On October 27 and 28, the Harris Theater filled from front row to the top of the balcony for Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring (1975) and common ground[s], a new work by Germaine Acogny and Malou Airaudo. These historic performances, coproduced by École des Sables, the Pina Bausch Foundation, and Sadler’s Wells, brought Bausch’s iconic piece to Chicago for the first time, danced by a company of three dozen dancers assembled from across the African continent, alongside a new work by Acogny, founder of École des Sables in Senegal, and Airaudo, one of the earliest dancers in Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal.
For two hours each night, the stage is not a surface or a platform—it is an entire landscape, wild and wondrous, a terrain undergoing continuous change, which emits from unseen depths a murmur, a rumble, a hum, a pulse, an earthquake threatening to rupture and reorganize all its rocks and relations.
In common ground[s] the elements of the set are sparse and neatly contained, small piles of stones and sticks and straw spaced evenly about the stage, domestic. Two women appear on stools in long black gowns, sitting statuesquely side by side, with a long staff between them, backs to the audience. A quiet cadence, as of distant thunder, begins the score by Fabrice Bouillon LaForest, and the staff that divides them turns into a line that connects them, an oar to row, an invitation to cross boundaries and find connection and embrace.
They roam the large space, sometimes together, sometimes apart, quietly, calmly, and freely. Events occur: Airaudo rubs a stone on Acogny’s back. They stand near each other, shifting positions as if posing for a series of portraits. They begin to speak, and when they do, they speak about the dead. “Les morts ne sont pas morts,” says Acogny. “The dead are not dead,” says Airaudo, translating. They sing, “Que sera sera.” These two women, now in their 70s, have outlived Bausch, who died in 2009 at the age of 68. However, the relationship portrayed does not have the intimacy of those who have known each other long, but those who have moved through time long enough to have commonly experienced the loves and losses of being alive. At the end, they face each other, seated on the stools, and beat another cadence, feet against the ground, together.
Malou Airaudo (front) and Germaine Acogny in common ground[s] Credit Maarten Vanden Abeele
Intermission is its own act in this program, beginning with the subtle clearing of the objects from common ground[s], then evolving into the coordinated act of preparing the stage for the Rite of Spring: the laying of a huge canvas, billowing across the stage with an accompanying cloud of fine dust. The nailing of its edges to the floor, a whole side at a time—a line of crew in black stomp their way rhythmically along its length before fixing the other side down. When large metal bins of peat are wheeled in and overturned with a resounding crash, the crowd cheers—then together, with rakes and brooms, the crew smooths and spreads the earth into a perfect surface, every footprint erased, every edge square to the walls, temporarily silent and dark.
On the ground, a vivid red cloth, simultaneously a doorway and a grave, upon which lies a girl, undulating softly in a narrow beam of light upon a vast plain of peat. Another beam pierces the dark space, and after it bolts another girl, who comes to a sudden stop, pulling the hem of her dress to her face, revealing bare legs. Another and another enter swift as wind and stop still as stones, in thin nude slips, pale and fragile as tulip bulbs starting to sprout. When the men enter, they enter together, thunderously, to trumpets, brave—and yet afraid.
The world of Bausch’s Rite is perpetually poised on the edge of order and chaos, light and darkness, life and death—from a distance, careful geometric forms collect the bodies into tribes, in which they form tight clusters, like fists or flower buds, or open into a single large circle, within which is a massive vacancy, an earth so much larger than all those within it can encompass. Igor Stravinsky’s score is merciless, with strident dissonances and boneshaking basses that implant within us the inexorable impulse of the earth, the absolute gravity of mortality dragging us down, a death drive, against which we see bodies resist and yield, again and again surrendering to the dust. The earth is precarious, their feet slide in it, their limbs become submerged in it, it flies up and refuses to hold them, even as it threatens to bury them entirely. Every footfall leaves an imprint—every imprint can be erased.
Apart, they are possessed by tooth-rattling tremors and contractions that crumple a body as easily as a dried leaf; together, they huddle into masses, refusing to see or be seen. The women pass the cloth from hand to hand, fascinated and fearful. When one is chosen and clothed in scarlet, the structure erupts—they abandon her, and she abandons herself, to a wilderness that exists within and beyond us, an absolute terror, sublime.
