open them, possibly in a vain attempt to distract her from the recent horrors of the torture, weaponry, and treasure chambers by turning her mind to the potentially more peaceful and lightgiving vista of the garden and his expansive realm. As a would-be redeemer, she is initially determined to open all the doors in the hope that her action will bring light, wind and sun into the castle. But from the moment she looks through the door into the first chamber and recognises the torture instruments, she is increasingly motivated by the need to face her fear that the rumours about Bluebeard’s wife-slaying will be confirmed. Judith’s assertive yet ultimately self-sacrificing and motherly quest to know and comfort Bluebeard exacerbates his oscillation between fear of separation and desire for isolation. Love, a search for wholeness through union, paradoxically puts itself in jeopardy through its generation of conflicting desires. At the time of the Blaubart première Pina Bausch described the piece as being about the continuing battle of the sexes, particularly the feeling of being drawn together while simultaneously sensing rejection, and the tension between an individual’s inability to survive without others in society and the need to be alone.10 According to the video recording of Blaubart which provides the basis for the following discussion of the work (copyright 1984 and distributed by L’Arche Editeur Paris in 1987), Bausch choreographs the conflicts generated by love through a series of gestures which depict the way a tender desire for contact and knowledge engenders a violent and obsessive desire to control the beloved. For example, in one episode when Bluebeard is seated at his table on a chair and Judith comes to him, nestling between his legs on the floor, her head bowed, a gentle foraging gesture she makes consisting of an upstretched arm followed by an attempt to caress his head is followed by Bluebeard roughly pushing the 10

See Pina Bausch’s comments in Edmund Gleede’s Theaterzettl, no. 18, 1976–7 season as quoted in Niki Pantelidou, ‘Die Tänzerin und Choreographin Pina Bausch – Darstellung einer Entwicklung in Verbindung mit dem von ihr geschaffenen Tanztheater Wuppertal’, Diplomarbeit, Deutsche Sporthochschule, Cologne, 1987, p. 42. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.

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arm, the crown of her head and with it the rest of her upper body back down. This sequence is repeated in other parts of the dance, on one occasion eight times in rapid succession. The episode can be read in multiple ways: a domineering attempt to keep the submissive partner ‘under his thumb’; Bluebeard’s defence against Judith’s encroachment on his mind; Judith’s masochistic persistence in provocations which bring only retribution, and so on. The gestures, like the opera, point gloomily to the interconnectedness of loving actions, alienation and cruelty. The scene of female subjugation seems unavoidable. Yet the repetitions partially defamiliarise the event, turning it from an unavoidable given into a performative game which could collapse if the partners stopped rehearsing their roles. The gestural imagery both traps us fatalistically in the experience of eternal sado-masochism and distances us in a bid to show the contours of the game and the chance for intervention. Here the work appears dialogically to bring mutually exclusive ways of being in – or ordering – the world into association and competition. Steven Connor has identified dialogics as a trademark of much contemporary theatre that attempts to resist the ‘stabilising effect of any single perspective by multiplying different frames of understanding and levels of performance’.11 In this case, and repeatedly throughout the work, I would contend that the experience of a fatalist essentialist vision is not monolithically asserted but dialogically opposed to a constructivist critique of learned sado-masochistic behaviour. BLEAK IMAGES OF DEATH AT THE HANDS OF THE COLLECTOR

The moment when Bausch’s Blaubart comes closest to the tragic bleakness of the opera is in its use of images which, in a freely associative manner, refer to the events of the libretto’s finale. In contrast to the ‘happy endings’ given in Perrault’s and Grimm’s versions of the tale – the heroine’s brothers slay Bluebeard and she inherits his wealth – Balázs has Judith stand fearful and broken after the revelation of her three predecessors. Bluebeard then clothes her in a mantle, diamond crown and jewellery. With sunken head she passively follows the other women through the seventh door. As it closes behind her Bluebeard sings ‘And always, too, it shall be night,/Night . . . night . . . ’.12 Total darkness descends in which he disappears. The three beautiful, mute and statue-like former wives have been interpreted by Puw Davies as the petrified aspects of Bluebeard’s

11

Steven Connor, ‘Postmodern performance’, in Patrick Campbell (ed.), Analysing Performance: A critical reader, Manchester 1996, pp.110, 114. For further discussion of dialogics, see Michael Vanden Heuvel, ‘Complementary Spaces: Realism, Performance and a New Dialogics of Theatre’, Theatre Journal, 44, 1 (1992), 52–4, 58. 12 Trans. Carl Stuart Leafstedt in Music and Drama in Béla Bartók’s Opera ‘Duke Bluebeard’s Castle’, Ann Arbor 1994, p. 329. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.

