Watching Café Müller and The Rite of Spring was a completely foreign experience for me. I definitely did not know what to expect, but Café Müller was not in the realm of anything I expected. I watched six bodies interacting with each other, sometimes manipulating another figure, slamming another into a wall or helping another navigate without hitting furniture. At the end, I turned to Jason and went, “What just happened?”
I wasn’t able to piece together a significant moment, but maybe that was the point. Maybe the idea was to watch these different people going through their different actions and feeling different themes arise. The first thing that I felt was the repetitiveness and I coupled that with the theme of habit. The man kept positioning the girl and the boy until they eventually began to carry out a routine because of a force of habit. There was this dependence on another person throughout the performance- a dependence on someone being there for a hug, or a dependence on the men moving chairs out of the way.
The Rite of Spring, still foreign, was a very different from watching Café Müller. From the beginning, the dancers captured my attention. Throughout Café Müller, I never knew what to focus on and felt like I was always missing something. With The Rite of Spring, the dancers were so in-sync and so together that I felt like I captured the entire picture. While the background was dark and gloomy, the floor covered with dirt, the entire performance felt alive. Café Müller just struck me as incredibly creepy. I felt more invested in The Rite of Spring, probably because I felt like I understood it, and even audibly gasped when the man chose the girl who would later dance to her death. The Rite of Spring was all about movement and telling a story while Café Müller seemed to be more about placement and letting you come up with connections.
I really enjoyed how you captured your own thoughts within both performances. Although you may not have grasped the complete idea of Cafe Muller as many people did not, you were able to still have a sense of what Pina Bausch is trying to convey within this dance. I completely agree that Cafe Muller had a much creepier vibe to it while The Rite of Spring was completely alive and filled with energy. You do a good job at comparing the two pieces not only in their energy but in the representation of the dances which, although created by the same person, represent completely different things.
I completely agree with your point of how The Rite of Spring was much more narrative and we’re so used to dance being synchronized and having such a variety of movements that we were able to decipher it better. And I agree I was confused as to what was going on, they certainly weren’t pieces meant to come so easily to the viewers but the both of them seemed to have this big theme of repetition which kind of made me force a meaning onto those movements, I just felt that because they were repeating so much there had to be a meaning to it. And this was especially the case with Cafe Muller, I felt I had to give it some meaning because I couldn’t understand it.