Choreographer: Pina Bausch
Staged for the first time in London 17 years after it premiered, Sweet Mambo by Pina Bausch is a shifting series of scenes and sensations built around a handful of female dancers whose agency and presence are both celebrated and challenged. A hard piece to pin down, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch’s revival, performed at Sadler’s Wells, reunites the original cast with two new dancers for an evening that focuses on not forgetting and the many shades of being a woman.
Sweet Mambo is a piece that is easier to experience than describe; it is lots of thoughts, statements, meanings and narratives that overlap, interact and undercut each other continually, and in constructing it, Bausch reaches not only for dance – arranged as solos, duets and group numbers – but also monologue, film and performance art, wrapping them all together in a broad, repetitive, cyclical and sometimes mesmerically annoying melee of collective and individual experience.
There are certainly big themes about gender dynamics that run through the two halves of this show, running at over 2 hours and 30 minutes. The women are in charge, sidelining the male dancers who also, at times, surround, pursue and violently constrain them. Throughout, the implication is that this attention is almost unwanted, yet as the different moods flow through Sweet Mambo from joy and self-possession, contentedness, fear and surreal silliness, the dynamic with the men also shifts like the weather from seductive to despairing, dismissive to ambiguous indifference.
Peter Pabst’s set and Marion Cito’s costume design are consistently striking, united through billowing fabrics that create deliberately glossy and ethereal set pieces – the wind machine is the most hard-working piece of kit in the show. All of the women have several costume changes, a series of silken evening gowns, a catwalk show of couture-inspired dresses and very high heels, which they frequently remove to run or dance across the stage, tumbling themselves into the gauzy curtains and using the excess fabric as part of the expression of Bausch’s choreography. The overall effect is like a glamorous house party, a surreal bash thrown by the Mitford sisters with each unique personality complementing, clashing and competing with each other.
That scenic approach is sometimes distracting, and over a long night, the wafting of the curtains and the shapes they create can pull focus from the dancing, not least in a striking segment as a huge bubbling mountain of fabric creeps in from the side, dominating the soloist. That also happens when excerpts from Der Blaufuchs, a 1938 movie, are projected behind the performers, and with the repetition of scenes within scenes as well as reprisals of key choreographic sequences throughout, it can be difficult to focus attention in one area when so much is happening simultaneously.
Sweet Mambo is playful and collaborative, bringing out the personalities of the dancers, including originals Julie Anne Stanzak, Nazareth Panadero and Julie Shanahan, whose energy across the night is unfaltering. But it is a piece that could have lasted 30-minutes or even three more hours without adding or taking away anything from its overall effect.
Runs until 21 February 2026