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memory.13 His act of hoarding them, rather like art works, also suggests the activities of a collector. A prominent figure in the nineteenth-century world of museums and scientific categorisations, and one still with us today, the collector pursues control over the natural and cultural environment and hence finds solace in the ownership and display of objects, particularly immobilised ones. Puw Davies has pointed out that in Bluebeard texts from the nineteenth century onwards, the male protagonist is recurrently associated with the figure of the collector, as exemplified in John Fowles’s novel The Collector (1963) where the systemisation of butterflies and real women leads to the death of both.14 Bausch’s production takes up the image of the three museum-piece wives and their Bluebeard collector in a sequence which is positioned in the Treasure Chamber section near the middle of the opera. Here Bluebeard, rather like a butterfly fanatic, catches three dancing women costumed in white slips with a white bedsheet, swings them around in the sheet-turnedsling, hoicks them on his back, walks to his chair and in succession piles them onto it, one on top of the other, where they lie motionless in their white shrouds for a period of time. The image is both amusing and chilling: the women look like many things – including, admittedly, ‘sad sacks’ – or a pile of deserted dolls in a toy-room. But the white jumble of bony limbs recalls also the stark images of Holocaust victims lying in strangely aesthetic piles. The moment is soon broken when the women slide off the chair, giggling, but the sequence has already imprinted on our mind the dangers of the collector’s desire to catch, immobilise and collect. The finale of Bausch’s piece makes connections between the work of the visual and performance artist and that of the collector. It begins with an episode which mirrors the singer Bluebeard’s act of decking his mannequin in regal finery. The dancer Bluebeard puts his Judith in six late nineteenth-century dresses discarded by women of the ensemble, one on top of the other, as if forcing her to adopt the roles and behaviour of his previous wives. Suffocating in her straitjacket, Judith is still able to walk and she toddles offstage only to return with eight white pillows which she distributes to women, perhaps an injunction to take on the comfort of sleep/death. After this she lies motionless, mummified, and for all his attempts to awaken her by shaking or re-enacting the grotesque love-making antics of the opening, he remains unsuccessful. During his shuffling with her body and after it has ceased, Bluebeard intermittently claps, finally letting the music run its course uninterrupted to the bitter end. At each clap, the men and women in the ensemble position themselves in tableaux which recall earlier images from the piece. They respond to Bluebeard as if he is a directorial force, letting him conduct them in this fashion until the lights have dimmed and his claps finally come to an end. If the tableaux can be 13 14

Puw Davies, p. 166. Ibid., p. 154. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.

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described as ‘sudden bursts of memory’, Bluebeard can be accused of being trapped in idealised and frozen images of the past.15 As dictatorial choreographer-cum-conductor, he is also a form of window-dresser who organises displays for voyeuristic passers-by. We too, the spectators, participate in the collector’s activities. His authoritarian art does not transcend the potentially sadistic organisatory acts of the collector. Much dance performance involves a repetitive re-presentation of past moments in accordance with one individual’s vision, a point hammered home by the obsssive repetition of the tableaux, and this repetition can be deadening for the artists and performers involved. Interestingly, Blaubart was the product of a new working method for Bausch, one which moved away from this authoritarian model, where a single individual’s vision is imposed, towards a greater reliance on the creative involvement of all ensemble members. Shortly after the 1976 première of Die sieben Todsünden and prior to the Blaubart rehearsals Bausch suffered a crisis of confidence as a result of the frustration expressed by many of her company members with her experimental demands. Her solution was to leave the theatre and work in a studio with a small group of dancers supportive of her ideas.16 Out of this period Blaubart emerged, and a new method of stimulating the dancers’ imaginations and memories by asking them to improvise responses to questions was introduced. In this case the questions concerned male-female relations.17 This mode of operation, which has now become her established method, places great emphasis on collective memory and participation. However, Bausch retains overall control as she is the one responsible for setting the questions and selecting and arranging the improvisations. That her approach to leadership remained problematic during the production is suggested by the comment of the dancer Jo Ann Endicott that there was ‘a bad atmosphere’ between Bausch and many of the group during the early part of 1977.18 Given the questioning of the choreographer’s role in relation to the ensemble during the production process, it would be unsurprising if the piece, the depiction of Bluebeard in particular, bore relation not only to Germany’s recent history of authoritarian government but to post-1968 experiments in the West with non-authoritarian ways of organising performance. Through references to the statue-like wives, the adornment of Judith as a petrified display object, the cyclical return of music and of choreography from the opening which suggests the union of eros and death, and the final dimming of all light on the stage, Bausch’s work grimly echoes the opera’s fatalistic depiction of Judith’s acquiescence in eternal live

