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What I'm Watching — Alison Croggon

Alison Croggon September 26

This is the first in a new series of guest blogs where we ask interesting Australians from all fields what they’re watching (or reading or listening to) at the moment that is exciting them. This first post is from poet, critic, novelist and playwright Alison Croggon


My daughter Zoe is a Fine Arts student at the Victorian College of the Arts, which means she has access to their excellent library of DVDs. This week she’s been stuck at home, finishing off her thesis, and she’s brought home some treasures to while away the evenings. We’ve been doing mother/daughter bonding on the couch over Alfred Hitchcock, Marcel Carné and Pina Bausch.

The Bausch video, of her 1978 dance Café Müller, is excerpted in Wim Wenders’s 3D film Pina, and we were curious to see the whole piece. Bausch herself dances in this performance, fragile, almost skeletal in a plain white shift, moving blindly (her eyes are shut) between the tumbled chairs that make up most of the set.

Video of performance is almost always unsatisfying: even at its very best, you can be sure that you’ll be experiencing maybe 70 per cent of what it was like to see it live. At its worst, as I discovered when I watched a video of Ariane Mnouchkine’s Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées), it is a travesty.

Live, Le Dernier Caravansérail was overwhelming, an unforgettable work of theatre. The video, alas, was made by a film director who inexplicably decided to literalise the metaphors of the stage, locating a scene in Moscow, for instance, in an actual street in the snow. Scenes that were delicate, powerful and beautiful in the imaginative world of theatre became banal, even bathetic. I turned it off after 10 minutes, in case it overlaid my memories of the performance.

Not so with Café Müller, which is an intelligently directed video of a staged performance. Even with well-directed videos, I find myself frustratingly at the mercy of the camera: in a theatre, the eye can wander and focus where it likes, following different actions simultaneously. Film demands that we see where the camera looks, and I chafe against that lack of freedom. But even with this limitation, the video is a beautiful evocation of the dance.

Café Müller is a series of interactions between various habitués of a mysteriously abandoned café. The stage is scattered with chairs and tables, which are thrown into disorder as dancers run across the stage, often with their eyes shut, and other dancers scramble wildly to clear their path of obstructions. The score alternates between silence and excerpts from Henry Purcell’s masques/operas The Fairy-Queen and Dido and Aeneas, arias of passion, grief and loss.

Café Müller’s exploration of yearning and love, of human fragility and loneliness, is powerful, even painful. I still find the expressiveness of the human body in dance astonishing: how is it that a single fluid gesture of Bausch’s arms can express, with such accuracy, the inarticulate longing of the soul? An exemplary work, even in two dimensions. Live, it must really be something.




 

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