Pina Bausch's Café Muller, the ghostly digital
A ghostly figure enters the scene. Its halting steps cause its feet to stumble on chairs dispersed in a make-believe café. Pina Bausch’s Café Müller (1978) immediately invites the audience to pay attention to every abrupt movement, broken gesture. The choreography, the setting and the alternation between delicate music and abrupt silence create a surreal atmosphere. The dancers, entranced in an almost convulsive state, craft a tableau of exhaustion. Sleepwalkers execute stiff gestures, eyes closed, arms sprung forward. Bausch is obsessed with detail and repetition.
Pina Bausch herself occupies a corner of the room. Absorbing the other dancers' movements, her pale figure produces slow and lingering poses. This may be why despite the tragic and unstable psyche of the characters, a sense of poetry and lightness exudes from the work. Something of the light white dresses, the frailness of the characters brings about an eery softness. Henry Purcell’s delicate music completes the dancers’ flawless execution and their eerily encounter. However, moments of silence bring about stifling urgency (and awkwardness). Muffled grunts, chairs squealing, accompany the characters' frantic bodies' entangling, and disentangling. The broken gestures of the dancers coupled with the buffering of the video. The glacial aspect of their costumes concurred with a cold blue screen. My eye didn’t wander from one dancer to the other, nor did I look at the audience to gauge their reactions.
There was something unusual, anachronistic about looking at Café Müller from a computer. I could get up, pause any of the 48:19 minutes of the video to check my phone, open another tab, write some notes on a moment or an arm inclination. And then I could go back in time, rewind, unearth exactly what I meant by a tableau of exhaustion or urgency. Looking at it demanded more imagination and concentration, the experience wasn’t whole nor separated from routine life. I did not make an afternoon of it. I simply dedicated one hour of my time to watch a video of a work I had heard about.
The experience reminded me of Hito Steyerl’s essay “In defence of the Poor Image”. According to Steyerl, the poor images, the copies of the original, the bootleg videos or photos are no longer concerning the authentic pieces but their afterlife. They are transformed into travelling objects. In this state, they become polysemic, constantly distorted as they change into emblems of the democratization of information. I attempted to trace the different ways to document Café Müller online. I stumbled upon extracts of Wim Wenders documentary on Bausch’s life’s work, cropped videos on youtube, black and white pictures of the scenes or photographs of dancers inspired by Café Müller. Without the never-ending, fractured and fragmented archive the internet represents, I would have never been able to access, nor experience, the dance.
However, did I experience it? Taken out of context, space. Minimised, squared, slapped on a blue screen. Did I experience Pina Bausch’s Café Müller or Pina Bausch’s Café Müller Premiere, filmed 20 May 1978, Opera House Wuppertal, broadcasted, pixelated and seen the 25th of May 2019? Was there a way for me to experience Café Müller as Café Müller?
As I looked at the blue screen, residual philosophical precepts sprung upon me. Form = content. Methodology = ideology. Creative and non-linear re-transcriptions of works have become somewhat prevalent as curatorial choices. Physically, the making of an exhibition's design, an experimental text, a fictional archive, documentation, or even maps and diagrams. Digitally, podcasts, experimental websites, videos, Instagram pages, take-overs, stories, Spotify Playlist. All of this background work, decisions. Critical methodologies on the documenting and showcasing of artworks crucially determine their nature and dissemination in culture. They call for re-thinking the way we approach digital re-transcriptions of works, the way we consider online archives.