The Power Of movement

Pina Bausch’s Cafe Müller and The Rite of Spring were such intricate performances that gave dance an abstract perspective. The way Bausch’s manipulated movement truly gave a 3-dimensional meaning to dance.  She used a contrast of simple movements to make bold statements and bold movements to make simple statements. The dances at first had me quite confused, but at the same time, they were so different in nature that it compelled me to try to decipher them. One thing I found quite interesting was how the dancers made use of their space, in Cafe Müller there were only about 6 people but they used every inch of the stage. They clearly weren’t confined to one space and neither was the audience’s interpretations. I thought that the girl was sleepwalking, and they didn’t want to wake her up which is why a man kept moving the furniture out of her way. She seemed to be escaping reality, living in this dream world with her lover, but she failed because parts of her reality would come back for her for example when the other man kept adjusting her position with her “lover” repeatedly. Or how they kept slamming each other against the walls, and the girl in the back was what I thought represented her internal suffering, and we see the same theme of repetition with her as well. I think Bausch used repetition significantly through her choreography to amplify the point how such a suffering can impact the mental health of someone, how it’s something that doesn’t go away all at once, and you can’t escape it so easily. Now although I thought that, my neighbor thought something completely different which is the effect Bausch’s dance has on people. With  The Rite of Spring, the movements were quite more dramatic and intense, but the use of the stage was completely different. This time the stage seemed smaller, mostly because there were much more people but they amazingly maintained a form, again using every inch of the stage but without bumping into one another but yet having different movements which made me think if I were to trace every person’s footsteps it would look like a huge scribble, which is kind of what the human experience is like. It’s not as simple as a straight line and everyone has a different path. I did have some background information prior to watching  The Rite of Spring,  it speaks to Russian history and how the girl in the red was the chosen one which is why she had to literally dance to death. But similar to Cafe Müller there were definitely more possibilities to more than one interpretation, for example, there was definitely this theme of gender differences for example when the men would dance the music and movements would get more dramatic and loud but when the women would dance it’d be more elegant and soft. That’s what I loved most about these two pieces, there wasn’t one answer or any wrong answers because the dance wasn’t only dependent on the dancers but our own human experience and how we resonate with the dance, whether that be emotions of confusion, sympathy or admiration.