15

Ciane Fernandes, Pina Bausch and the Wuppertal Dance Theater: Repetition and Transformation, Ann Arbor 1995, pp. 275–6. 16 Anita Finkel, ‘Gunsmoke’, The New Dance Review, 4, 2 (1991), 5. 17 Jo Ann Endicott, Ich bin eine anständige Frau!, Frankfurt a.M. 1999, p. 89. 18 Ibid. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.

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entombment. However, the hyperbolic extension of these features through haunting imagery, the increase in significance of the collector figure and the new presentation of performance artists and spectators as being involved in the same potentially violent activities of control and fetishism seem to draw critical attention to recent (rather than eternal) German and Western concerns. These include a wariness of colonising behaviour, especially the attempt to fix and control the Other, and of authoritarian structures both in personal relationships and in performance groups. BLUEBEARD THE OBSESSIVE COLONISER

The critique of colonising activities is nowhere more strongly expressed than in Bausch’s portrayal of Bluebeard himself. In the cast for the original as well as for the video and American tour versions the role was played by the Czech dancer Jan Minarik, a man of giant proportions in relation to the other dancers, especially the petite Beatrice Libonati who took the part of Judith in the video and tour. In the opera libretto Judith is the more assertive of the couple, at least until she begins to carry the weight of her impending fate, while Bluebeard is relatively passive, acquiescing in Judith’s demands and offering her first the chance to leave his castle and then dissuading her from her fate. Bartók enhanced the depiction of Judith as single-mindedly insistent and of Bluebeard as sympathetic by, for instance, giving her musical line less harmonic and melodic flexibility and his a smoothness which never manifests his capacity for cruelty and violence.19 The casting of the powerfully built Olga Haselbeck as Judith and the more slender and less imposing Oszkar Kalmann as Bluebeard for the 1918 première at the Royal Hungarian Opera House may well have enhanced the portrayal of Judith’s relative assertiveness. By contrast, Minarik’s Bluebeard overtly dominates the proceedings from the start, both visually and through his control of the tape-recorded music. His sadism and physical aggression are overtly on display as he pushes, pulls, drags, and swings women through the air or paternalistically puts them over his knee and smacks their bottoms. A predatory coloniser, he incarcerates women in sheets and clothes and on occasion advances towards them with a Nosferatu-like clawed-hand gesture. However, for all the grotesque overtones, this Bluebeard is not in terms of physique the bearded beast of the fairytale but a clean-shaven male. From his costume – a dark suit with braces and open-collar white shirt, occasionally with a heavy winter coat, and later a striped bathrobe made of silk – it would seem he belongs to the ranks of ‘ordinary’ middle-class Western men of the twentieth century. Not a duke, but perhaps a man with aristocratic

19

Leafstedt, p. 225 and Paul Banks, ‘Images of the Self: “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle”’ (1988), in Nicholas John (ed.), The Stage Works of Béla Bartók, London/New York 1991, p. 10. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.

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pretentions. His very ‘ordinariness’ can be read as an indication that the ogre within is not an aberration but symptomatic of a large part of the male population in a context dominated by world war and fascism. The dancer Bluebeard has an impressively toned physique and like the Don Juan type of Bluebeard which began to emerge at the turn of the century is not averse to conquering multiple female bodies, a testimony to his desire for control over the material world. The association of Don Juan with Bluebeard, particularly from the late nineteenth century onwards, signalled a new emphasis in the tradition of this tale on a dangerously potent masculinity, whose aggressivity has been interpreted as a symptom of sexual repression.20 Like Don Juan, the dancer Bluebeard flirts with women other than Judith, memorably at one point waltzing with a woman while Judith lies curled in a dependent fashion around the back of his head, her weight supported by his shoulders. Often at the centre of attention and surrounded by a gaggle of women, he is a poseur who narcissistically seeks further confirmation of his identity by putting his strength on display, for example, through a set of push-ups. His infantile desire to be loved, expressed through these extrovert performances, takes on a sinister edge when he begins to watch one of the women intently and then whips open his bathrobe to her like a flasher, an act ironically juxtaposed with the opera lyrics which at that point involve the singer Bluebeard proudly introducing Judith to his ‘Zaubergarten’. In a memorable episode involving a nude plastic doll with long dark hair reminiscent of Judith, who in the 1984 video is also armless, a connection is drawn between Bluebeard’s narcissism and Judith’s victimisation. The doll is brought in by the actress Mechthild Grossmann, whose hairstyle resembles that of Judith and the doll. Grossmann acts out a scene of female complicity in the victimisation of women: as she crosses with the doll down centre stage – where she places it in a standing position with its back to the audience – she engages in love-hate gestures, a gentle caressing of the hair turning into a vicious yank, and repeated pulling of the nose. The assault is both an attack on self, and on her sisters and daughters. Bluebeard then shoos all figures offstage in order to have the space and doll to himself. At first he minces in front of it with his bathrobe to the sound of women tittering backstage, both mocking at and delighting in his display. The titters then turn into hysterical laughter. Bluebeard takes off his robe and does muscleman poses in a pair of velveteen underpants. Here the helpless armless doll is treated as an ‘Ersatzfrau’, one who mutely accepts his antics and does not make demands in return. This waxwork figure is the deathly ideal he imposes upon Judith. Repeatedly Bluebeard’s

