Reviewed November 11, 2022
Geoff Gibbs Theatre, Perth
ICON, An Extraordinary Event, presented by the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), is a tribute to the legendary German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch, who died in 2009. Performed by second and third year students and LINK Dance Company (WAAPA’s graduate dance company), it features three works: Bausch’s Tannhauser Bacchanal, Meryl Tankard’s Chants de Mariage 2, and Michael Whaites’s Things that Remain.
This is, as the title suggests, an extraordinary event: Tannhauser Bacchanal, created in 1972, has never been seen outside of Germany, and Chants de Mariage, created in 1991, has never been seen in Perth. It is made even more extraordinary because it brings together in WA four dancers who were part of Bausch’s famous company Tanztheater Wuppertal: Marigia Maggipinto and Ophelia Young (here from Europe to direct Bausch’s work), Australian-based Tankard, and Whaites, Artistic Director of LINK.
All three pieces are alive with Bausch’s legacy to contemporary dance, principally more earthy emotionalism, beauty and humour and dancer collaboration.
Tannhauser Bacchanal, created prior to her seminal Rite of Spring, is itself temporal; with dancers who mingle their bodies in an intimate ease that’s quite disarming. So in tune are they with the magnificent tones of Richard Wagner’s Overture und Venusberg - Bacchanale they seem to be part of the music notation itself.
The work opens with 23 inert bodies in pale skintight attire lying across the stage. As if warmed by the chiaroscuro side-lighting, they begin stretching, then rise and slip into Bausch’s graceful idiomatic curves and bends. Before long they are immersed in a structure of propelling and compelling sophistication. It’s short, exquisite and consummately staged by Maggipinto and Young.
Perth-based choreographer Paige Gordon danced in Chants de Mariage and now assists Tankard in the directing of Chants de Mariage 2 using, amazingly, the original costumes. In this wonderfully sardonic piece, the nine women-only Link dancers astonish with their command of voice and dramatic invention, let alone their dancing prowess. It starts with a bride chopped off at the legs, it seems, twirling robotically like a manic doll in a jewellery box. It is hilariously and beautifully performed by Ruby Ballantyne. With its Gothic ambience - stone backdrops and heavy pillars - Tankard wickedly illustrates the conditions marriage can impose, although at first it’s all long-sweeping white dresses, light-hearted humour and confessions of everlasting love or tears over inane incompetences like not knowing how to iron.
Then, like a Hitchcock film, things turn sour. The dancers, all in black, scream and wail and certainly adhere to Bausch’s creed of emotional intensity. One of the most beautifully realised sequences is performed by Hope Keogh, Madison Farrell and Claudia Bolam who, head and shoulders forward, grieving, move their heads in little rhythmic circles trying to breathe in the odour of a loved one irretrievably lost. Tankard’s choreography, music and design is stunning, with a visual beauty that leaves you lost for words.
Whaites’s Things That Remain, with its historic video images, including the devastation of war into which Bausch was born in 1940, pays homage to Bausch but reflects what is essentially the passage of all our lives. Scattered across the stage are discarded A4 sheets of notes. Dancers skate uncaringly across these once precious ideas and fulfill Whaites’s epithetic choreographic premise with pathos and empathy and its effervescence with wit and conviction. It’s a warm, charming, thoughtfully realised tribute to a vital and legendary woman.
ICON is a tribute to WAAPA and the works uphold all that is vibrant, demanding and irresistible in Bausch’s, and now her lieutenants’, iconography.
- RITA CLARKE