PINA BAUSCH TANZTHEATER WUPPERTAL.

PINA BAUSCH TANZTHEATER WUPPERTAL ZELLERBACH AUDITORIUM BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA OCTOBER 15-17, 1999 REVIEWED BY JANICE ROSS

German postmodern dance history ran in reverse at the opening of the Cal Performances season when a program by thirty-two-year-old Berlin-based choreographer Sasha Waltz and her company was followed by fifty-nine-year-old Pina Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal. It was splendid to have the opportunity to see the two artists close together. In her Bay Area debut and her only American appearance, Waltz presented the U.S. premiere of her Zweiland, a dark, acidly humorous snapshot of some psychological divisions that persist in unified Germany. Bausch's Nelken (1982), also a Bay Area premiere, showed the model for this genre of dance where discrete images and situations offer visual pleasures far more intense than their narrative logic or development.

Zweiland opened on the image of a pair of not-quite-identical twins formed by two dancers intertwined into a one-headed, four-limbed unit. They struggled to ambulate and eventually separated, exiting the stage arm-in-arm after some seductive interplay with a male passerby. Physical images like this were replete in Zweiland. Some seemed to be clear references to iconic dance moments such as a Les Noces-like girl with braided hair so long it doubled as a tethering rope, and a Cafe Mueller-like pair who took turns slamming each other into a towering upstage wall, or DV8-styled bruising, tumbling interactions among men. Yet rarely did these episodes have a bigger cumulative effect than their parts. Instead one felt, as in Nelken, with its images of wailing, force-fed adults, and men bursting out of too-small women's clothes, a curious jumble of the horrid and the cutesy.

The title Zweiland, literally "two lands," was a clear reference to the divided Germany of the Berlin Wall era, and this reverberates in the Berlin Wall-like set and numbing bureaucratic routines like lines of people who wait endlessly. These blunt metaphors seemed to be esoteric musings on a world too intimidating and indifferent to shape with logic or art. The dancing of Waltz's seven company members was insistently and eloquently physical, but the choreographic logic was not. Too often in Zweiland social points were obvious while the aesthetic rationale stretched thin. In both choreographers' works, the urgency and passion of the dance images were seductive and the visual spectacle captivating, yet meanings remained frustratingly elusive.