Written for Culture WarsLast week, I started moisturising. Perhaps that decision – although it wasn’t quite as conscious as the word suggests – stems from vanity, having finally appreciated the importance of skin to overall appearance. However, I can’t shake the nagging suspicion that, somewhere under the surface of conscious awareness, I’ve become – not scared exactly – but sensitive about the process of aging and the onset of time.
Having wept my way through From Where I’m Standing last Saturday on account of fading fathers, on Friday night I found myself moist-eyed and fascinated by The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It was the brevity of peak condition – the fifteen year period when the fated lovers fell into sync, when body and mind matched up – that got to me. The rest is ripening or wilting, developing and dying.
Then, come Saturday evening, within seconds of Kontakthof’s restart, I found a frog in my throat (smaller than that, really: a tadpole, frogspawn even). A woman walks steadily and straightly downstage. Her hair is a glistening auburn; her walk delicately cross-footed and alluring. She cuts a commanding presence. And yet, she is marked mostly by her age, since, earlier that afternoon, the same shapely pink dress had housed a teenage girl: taut, wholesome and brazen. The disappearance of that girl, the shock of her shapeshift, is instantly affecting. In the auditorium, a thousand minds jumped to their inevitable future selves with a pang of sadness and a flash of horror.
Really, though, these versions of Kontakthof – the same choreography is danced by two non-professional casts: one composed of teenagers between fourteen and seventeen, the other of pensioners over sixty-five – are as comforting and affirmative about aging as Benjamin Button can be. The wrinkled version seems combative and optimistic. It counters patronising concerns, defies expectations and testifies to vitality. It is a joyful, mischievous chorus of Anything You Can Do and a hearty reprise of Anyone Can Whistle.
Set in an over-large hall that seems, depending on its inhabitants, a school assembly room and a community centre, Kontakthof often calls to mind a semi-formal social encounter in which the sexes come together. For the teenagers, it seems a polite disco; for the oldies, a tea-dance. For both, it is an opportunity for mischievous flirtation: a chance to parade one’s wares, grab a partner, grab many partners and let go. Vitality is equally present in both, but it raises its head at different points and with different textures.
An early sequence, for example, builds a routine out of an identification parade. The dancers hold out nails and palms for inspection, bare teeth and push back hair. They turn on the spot for profiling, as if undergoing a full-body scan. As performed by the teens, the ritual seems enforced. There is a nonchalance, a touch of impatience. The older cast, by contrast, seem to offer themselves up for scrutiny freely, even eagerly, as if to say, “Look: I’m still standing and I’ve still got all my teeth.”
In another, the cast trot down a corridor of light at the side of the stage wearing plastic masks that contort their faces into hairless wrinkled wrecks, caricatures of old age. That decay, the descent into the doddery, seems just as distant and unrealized. Why act your age when it’s an idea that doesn’t conform to reality? When it’s a fear of the future that is permanently one step ahead, never now, always just around the corner?
However, there are differences – at least, differences appear. The playfulness enacted, interacting both with the environment and with each other, takes on a different quality. In the teenagers, it seems exploratory, as if boundaries are being tested and the world’s working are being discovered. That changes with the introduction of agedness. It seems knowing, as if irony is permitted and tomfoolery has become conscious. Or else, it can seem motiveless to the point of irrationality. The lurking possibility of dementia haunts the more absurdist individual images: a man starting to sing alone, before others join tunelessly in; a woman crouched on a chair tearing at hair; a man repeatedly lighting matches and playing tame fire-eater.
The thing is that you’re never quite sure what you’re projecting and what’s there to be read. Such is the presence of age – when you watch one, you can’t help but imagine or recall the other as comparison – that it can obscure anything else. It’s hard to see the work for the teens, as it were. You are constantly aware of the impossibility of seeing the choreography in any pure form, as initially intended. It is the ever-absent middle ground. The infinite versions that might have been – imperfections each, perhaps, or just permutations, parallels, possibilities – jump inevitably into mind. But, for now, this is all there is; these are all there are and that’s that.
Look beyond the wrinkles and the acne and the work is actually more concerned with gender relations than anything else. However, the effect of playing the same actions with two casts somehow flattens that subject, as if its only purpose is to demonstrate the constancy of behaviour between men and women regardless of age and other conditionals. Both sets preen and puff their chests; they flick, flaunt and fiddle; they flirt and infuriate.
Tonally too, there’s a flatness to Kontakthof. There’s no doubting Pina Bausch’s eye for a stage picture. She has a startling ability to juxtapose an instance of serenity with scrabbling chaos and to carve up space so that the mind can take in two things at once, perhaps even acknowledging the situation’s reality and the fiction floating around inside it. However, until a short segment in which a gaggle of suited men surround a woman to the point that she seems consumed by a crowd, hands picking at her flesh like vultures’ beaks, Kontakthof desperately lacks real cruelty. Everything is a little cozy. What violence exists is given a soft edge, born of flirtation or mischief rather than anger or hatred. Human behavior is treated with a quaint curiosity, not dissimilar to nature documentaries – such as the one on ducks shown within the piece itself. The viewpoint is oddly detached, as if we are asked to observe and chuckle along rather than judge. The result is that, for all its delicacy and the thoughts born of comparison between its dual casts, three hours stretch out rather further than one might expect. Just like life, really, if not skin. No matter how much moisturizer one applies.
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