Drop by Drop

by Teresita Pumará

He knew he had won a battle, and easily, without apparent violence.

But violence had been done.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed

I

A couple of months ago I saw Pina Bausch´s Tanztheater Company live for the first time. The company is settled in Wuppertal, an industrial city in West Germany. A hanging train runs over the river. There is an Engels´ house, an Engels´ stone park and a giant Engels statue donated by China´s government. Wuppertal is a dystopian steam punk city that hangs between the past and the future, between the first and the third world. She holds the secret of western civilization.

The company presented two of their most famous pieces: Café Muller and Das Frühlingsopfer. I sat still and alert during the show, waiting for the strong aesthetic emotion that never came. There was no relax and enjoy beauty. The stillness, the alertness, remained. This is violent, I thought, while I clapped the dancers who showed no complaisance, still tense and serious. It would be better not to clap, it would be better to stand up in silence and look at each other and then leave the room and change the rules that order our lives. This is violent.

II

It was violent in a slight way. Not violent in the Lars Von Trier way, which makes you swear: I will never go through this experience again in my life. It was violent like life is violent: drop by drop, never reaching the top, so that it is always bearable. So that you grow into it and go on.

III

Pina Bausch is the big name in the story of Tanztheater. She created a new performance that made Artaud´s theatre of cruelty happen: in a total scene, the elements involved in it (movement, clothes, lights, words, music, respiration) are not submitted to the spoken word or the author´s authority. Each element connects to the others, configuring a performance that does not re-present but creates shadows. The shadows are the way in which what happens on stage echoes through each of the individuals that participate in the ritual, and transforms them.

IV

In Café Muller a woman in a white nightgown, eyes closed, moves blindly against a wall or through a chair mined café. Another woman in the same nightgown finds and loses love. She sometimes dances, and sometimes takes her gown off and sits with her upper body lying on a table, showing her naked back. A third woman dressed in bright colours comes in and goes out, searching desperately for something, anxious to call anyone´s attention. The men take care of the women. They move the chairs for them, so that they do not stumble and fall. They hold them, get them on their feet, organize their movements and soften their falls.

Café Muller brings to the stage the invisible force that fixes each one of us to the wall and compels us to repeat blindly the same movements. This force flows between the dancers and the public, it makes them uncomfortable and lonely. It is, in Walter Benjamin´s terms, a law-preserving violence. The law this violence preserves is often a unwritten one. It tells us what is expected of a woman and what is expected of a man and drives us endlessly around the circle of action and reaction.

V

In his Critique of Violence Benjamin distinguishes between a law-making violence and a law- preserving violence. The critique of this second form of violence can only be achieved by a critique of all legal violence. But Benjamin warns the reader not to fall in a childish anarchism. In other words: there will always be parts to be played, there will always be rules. Life is a game and games are just games. But sometimes those rules give place to joyless bodies: bodies full of fear, societies that seek a foreign group to blame their frustrations on. Then everything and everybody becomes a threat. Is there a non-violent way to end a violent order? Benjamin likes mystic exits, so he suggests a “pure violence”, the divine power, which is cruel but not bloody and does not create law.

VI

In Das Frühlingopfer a group of women and a group of men dance the dance of spring, full of strength and desire. The women seek and refuse a red dress as they seek and refuse their partners. The struggle takes place within each dancer as well as within each group and between each group. There is no easy, binary way to experience their ritual. In the end, a woman chooses and is chosen. She wears the red dress and dances alone. A stripe falls from her shoulder and leaves her left breast naked. At first she feels uncomfortable, she would like to cover it, but desire and music and movement are stronger. She dances with growing intensity, sucking strength and confidence from her naked breast.

This is a pure form of violence. It has nothing of the fixed movements of the men and the women in Café Muller, but it neither denies fear. It acknowledges it, it takes the risk, its dances through and beyond it. It echoes in the individuals who experience it, it never turns against them or seeks to destroy them. It questions the way in which we are organized, as bodies, as societies. It invites us to live beyond fear. Fear produces lonely and joyless people. Life, says the woman who dances, her left breast naked, is a risk, and love is the ultimate danger.