20 Puw Davies, pp. 186–91. According to Leafstedt, when Balázs began work in 1908 on the Bluebeard theme he sketched out a play where Don Juan and Bluebeard meet in a pub. Don Juan is characterised as a womaniser afraid of his own mother. Apparently Balázs himself identified with Don Juan during this period. See Leafstedt, pp. 24–5.

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megalomaniac masculinity is displayed as self-defeating in that it ultimately separates him from that which he would possess, often through bodily mortality when the desired lover is turned into an inanimate object. Bausch has spoken of her interest in the solitude of Bluebeard21 and in her piece she suggests that solitude is self-imposed. Bluebeard is a prisoner of himself, trapped inside his own fortress of rectilinear movements. Unlike the men in the ensemble, he never experiments with feminine gestures in, say, a lyrically flowing solo. By contrast, he often behaves like a nineteenth-century male ballet dancer, a rigid pillar lifting and hoisting. The image of the solitary man at the table with a tape-recorder recalls Samuel Beckett’s protagonist, Krapp, a lonely writer who celebrates his sixty-ninth birthday by recording a reflection on the year gone by while listening to another commemorative tape made on his thirty-ninth birthday which in turn contains a musing on events recorded in a tape made a decade earlier. All the tapes, like Bartók’s opera, deal with unsatisfactory love relationships which are invariably terminated, or with moments of solitude.22 Like Bluebeard, Krapp is locked in the realm of petrified memories and habitual behaviour. In Beckett’s Berlin production of Krapp’s Last Tape in 1977 – shortly after Blaubart was premiered – he underlined his protagonist’s self-incarceration by having him appear in a terry-towelling greyand-black-striped bathrobe with prison overtones, not unlike Bluebeard’s.23 Krapp’s solitariness is partly attributed to his obsessive making and collecting of memoirs on tape. This compulsive keeping of and listening to records, the symptom of a collector, is analogous to Bluebeard’s treatment of his tape recorder and the ensemble’s tableaux vivants. The object of both men’s collections is not only memory but the language through which it is communicated. Krapp is a writer and it is his dedication to his written work which has paradoxically contributed to a lack of investment in relationships and communication. Bluebeard similarly controls language, in this case the sung word, and his control freakery turns it and the machine which makes it possible into a weapon, a Pandora’s box, which unleashes all sorts of problems for both performers and spectators alike. Man’s masculinist obsession with physical armoury, language, memory and machine is a source of his solitude and alienation from life. JUDITH THE JÜDIN

Judith, the biblical redeemer figure, attempts to drag Bluebeard from his fetishising activities in an early episode where she singles out seven women in succession, pulling each one out of the crowd and standing them before 21

Canton, p. 116. Charles R. Lyons, Samuel Beckett, London/Basingstoke 1983, p. 101. 23 See Michael Haerdter’s production account as given in Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre: The Author as Practical Playwright and Director, London 1988, p. 303. 22

