Theatres are haunted houses: on any stage, the ghosts of past performances can rise. At the opera house in Wuppertal, North Rhine-Westphalia, you can imagine the decades-ago premieres of Pina Bausch’s first potent tanztheater shows, which left audiences either enraptured or slamming the exit door. An original cast member may still appear in revivals today, giving a tantalising link to the history of a company now packed with dancers who joined after the German choreographer’s death in 2009. But tonight a full house in Wuppertal is watching Bausch’s classic Kontakthof delivered by a cast of nine, all of whom created it here almost 50 years ago. And they are accompanied by ethereal archive footage of the production from 1978, blown up to a dizzying scale.
It is uncanny and moving to see them enter, in monochrome outfits, their steps mirroring those from the black and white film projected on an enormous gauze screen. It engulfs the performers so the images of their younger selves, at a height of several metres, loom over them. Kontakthof was first staged with 20 dancers and those who have not returned for this iteration – some of them deceased – remain frozen in time in film, accompanying tonight’s cast who have more than doubled in age since.
