In 2023, the German choreographer Pina Bausch’s groundbreaking company Tanztheater Wuppertal celebrated its 50th birthday. So too did its current leader, Boris Charmatz, born in the French Alpine town of Chambéry in the year Bausch took over a ballet company in North Rhine-Westphalia and renamed it for her dreamlike dance theatre.
Charmatz is acutely aware that he is still catching up on a half century of Wuppertal history. It is partly why the choreographer is also dancing in his own ambitious reframing of Bausch’s agonising signature work, Café Müller, presented six times by different casts alongside interludes with company members, in a stunning seven-hour event at the Avignon festival, where we meet backstage. (He is Avignon’s artiste complice this year, presenting several of his productions.)
Performing in the haunting Café Müller is “a totally different experience from watching” says Charmatz, who is two years into an eight-year contract as artistic director. He was given insights by original cast member Malou Airaudo and another company veteran, Héléna Pikon, who also dances alongside him in Forever (Immersion dans Café Müller de Pina Bausch) and is the rehearsal director for Bausch’s 1978 classic.
He is joined, too, by Nazareth Panadero who originated her part as one of the troubled figures weaving their way through chairs and tables to the plaintive sound of Purcell. Charmatz, a genial leader with a ready smile, switches from company boss to unabashed fanboy: “It’s mind-blowing for me. I never thought I could be part of this company. I’m dancing with Nazareth who I saw so many times on stage, in films, in pictures. It’s crazy, amazing.”
Charmatz, who trained as a dancer at the Paris Opéra ballet school and the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse, co-founded the association Edna with Dimitri Chamblas before he turned 20. He points out that their early duet, À bras-le-corps, is still touring so he similarly has a body of work stretching back decades. “You could say, ‘hmm, it’s not as old as Café Müller’ – but it’s still from 1993.”
Alongside Tanztheater Wuppertal, Charmatz still runs Terrain, founded in 2019 as a dance project without walls. Its productions have been presented in various outdoor locations whereas Bausch’s stage works were built for the city’s opera house (albeit sometimes using soil and turf on stage). But Charmatz highlights her extraordinary 1989 dance film Die Klage der Kaiserin, shot on location around Wuppertal, with performers close-shaving in roadside puddles, wandering in high heels through the woodland and riding on the Schwebebahn, its suspended railway. So it was not exactly a break with history for members of the Wuppertal ensemble to dance in a nearby church last year in Charmatz’s premiere Liberté Cathédrale, which was also performed at Avignon in a sports field earlier this month.
Listening to Charmatz discuss casting dancers is a little like hearing a football coach explain squad selection. Terrain is a nimble outfit, which assembles freelance performers for each production. Tanztheater Wuppertal has a contracted long-term ensemble, with some staffers who have performed there for decades. But like Charmatz, Bausch also showed an interest in adding novice dancers to the mix, as in her piece Kontakthof which was staged with teenagers and older people. Charmatz’s third presentation in Avignon, a workshop entitled Cercles, invited dozens of amateurs to perform alongside professionals. “Pina showed us the way,” he says.
He likens taking over in Wuppertal to the gardening technique of grafting, forming a union between two parts of different plants. “It’s two histories that meet. A hybrid. I think it feels pretty good that this company now has two heads … Pina is still giving a lot to us. And then there’s me. I think one can nourish the other.”
How did it feel when Charmatz started at the company after a series of brief and, he acknowledges, sometimes “dramatic” leaderships following Bausch’s death in 2009? “It’s a big change for me. You’re on the diving board, and your body tells you don’t jump. Then I’m in the swimming pool, I’m going to learn to swim with everyone else.” It is important for the company, he says, that his contract lasts for so many years. “It’s still traumatised by the loss of Pina, so we need to have time. It’s a very hard road.”
Charmatz never met Bausch and, although he knew it well from recordings, had not seen Café Müller live when he took the reins at the organisation in 2022. The piece had been scheduled for performance soon afterwards. “It was really frightening, to be honest!” He decided to make the “radical choice” of casting younger dancers that time because he himself was new to the company. While watching Pikon direct rehearsals, he saw how many dancers were suited to the somnambulist role once played by Bausch and had the urge to share the intimate process of creation with audiences. The seeds for Forever were sown. In the studio, solos and duets are worked on in isolation and it occurred to Charmatz that, in between the full performances of Café Müller in Forever, they could also be reprised separately. Rehearsals, especially for Tanztheater Wuppertal, are also an opportunity for sharing memories and passing on details. “When you hear Héléna and Nazareth talk, it’s so touching. We learn so much from them.” Forever’s audience is privy to those recollections too.
In 1995, CaféMüller was staged outdoors at the grand Cour d’honneur in Avignon’s Palais des Papes. “It’s the most monumental stage ever,” says Charmatz. But he wanted to try something different. “We take a step to the side, we take a risk. It doesn’t come from a discomfort with the original piece [which will continue to be performed in the company’s repertory in its usual form]. Sometimes it’s good to look from a different angle and rethink. And I’m sure we will learn a lot from doing that … We need to think after this one, how did you feel? Good, bad, awful? Did you find it interesting?”
For Charmatz, Café Müller sums up both the way the company has pressed on and his own part in leading it. “When you enter a cafe, it has an atmosphere already. This piece, it ends, but there’s no real ending. There are so many movements that are looped and, though we don’t use it in Forever, it has a revolving door. It’s a symbol of a turning system. Life goes on. This repetition is in the endless desire between the dancers, bodies that try to find each other.” He pauses, the smile ready as ever. “It’s also a symbol of our desire to never give up.”
• Forever (Immersion dans Café Müller de Pina Bausch) is at La FabricA, Avignon, until 21 July. Chris Wiegand’s trip was provided by Tanztheater Wuppertal.
