Pina Bausch’s “Café Müller” and “Rite of Spring” both utilize the relationship between the human body and its surroundings to convey stories through movement. The pliable nature of the body as a medium is exploited, in that movements are shifted in ways which cause feelings such as tension and panic to arise within the audience members. For example, in “Café Müller” Bausch applies repetition to the motions carried out by the dancers, and in doing so she builds suspense and anxiety. These emotions become amplified as the performance nears its end, when  the man and the woman fling each other against the walls of the set violently. In “Rite of Spring,” Bausch employs more traditional choreography, but only to an extent. The movements of her dancers border on chaotic, but never completely devolve into madness as they do in “Café Müller.” In both performances, the set is integrated into the choreography. In “Rite of Spring,” the stage is covered in a layer of dirt, which covers the dancers and is disturbed by their motions. I believe that it also plays a critical role in imagery, representing rebirth and growth which are both traditional associations with springtime. In “Café Müller,” the set is what appears to be a cafeteria in a mental hospital and is covered with tables and chairs. These props frequently collide with the dancers, and are moved around throughout the performance. In the beginning of the dance, we are introduced to a female character in a long white nightgown as she staggers across the stage. She appears to be sleepwalking, and bumps into the chairs and tables in her way. At this point, a man enters the stage and begins moving the props out of the woman’s way before she collides with them. I believe that these objects might represent obstacles in life, and that the man’s efforts to eliminate them from the woman’s path represents his role in the relationship as a protector who responds to her vulnerability and dependence. Both performances are difficult to interpret, “Café Müller” more so than “Rite of Spring.” However, based upon the push-pull interactions between characters I observe that the performance is based on expectations that we have for our relationships with each other and the changes that they shift through. Throughout the dance, the male and female leads act as lovers shifting from holding tightly to each other, to separation, and finally to violent collision. “Rite of Spring” creates a clear divide between the two genders not only in their costumes, but also in their body language and sexually charged dancing. The women cower as they are approached by the men, and are sometimes chased and throw about the stage. The excited dancing and loud exhales from the dancers inspire a sense of panic, which is further accelerated when the dancers run about frantically and hug each other. A dress is passed down from one girl to another, and it appears that the men are singling out and choosing girls.

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.

Both The Rite of Spring and Cafe Muller are emotionally strenuous. Although I did not completely understand what I was watching sometimes, the intensity and passion of the performances was almost palpable. In Cafe Muller, Pina Bausch incorporated unpredictable movements that were also repetitive. Each dancer had completely different roles, and in some cases, they hardly interacted with each other. The stage was a slew of movements that were vaguely connected. While this piece was largely abstract, the choreography almost seemed to be stringing the audience’s emotions along. For example, the scene where two dancers were hugging and a third dancer kept trying to “fix” their positions. At first, the movements seemed comical and many people in the audience were laughing. However, as the dancers’ movements became more frantic and their breathing became haggard, the mood of the whole auditorium shifted. While Cafe Muller was hard to analyze and made me very confused, in that scene, I could feel the increase in anxiety and tension.

The Rite of Spring was just as, if not more, emotionally exerting as Cafe Muller. This dance piece was a lot more conventional and organized than the earlier performance. Men and women kept traditional roles, where the women had more delicate movements and men were more aggressive. In addition, the choreography maintained a clear connection between the dancers. Even when they were dancing individually, the dancers would have similar motions that would just be timed differently or scattered throughout the stage. The Rite of Spring is also very abstract but it was a lot easier to interpret compared to Cafe Muller. The overall tone of the piece was ominous. Even though I was enraptured by the movements of each dancer, the performance made me feel like I had heartburn. I was anxious and terrified without clearly knowing why.

Pina Bausch’s pieces can only be described as unpredictable. However, it is this unpredictability that keeps the audience on the edge of their seats – both literally and figuratively. I constantly found myself leaning forward so I could take in the whole stage at once. It felt like if I focused on one part of the stage for too long I would miss something on the other side.The two pieces performed were unpredictable and somewhat chaotic, but in very different ways. While Cafe Müller’s set was chaotic, The Rite of Spring‘s actual choreography was unpredictable.

Both pieces used repetition but the effect it had on the audience was different. In Cafe Müller, there were chairs strewn across the stage, and the dancers were moving in an unsure way and there were many sudden changes in the quality of the movement like when they went from walking slowly across the stage to throwing themselves against a wall. The combination of these two aspects of the dance made me feel pretty uneasy. Meanwhile, in The Rite of Spring, there was organized chaos. The actual stage appeared hectic but upon closer examination, it’s clear that the dancers are all doing the same movements, just in different pathways and facings. One can tell that the choreography was specifically set to be that way because none of the dancers bumped into each other – their pathways were laid out and practiced until no one bumped into each other.