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Bluebeard as if confronting him with his former wives.24 However, she quickly despairs and goes over to sit in his lap, leading his hand to the tape recorder as if instructing him to play on. This is not the assertive Judith of Bartók’s opera. In the original cast Judith was played by Marlis Alt, described by one German critic as ‘ein zartes Nichts aus Haut und Knochen’.25 In the video version Beatrice Libonati wears a low cut damask rose dress which exposes her ribs and spine and often her breasts. Half doll, she is introduced to us lying on the floor with her arms stiffly held out in supplicating fashion, asking to be embraced. Half wild naked animal or madwoman, she has many expressive and desperate solos in ‘Ausdruckstanz’ style, interspersed with moments where she neurotically rubs and counts her hair. Her barefoot ‘Ausdruckstanz’ solos, read in terms of dance politics, can be interpreted as a reassertion of a suppressed national form, the heritage of the Weimar Republic, distorted by the Nazis in their physical culture regime, and then abandoned in post-war West Germany, where until the 1970s classical ballet dominated.26 The imagery of the neurotic hysteric, who has surrendered self-control, is juxtaposed with the actions of a masochist who seeks control from outside: repeatedly Judith gets up only to be knocked down, scurries back to the walls only to be pulled away again by the leg, all the while submissively bowing her head. Judith is the victim not only of domestic but also of state violence. In one episode the ensemble becomes representatives of a national dance troupe as they perform a strange combination of gestures which seems to be a combination of a ‘Schuhplatteln’ slap of the left thigh followed by a goosestep kick. Judith, seated on a chair amidst them, winces and adopts defensive postures as if she is the object of their ‘merry’ blows. In the opera, and arguably in the video recording of Bausch’s ‘Tanztheater’ too, Judith is Bluebeard’s Jewish Other. In the Apocrypha, Judith is the Jewish widow who saves her city from Nebuchadnezzar’s commander-in-chief, Holofernes, tricking him into believing she is a traitor and when they are alone together decapitating him with a sword. In fin-de-siècle representations, however, she was commonly depicted in the manner of the young, sexually attractive virgin à la Judith of Friedrich Hebbel’s 1840 drama, whose sexual allure was threatening. Even if Balázs did not come into contact with Reinhardt’s ‘Deutsches Theater’ production of Judith, which toured Budapest in 1910 during the period in which the libretto and Bartók’s opera were conceived, he was familiar with the drama from his doctoral work on Hebbel. In a study of the opera, Leafstedt points to the overtones of antiSemitism or Jewish self-hatred evident in the fin-de-siècle representations. 24 Hartwig Suhrbier (ed.), ‘Blaubart – Leitbild und Leidfigur. Einleitende Aufklärungen’, in Blaubarts Geheimnis: Märchen und Erzählungen, Gedichte und Stücke, Frankfurt a.M. 1987, p. 62. 25 Ingeborg Schader, Südwest-Presse, 12 January 1977. 26 Susan Manning, ‘German Rites: A History of Le Sacre du printemps on the German Stage’, Dance Chronicle, 14, 2/3 (1991), 130–1; and ‘Generation and Gender in West German Art Today’, Next Wave Festival Catalogue (1985), 9–10.

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He then suggests that given Balázs’s unsuccessful struggle to form a bond with his own Jewish ancestry, the relation between man and woman in Herzog Blaubarts Burg can on one level be read as a symbolic conflict between a man and his Jewish identity.27 The 1984 David-and-Goliath casting of Judith and Bluebeard functions as a warning against the suppression of the Other, be that suppression based on gender or racial myths. The depiction of Judith’s feminine expressiveness, hysteria and masochism is its counterpart, a warning against internalising the role of the victimised Other. THE SPECTACLE OF SOCIETAL CONDITIONING AND HISTORICAL SPECIFICITY

In the analyses of Bluebeard and Judith offered thus far, I have suggested that Bausch’s characterisations contain critical warnings about destructive compulsive repetitive behaviour rather than fatalistic assertions of its unavoidability. However, the piece does allow us simultaneously to read the spectacle of people mechanically responding to stereotypical expectations and destructive behavioural schemata as an existential condition that cannot be remedied.28 After all, alternatives are rarely posited and certainly never sustained. On the other hand, the use of the ensemble to highlight the learned nature of our behaviour and the references to a particular period and culture through costume and set suggest that the piece also offers a picture of transformable rather than eternal structures. Whereas Balázs’s archetypal protagonists are very much alone in the underground fortress, Bausch surrounds hers with twelve other couples. Often the group echo and extend the behaviour of the protagonists, thereby relating the private realm to the social context. In the armoury chamber section, when the men line up in their velveteen briefs and repeatedly perform a set of macho gestures accompanied by a fixed grin, punctuated by a triumphant ‘Hah!’, and encouraged by the women who massage their shoulders from behind – a sequence humorously set against a section in the opera about Bluebeard’s weapons – we can see the sources which nurture Bluebeard’s aggressive narcissism. However, on occasion the ensemble dancers break the gender opposition established, with the men mimicking Judith’s expressive solo style and the women brutally pulling the men from the walls by the leg or attempting to catch them in sheets. This reversal of role play does not solve the problem of union, the couples remain dysfunctional, but at least the gender role experimentation suggests the behaviours are not fixed to a particular sex. The ensemble also brings a picture of social institutions onto the stage: the schoolyard, as they sit in rows of small chairs, or the dance hall as they waltz en masse. Their congo line of walking dancers holding hands, weaving through the space with heads

27 28

Leafstedt, pp. 95–121. Canton, p. 128. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.

