Rancorous couples who can’t stand the sight of each other are common among the parading figures of Pina Bausch’s dance theatre. But in one of her earliest creations, from 1975, she retold the story of the devoted Orpheus, expressly forbidden from looking at Eurydice as he leads her out of the underworld.
Not performed in Wuppertal for almost 30 years – and more recently seen in Paris Opera Ballet’s repertoire – it has returned to Bausch’s home town in a production of piercing sadness that will also visit the Gluck festival in Fürth. In her second dance opera set to Gluck’s music (after Iphigenie auf Tauris, 1974), she distilled a balletic language to match the noble simplicity of the composer’s reform operas: lucidly emotional, never needlessly embellished movement where fouettés are as absent as coloratura.
