Café Muller
|
|
Café Muller premiered on May 20th, 1978 at the Opera House Wuppertal. In 1985, the piece was televised featuring its original case. Here is that full length documentation of Café Muller from Talk to Her. Pina was a member of the original cast, being the first women to enter the scene, and remains detached from the unclear, multifaceted relationships that appear in the foreground. She stays mostly in the background, as an ever-present, ominous figure who is constantly "re-noticed" by audiences throughout the piece. The full piece is approximately one hour, is characterized by pedestrian movements, lavish arm gestures, and is heavily influenced by its setting--a cluttered, dim, empty café.
|
The piece was met with controversy, as many of Pina's works were. The erratic nature of the dancers, particularly Pina, her counterpart, and the woman with red curly hair, and heavy use of repetition was met with criticisms. Arlene Croce from the New Yorker went so far as to say, "at every repetition, less is revealed, and the action that looked gratuitous to begin with dissolves into meaningless frenzy" and that "it enshrines the amateur's faith in psychopathy as drama." However, her infusion of dance and theatre was more accessible to non-dance audiences but her work was so intelligently crafted that more experienced audiences still found a significant amount of subtext to investigate. The result of these two elements? Anna Kisselgoff calls it "a highly charged theatrical experience."
Café Muller in Pina
Café Muller was actually the piece that inspired Wim Wenders' beautifully innovative 3D dance documentary on Pina. He saw the piece in 1985 and it not only brought him to tears, but right away he knew he had to film this dance (Dowell). The full interview with NPR on his experience with Café Muller and process with Pina is under "The Choreographer" tab above. Below, however, is a clip of Café Muller as filmed in Pina. It is nicknamed "the pair scene:" the moment where a man and woman's embrace is repeatedly manipulated until the couple falls into a pattern of their own.
Moments
The photos in the gallery below span from photos of the original cast, stills from the televised broadcast above, and professional shots of a more recent performance of Café Muller by Gallica. The link to their pictures, plus photos of a performance of Pina Bausch's Rite of Spring are in the bibliography.
The Sound
|
The score of Café Muller, besides the sounds of scattering chairs and bodies on the floor, is an excerpt from Henry Purcell's opera, Dido and Aeneas, a song titled "When I am Laid to Earth." The opera, which was first performed (probably) in 1689, features Dido, a queen who will not acknowledge her love for the prince, Aeneas. "When I am Laid to Earth," otherwise known as "Dido's Lament", "uses notes that are foreign to the key it is in," according to The Rough Guide to Opera. The singer focuses on the syllable "dar" in "darkness" which, as the author of The Rough Guide to Opera states, produces the effect of "someone feeling their way in the dark step by step" (Boyden et. al, 29). This is a huge "Aha!" moment because this directly parallels not just the opening of the piece where Pina stumbles into a dark room with her eyes shut, but this description mirrors a major motif of the piece! Both Pina and her counterpart feel their way through a cluttered room with their eyes shut -- a feeling that is evoked directly from "Dido's Lament."
An mp3 of "When I am Laid to Earth" is available for download to the left. | ||