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bowed like a line of children on an outing, connotes socialised meekness and blind conformity. The historical context of their socialisation is also indicated, though the period addressed ranges over more than half a century. The men’s costumes mirror Bluebeard’s while the women, when not in shifts, wear high-necked and long-sleeved dresses which they leave unbuttoned at the back, frequently robing and de-robing during the proceedings. The dresses have a late nineteenth-century feel with a fairytale touch of pseudo-medievalism. The ensemble’s clothes and underwear bring together periods from the Wilhelminian Empire through to the post-war context. In the American press Deborah Jowitt claimed that it was her parent’s generation that Bausch (born in 1940) was angry at.29 Yet the timeframe of this piece stretches back further to the founding of the German Empire – one German critic interpreted the prominence of the waltz as a reference to the mores of ‘Oma’ and ‘Opa’,30 and forward beyond the fifties to Bausch’s own generation. Spatially, too, Bausch’s setting has greater historical specificity than that of Balázs. The opera’s atmospheric Gothic castle interior attempts to create an illusion of timelessness and universal validity in a way typical of many regressive ‘Märchen’, though of course its manifestation in performance will vary with each production. While the nature and historical location of the building represented in Rolf Borzik’s ‘Tanztheater’ set was open to different interpretations, German observers in particular regarded it as architecturally typical of a house from Wilhelminian times, or as one critic put it, of an ‘Altbauzimmer’ from the ‘Gründerzeit’.31 With its white walls, tall recessed windows and shutters the room is reminiscent not only of old mansions but psychiatric institutions and possibly schools. In place of bookcases there are holes in the wall where shelves may have been lodged. The performers use these to anchor themselves in the numerous episodes where they literally climb up the walls in flight and madness. Littered with autumnal dead leaves, the space is far removed from the garden of Eden. While this playground of the nation is barren, perhaps there is hope to be found in the fact that it is derelict. Borzik has left visible construction lines in the walls that are open to numerous readings: cracks in the psyche or a Brechtian defamiliarisation of the set, showing its artifice and potential for reconstruction? Bausch’s Blaubart vividly deals with connections between gender relations, national, and cultural concerns. Blaubart’s patriarchal colonising of Judith and her internalisation of the role of victimised Other relate to issues such as the dynamics of fascism and racism and of the authoritarian 29 Deborah Jowitt, Village Voice, 17 December 1985 as quoted in ‘What the Critics say about Tanztheater’, TDR, 30, 2 (1986), 80. 30 Heinz-Ludwig Schneider, ‘Sektierersex im Kohlenpott’, Stuttgarter Nachrichten, 11 January 1977. 31 Helmut Scheier’, ‘Hilflos prallen Körper aufeinander’, Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 11 January 1977; Norbert Servos, Pina Bausch – Wuppertaler Tanztheater oder Die Kunst, einen Goldfisch zu dressieren, Kallmeyer 1996, p. 49.

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civilising structures which surround the assertion of a nation. The figure of the aggressively masculine collector is central to the exploration of these concerns. His desire to control the environment immobilises bodies and minds, including his own. A relative of the lover, whose desire to know involves the desire to control, the collector also has something in common with the choreographer insofar as s/he engages in the organisation and repetitive display of bodies. Viewed from one perspective Bausch does not seem to offer a way out of the insidious maze of connections she explores – between sadism and masochism, love and death – but shows instead figures compulsively repeating habitual behaviour, unable to move on from the cruel past. Yet the exaggerated display of repetition can generate ambivalent feelings and opposing logics. At times Bausch seems to offer a possibility for change through the act of repetition itself, using it to highlight the performative nature of behaviour, the way we learn and reiterate roles in specific historical contexts. Certainly her application of the technique of repetition to the opera music and its fairytale narrative draws attention to the compulsively repetitive nature of the very artistic media – such as the ‘Märchen’ – by which Western expression and learning continue to be shaped.

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.