Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal | Ten Chi / 2007

you know what i mean

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal Ten Chi, Royce Hall, UCLA / the performance I saw as on Sunday, November 11, 2007

 

Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater’s “Ten Chi,” begins promisingly enough, the stage featuring a sculptural conception of what appears to be a frozen whale or, at least, a whale frozen in space half in and half out of white ocean. For the first half of the work, Bausch’s dancers alternate with graceful lifts—in which the women performers such as Azusa Seyama, held parallel to the stage, appear to swim along with the whale—and dreamlike movements and verbal skits, including Metchild Grossman’s comic query of the front-row audience members whether or not they snore. The alternating currents of water-and-wave-like movements and the dream-like occurrences—including a shower of seemingly never-ending snow—create what appears to be a significant context for Chi, the metaphysical life forces which are promised as “exercises” in the second act.

       Yet gradually, what might have been interwoven into a moving testament to contrary cultural experiences increasingly comes to be represented in cabaret-like sketches: the usurpation of a corner of woman’s dress as a male’s napkin, a man cavorting in a long evening gown. And differing cultural experiences grow into more like “Saturday Night Live” satires of Japanese stereotypes: a woman teaches others how to properly bow, another gives a rendering of standardized Western images of Japan through a comic extension of the consonants of words such as Mount Fuji, samurai, sushi, etc. Another skit satirizes the Japanese love of the camera.

    As on-line reviewer Paul Ben-Itzak commented on The Dance Insider: “Do we really need another comic riff on the snapshot-crazy Japanese…?” A dancer of Asian heritage attempts to tell the audience they are now free to leave since the performance is over; as the audience remains frozen in place, she repeatedly returns, with Geisha-like graciousness, to convey the seriousness of her statements: “Oh, I so sorry, very sorry. I understand,” she reports, “you think I joking with you, you think when I say you may go now, I am really saying you should stay…”—and in other words to that effect.

     Instead of gradually attempting to unveil the mysteries of the life-forces of things, Bausch’s dancers turn what began as a cultural exchange on its head, ultimately reverting to all things European rather than Asian. Finally, as these skits gasp into increasingly unfunny comic routines and movements (a dancer punching a miked pillow, three men with Eraserhead hair dancing steps similar to those of street-dancing and hip-hop) the entire performance seems to collapse. Almost as if to redeem the utterly disconnected movements of “Chi,” Bausch pulls out the stops, forcing her talented company, one by one, to repeatedly run from every corner of the stage and nearby doors as they dance a maddened frenzy of athletic (and one must admit, often quite joyfully engaging) movements. Perhaps that is enough: certainly the audience at UCLA’s Royce Hall thought it sufficient to give a long and rousing ovation, not one of the usually hurried California audience members dashing from the theater to claim his car!

      What most irritated me about Bausch’s (and her dancer’s work, since her theater is a collaborative affair) was that while the work suggested it might attend to one of the most substantial differences between the East and West, focusing on the Asian idea that each thing in the world has its own energy and life-force, “Ten Chi” seemed to indicate that any “superficial differences” the cultures experience are merely something at which to laugh: what we know, they know, and any seeming incomprehension is unimportant.

 

Los Angeles, November 12, 2007

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2007).