Pina Bausch's last work was on stage at the BAM opera house. For some reason, it felt odd to see a dead woman's choreography. We see dead dramaturges' plays - Shakespeare, Brecht, Beckett, et al. - but those are written words. Not movement. I feel like movement should be more ephemeral.
Setting that minor oddity aside, Como el muguito en la piedra (Like moss on a stone) is a beautiful piece. After Pina's sudden death, it became a hot commodity and has been touring since. It takes a lot from Chilean tradition and history, which was especially cool for me as a Spanish speaker. Setting aside the music which was either instrumental or with lyrics in Spanish (in fact the title of the piece comes from Violeta Parra's "Volver a los 17"), the piece incorporates actual dialogue which I thought was an interesting choice. Women in jewel tone dresses float across the stage and, often, men in dark suits try to hold them back. Going through the year in AP Spanish Lit, I have reached a unit of works on machismo y feminismo, so this idea is especially relevant. The piece begins with a woman on all fours, yelping like a dog as she is first carried in that position by two men, then lifted like a marionette by a group of male dancers. The interplay between the male and female dancers is fascinating. The opening scenes of both acts are very male dominated - I have already described the first snippet of the piece and the second act opens with a man greeting women as they enter his home for a party not by name but by descriptors like "the blue one" or "the little one" - to a very harmonious moment where the company is lined up diagonally playing with the hair of the person in front of them to even a moment that seems almost female dominated where the men mirror the movement of the women but always seem one step behind.
Technically... well, I wasn't really paying attention to the minutia of the tech performance. I know, readers will be disappointed (assuming that ), but I was really caught up with the dance. One obvious aspect of the design was the stage. The stage was completely white and completely bare, but the deck separated to form these wild cracks in the ground. Inspired by Chile in many ways, it is unclear whether this is seismic activity, the Atacama desert, an Andean glacier, the cracks through which so many fell through during the Pinochet regime (many of the songs used and pieces themselves reference the disappeared), or simply dying earth.
It was truly beautiful.