These differences affected the overall mood of the pieces, too. After Cafe Müller, I felt confused; I remember thinking to myself, “What just happened?” After The Rite of Spring, I was just as confused but I was also rattled and uncomfortable. The intensity of the choreography and the amount of movement going on at once gave a very eerie vibe. I felt challenged as an audience member because it was difficult to figure out the meaning and intention behind both pieces.

The differences in style of “Café Muller” and “The Rite of Spring” is astonishing, since both were created by the same choreographer, Pina Bausch. In a way, both are representative of her beliefs about dance, from aligning to society’s expectations to altogether destroying its sense of meaning.

“The Rite of Spring”, made 10 years earlier than “Café Muller”, features two distinct sets of groups (women and men) who fit firmly in their gender roles. The women are more graceful and seem almost lightweight and playful, while the men are more heavy-footed. This changes when they join together, forming a large, organized mass of stomping feet and heavy breathing. Then, there’s the woman in the red dress, who seems to fit into neither of these two set groups, and is thus excluded from both and seemingly disgraced. Café Muller, on the other hand, was a ritualistic mess of repetitious patterns combined with seemingly useless and potentially harmful movements, such as slamming on walls and running into chairs. Every character had their own “job” (one man kept trying to move chairs from a running woman, while another kept trying to make a couple kiss or hold each other instead of hugging), even though each job did nothing in the end. The dancing of “Café Muller” seemed to almost symbolize a dream-like insanity, with characters ignoring each other and their own environment, while “The Rite of Spring” showed a strictly organized harmony of characters who shunned those who stepped outside their role. Both dances, however, were capable of inciting strong reactions from their audience: Café Muller purposely wanted its audience to feel confused and helpless, much like the characters in the dance itself, while The Rite of Spring made its audience breathless and taken aback by the power showed by characters.

The importance of movement as the medium definitely came across in both Cafe Muller and The Rite of Spring. The first performance in particular, depicting the sleepwalkers, relied on their movements (more so than the music that accompanied the piece) to present the piece. The dancing in this work was considerably less conventional. Bausch used repetition to stress the interpersonal relationships that were put on display for the audience, although I personally found this piece a bit difficult to understand at first; I was completely uncertain what to make of it. It was not until I read thoroughly through the BAM Bill about the role of obstacles (the tables and chairs) and how these can interfere with the achieving of one’s dreams. The movements in this piece were less traditional, with the inclusion of what looked like flailing body parts, slamming of bodies against walls, and constant running on and off of the stage. The second performance, The Rite of Spring, pulled a much stronger emotional response out of me as a member of the audience. The only props used in this piece were the dirt covering the stage and the red fabric, which later was revealed to be a part of the costume design. The aggressive body movements, such as the stomping, along with the music, which did a fantastic job of exhibiting the extremity of emotions, the sounds of stomping, grunting, and the heavy breathing of the dancers themselves only emphasized the exertion that they were experiencing. I noticed that once the dancer put on the red dress, she was treated as an outsider, a traitor almost. This led me to question exactly why this was and what the red dress was supposed to represent. Part of the artistic expression may include this sense of wonder that the audience is left with, not knowing exactly what Bausch intended to say, but allowing what she does say to fit into our own mental maps.

Cafe Muller and The Rite of Spring were both spectacular performances choreographed by Pina Bausch. Cafe Muller had me at the edge of my seat from the start when Bausch herself entered the stage in the dark where the audience could only hear the sounds of her feet shuffling and chairs moving. As an audience member, this dance challenged me because of the random movements that became repetitive overtime like a routine. For example, when the man in the suit continuously came to “fix” the position that the two dancers were in because they would keep returning to the hugging pose. I also found it interesting how the dancers would just bump into the chairs without maneuvering around them, unless they were moved for them, and how they would rush toward the walls or glass doors without hesitating. However, as these dancers interact with each other, Bausch remained at the same little corner and only went into center stage three times when other dancers were at the sides. While Cafe Muller showed us many abstract interactions between the six dancers and the stage, The Rite of Spring focused on the unity of a large group of female and male dancers, whether they were separated or together. The dancers made use of the entire space that was filled with dirt and as the dance progressed, the music got louder and so did their breathing. Initially separated, the dancers slowly came together as each female dancer meets the center male dancer until one is chosen to change into a red dress. The symbolism of the red and exclusion challenged me as I watched the performance. While The Rite of Spring focused on the choreography, Cafe Muller focused on the sounds that the dancers made as they hit the chairs, walls, and floors.