Nelken – Holland Festival

It’s regarded as one of her most beautiful works. Premiered in 1982, Pina Bausch’ Nelken (carnations) has never been out of repertoire since. After an absence of five years, Bausch’ Tanztheater Wuppertal are back in the Netherlands, performing this timeless classic by their former artistic leader, who passed away in 2009. Nelken is a world in itself. If you’ve seen it, you’ll never forget the famous set design by Bausch’ scenographer Peter Pabst. Thousands of carnations which seem to grow from the stage – and the dancers roaming through them, traversing Bausch’ eternal battlefields of love. Programme

The Wuppertal Tanztheater, founded by legendary dance innovator Pina Bausch (1940-2009), returns to the Holland Festival to stage a reprise of Nelken. The piece is Bausch's evocation of Arcadia, the eternally sunny paradise from Greek mythology where flowers were always in bloom; a dreamland that was lost before the dawn of history.

The ensemble's twenty-three dancers and four stunt men sweep the audience along in a kaleidoscope of different forms of innocence and repression. With its collage of ritual, dance, text (spoken, shouted, sung and gestured), music and visual theatre, Nelken conveys the dismantling of a utopia, in part comical, gentle and disarming, but also morbid and dark.

For Nelken, Bausch's regular scenographer Peter Pabst designed a stage carpeted with thousands of artificial knee-high white and pink carnations, which the dancers have to negotiate in all their movements. In this idyllic sea of flowers, the performers embody their own fantasies, dreams and fears to the music of Franz Schubert, George Gershwin, Franz Lehár, Louis Armstrong, Sophie Tucker, Quincy Jones and Richard Tauber, amongst others. Simultaneously, one can feel a forceful undercurrent of anger, repression and paranoia. Seemingly innocent children's games degenerate into cruel abuse of power. By the end of the performance, the dancers have trampled through thousands of carnations – leaving the audience with as many questions. Nelken dates from1982, when the Berlin Wall was still standing and the world looked very different from now, but the piece still retains its original poetic power and expressive force.

The performers' body control and enthusiasm contrast with the gloomy themes Bausch explores. This demonstrates the timeless qualities of her choreographies – lifting situations from the anchors of time and place to express the universal essence in human nature. In Bausch' universe, dance is a quest for love as much as it is a battlefield.

Pina Bausch rose to world fame as an innovator of contemporary dance. As a choreographer and a teacher she combined a range of different art forms to achieve a raw emotional and physical intensity which have become her trademark. Bausch focused on expressing longing, fantasy and the feeling of alienation in modern life, often using her dancers' personal experiences and input as a starting point. This intimate, almost family-like approach created an exceptionally close group of performers, who have stayed together after her death in 2009. This will be the fifteenth time the Wuppertal Tanztheater feature at the Holland Festival. The last time Nelken was performed at the Holland Festival was in 1995.

Read less

credits

a work of Pina Bausch direction, choreography Pina Bausch set Peter Pabst costumes Marion Cito drama advice Raimund Hoghe collaboration Matthias Burkert, Hans Pop artistic coordinator Lutz Förster rehearsal director Barbara Kaufmann, Dominique Mercy general manager Dirk Hesse cast Regina Advento, Pablo Aran Gimeno, Emma Barrowman, Andrey Berezin, Michael Carter, Çağdaş Ermis, Jonathan Fredrickson, Scott Jennings, Nayoung Kim, Eddie Martinez, Blanca Noguerol Ramírez, Breanna O’Mara, Julie Shanahan, Julie Anne Stanzak, Michael Strecker, Fernando Suels Mendoza, Tsai-Wei Tien, Anna Wehsarg, Paul White, Tsai-Chin Yu music Franz Lehár, George Gershwin, Franz Schubert, Quincy Jones, Sophie Tucker, Louis Armstrong, Richard Tauber performance rights Wuppertal, Verlag der Autoren stunts Hendrik Mohr, Moritz Fischer Bodo Haack, Jürgen Klein light direction Fernando Jacon light assistance Jo Verlei sound design Andreas Eisenschneider dresser Andreas Maier, Silvia Franco, Harald Boll ballet master Ed Kortlandt production Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch

dates

information

related

Workshop dance: Pina Bausch

credits

This performance is made possible by