Previously, roles were recast one by one, with lengthy rehearsal processes. The transmission was gradual and fluid. This new approach of three different casts was the result of long deliberations and many conversations. “Pina Bausch developed Café Müller for and with six dancers”, says Boris Charmatz. “That’s a very small group, almost like a chamber music ensemble. I desperately want to open up this fantastic piece for the next generation. I would love it if everyone could dance Café Müller in the future. The entire Tanztheater, the audience, perhaps even me at some point. This new version is a first step in this direction.” The two are similar in this respect. Pina Bausch also saw a premiere as a kind of caesura, an in-between stage, before the piece comes into its own from performance to performance. Boris Charmatz envisions Café Müller as an open laboratory of choreographic invention, as a piece of history with a new present and future.

Originally, Café Müller was one of an evening of four short pieces by four different choreographers. Today, only Café Müller is part of our cultural canon. It is one of the central pieces in Pina Bausch’s oeuvre. The year of its creation, 1978, marks the end of a decade of dance historical upheavals and turning points. In 1968, the year of the student revolts, Pina Bausch, who has up to then been a soloist with the Folkwang Ballet in Essen, begins to create her own pieces. The following year she succeeds Kurt Jooss, her former teacher, as the director of the company. In 1973, the classical choreographer John Cranko dies suddenly at the age of 45 and Mary Wigman is laid to rest in Berlin. In the same year, the director of the Wuppertal Opera, Arnold Wüstenhöfer, appoints Pina Bausch as the director of the Wuppertal Ballet, which she immediately renames Tanztheater Wuppertal. It was a time of change, during which it was unclear whether expressionist dance would lose its air of novelty and a new classicism would prevail in Germany. Hindsight affords some clarity. The opposite happened. Pina Bausch develops an expressionist language of pain, a theatre of loneliness and melancholy. She becomes an international icon of postmodern expressionism. Every gesture an ‘Alas!’, every sound a scream. Both Café Müller and the large-scale ensemble piece Kontakthof are created in the same year.

In future, eighteen dancers – three sets of six – will dance through the dark, austere transit space that Rolf Borzik furnished with empty chairs and tables. Pina Bausch’s role of the fairy queen, who dances with her eyes closed and yet, like Shakespeare’s fairy queen Titania, sees everything and watches over everything, will gain three new names in 2023. It will be danced by the Canadian dancer Taylor Drury, by Naomi Brito from Brazil, and by Emma Barrowman, who is also from Canada. Taking turns, they will follow the traces of pain in the space, accompanied by Henry Purcell’s “Remember me”. There is no hierarchy among them, no first, second or third cast. Instead, Boris Charmatz focuses on the choreography of desire, casting the piece like a director who is telling the story of a great unrequited love. Café Müller is a piece about desire. It draws you in from the very first moment, in an almost physical way. Desire dictates the law. For Pina Bausch, it is a law of lamentation and pain while for Boris Charmatz, the law of repetitive, conflictual relationships comes to the fore. Café Müller as a model of endless desire and rebellion. “I dream of an 8-hour version of the piece, in which the audience becomes part of the magical movement loop that the piece begins with.”

Boris Charmatz has experience on his side. His tenure in Wuppertal is the start of a new chapter, in which he, as a choreographer and a dancer, leads a company that embodies the personal style of a great icon. One whose name is not his. At first glance, this is an unusual and hybrid situation. But it is an opportunity to combine different aspects of his creative work: His generative approach to our modern dance heritage, his reflections on the body as situated between history and the present, his belief in the power of collectives and his openness to the art of great colleagues. He has danced in pieces by Isadora Duncan, Merce Cunningham, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Tino Sehgal. “We are used to thinking in opposites: older generations versus younger generations, men against women, rehearsal directors against dancers. What we need is a new energy of solidarity. I don’t believe that a repertoire piece like Café Müller needs to be changed. I didn’t come to Wuppertal to say, this costume needs to go or the chairs need to stand in a different position. It is more subtle than that. I am interested in the question of how these gestures and movements, which come from the past, can be danced by bodies living in the present. It is a modest but important question. Pina Bausch was someone who took risks; she was radical in her own way. Her successor can’t be a semi-risk-taker or semi-radical. Then he wouldn’t be a good successor.”

The text is based on a conversation between Boris Charmatz and Marietta Piekenbrock on the occasion of the restaging of Café Müller. The full interview will be published shortly.