Sweet Mambo Review – Pina Bausch’s Hilarious Valentine’s Day Is the Stuff of Dreams | platform

pIna Bausch had a pair of secret weapons in Matthias Burkert and Andreas Eisenschneider, who together searched for music to match her exotic dance theater and make it indelible. In Sweet Mambo, the German choreographer’s 2008 production for Tanztheater Wuppertal, their eclectic set complements the seductive elegance of set designer Peter Pabst’s huge, billowing white curtains and Marion Cito’s sumptuous gowns.

Track after track, a striking line is found in Sami’s vocals, torch song, folk, electronic and ambient music. The mix extends to the unclassifiable party sound of Hazmat Modine’s Bahamut, harmonica and tuba enhancing a late wave of dancer Daphnis Kokkinos’ abandon as his colleagues are twisted and twisted upside down in those curtains.

The quieter opening invites us to listen closely as Naomi Brito, a dancer who gets better by the day, plays the golden singing bowl. Andrei Berezin is duly drawn to the stage, a moth to its flame. Men harassing women, attraction and repulsion, have been Bosch’s lifelong trappings and made for some difficult scenes but here he is gently swatted away against Brito’s exhilarating solo, with long, silky lines and a full, luxurious flow. It encapsulates the soft edges of Sweet Mambo, where the women’s solos often have an inner stillness, even as the dancers drift away in the hammocks.

The collection of mostly macabre episodes includes Julie Shanahan, who walks in on herself and adopts stylized pop-art-style poses for Roy Lichtenstein’s preternatural malevolence. Later, I fell into a vicious cycle of closed and then liberated movement. In a re-enacted sequence, she strives to reach the end of the stage, and is repeatedly brought back to the beginning by men with implacable expressions – either acting sincerely or cruelly. The scenes in which Julie Ann Stanczak is dragged around the stage by her hair evade clear definition: it is done at her request, and as she spins in circles and the storm rages, the sense is that we are all in this mess together and need each other.

But Sweet Mambo is also one of Bausch’s funniest performances: chuckling happily, Nazareth Panadero digs into a plastic bag and seals it for later, then delivers whimsical aphorisms and tall tales about her neighbor’s parrot. “I feel so empty,” she says regretfully, waving a used water cooler bottle. Berezin returns for a sequence that suggests a helpless descent through the air, and this void is at the heart of Pabst’s simple, subtle design as the wind fills and sculpts a translucent sheet, with solos performed inside or next to it.

The billowy backdrop turns into a screen for a 1930s German film featuring polite actors, but really, with dancers like these, who needs the distraction of other performers? After the interval, replaying set routines risks diminishing returns, yet the work has an emphasis on unity – less expansive than some of the choreographer’s other pieces – and results in a startlingly beautiful night. Pina Bausch coinciding with Valentine’s Day is a Sadler’s Wells tradition and these dancers treat the audience like lovers, asking us to never forget them, telling them our problems, and helping them unzip a dress. For newcomers, this can be a coup; Long-term Wuppertal watchers may fall in love again.