Nelken – Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London

Choreographer: Pina Bausch

Director: Boris Charmatz

The show opens on a stage filled with carnations (Nelken, in Pina Bausch’s German) upright and pretty and intact. The show closes on a stage carpeted with carnations crushed and broken by the dancers’ perambulations and the deployment of tall scaffold towers and big stacks of cardboard boxes for stunt performers to jump off and land on. As is often the case with Pina Bausch productions, this must be a metaphor, though again, as is often the case, a metaphor for what?

The Tanztheater Wuppertal deal in metaphors. The dancers enter with the men in lounge suits and the women in slinky gowns, then the men go off stage and return in similar gowns, though less slinky, more held on with elastic straps. They disport themselves amongst the flowers and become bunny rabbits and four fierce dogs with their handlers come on stage to represent (possibly) East German border guards, except the dogs are quite young, quite fluffy, and are evidently more interested in joining the men-bunnies in hopping through the flowers than in enforcing draconian border policies. This may be an accident due to the availability of dog-performers, or it may be deliberate – Pina Bausch was quite fond of humorous effects, and men in frocks doing bunny-hops is not generally the stuff of solemn political analysis.

The performance is full of arresting but disparate tableaux. There is a man in a frock signing the lyrics to Gershwin’s The Man I Love, there are lines of dancers parading through the flowers performing signs for Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter in unison, on repeat, for a long time. Stunt performers jump into stacks of boxes that have been laboriously piled up by the dancers. Men slap each other on the cheek and then kiss the sore place. Chairs are arranged, re-arranged, lined up, sat on, waved around. There are a lot of lines of dancers performing set movements in sync. There’s a general theme of destruction and renewal, but whether the broken flowers are an ultimate symbol of destruction or just what happens to a carnation when it gets jumped on is anyone’s guess.

But. There’s always a but. The presentation may not be coherent, but it is engaging. When the performers come front and centre and say why they became dancers it is funny and relatable. The content is heavyweight but never solemn. It is fundamentally good theatre, if not necessarily profound argument. The audience is left, after the best part of an interval-less two hours, with a scattering of sense-impressions that give pause for reflection and reason for optimism, and moments of great beauty mixed up with silliness and Alsatian puppies.

Runs until 22 February 2024