Theatres are haunted houses: on any stage, the ghosts of past performances can rise. At the opera house in Wuppertal, North Rhine-Westphalia, you can imagine the decades-ago premieres of Pina Bausch’s first potent tanztheater shows, which left audiences either enraptured or slamming the exit door. An original cast member may still appear in revivals today, giving a tantalising link to the history of a company now packed with dancers who joined after the German choreographer’s death in 2009. But tonight a full house in Wuppertal is watching Bausch’s classic Kontakthof delivered by a cast of nine, all of whom created it here almost 50 years ago. And they are accompanied by ethereal archive footage of the production from 1978, blown up to a dizzying scale.
It is uncanny and moving to see them enter, in monochrome outfits, their steps mirroring those from the black and white film projected on an enormous gauze screen. It engulfs the performers so the images of their younger selves, at a height of several metres, loom over them. Kontakthof was first staged with 20 dancers and those who have not returned for this iteration – some of them deceased – remain frozen in time in film, accompanying tonight’s cast who have more than doubled in age since.
A scene with two performers in 1978 is recreated with just one, the missing member’s absence keenly felt. At times, the older dancers seem to partner their young selves, bringing shades of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. How does it feel to live in these bodies, half a century on? A sequence combining orgasmic cries from then and now gives one answer. Later, in a round of confessions, the cast assess their personalities. Meryl Tankard tells the audience she wishes she’d had children, she misses her mum and she is shy. Plus: “Resourceful, resilient, reliable.”
She’s not wrong. Kontakthof: Echoes of 78, conceived and directed by Tankard, is a spectacular feat, not just in technical execution but in how the concept deepens the themes of the original. When we meet at the opera house, Tankard – born in Australia in 1955 – lists her initial worries. “The whole fear at the beginning was Pina and how dare I touch her work. But I just felt I was going right back and actually finding the essence of it.” Her voice wavers. “I think she would like it.”
Bausch herself had a notion that the original cast might return to the piece in later age. More than most of her works, Kontakthof has been expressly staged with performers’ ages in mind: in 2000 it was put on with a new cast of over-65s; eight years later it was done with teenagers (documented in the film Dancing Dreams).
Its themes are eternal: cruelty, control, loneliness, seduction and the quest for pleasure, accompanied by airy reverie and surreal humour. “For me, she choreographed vulnerability,” says Tankard, remembering how Bausch would give dancers cues to open up and create autobiographical material. “She hardly ever directed how you did it. If she liked it, that’s exactly what she wanted you to replicate. She always said: ‘A lot of people can’t repeat that spontaneity.’ I realised how important this vulnerability was. It was not so much the action but the fear.”
Tankard joined Bausch’s company in 1978. “It was my third year in the Australian Ballet. Anne Woolliams had taken over and she said to me: ‘You should choreograph.’ I used to design huge cakes, knit complicated jumpers, anything creative … I did feel a bit frustrated. I guess she saw that.” Tankard created a piece, Birds Behind Bars, which won prize money that she spent on travel to Europe. Acquaintances kept recommending that she watch Bausch’s work and she was handed the number of a fellow Australian in the company, Josephine Ann Endicott, who took her to a rehearsal in Wuppertal.
“There were all these intellectual German actors sitting there,” she says, adopting a serious pose. “I walk in wearing a South American skunk coat like Joan Crawford, and red lipstick. Pina gave me this little smile, and said I could join the rehearsal.” That day’s improv was to show six ways of being surprised. “I remember my little sequence. She was going: ‘Schneller! Schneller! Schneller!’ … I stayed the whole day, then she said she would audition me. We did a ballet class, three hours, with Rite of Spring movements. At 11.30pm, she says, ‘OK, I’ll take you.’”
Extricated from her ballet contract, Tankard returned to Wuppertal. It had been five years since Bausch took over at the opera house, breaking new ground with her dance-theatre. “They were still booing,” says Tankard. “Scheiße, get out of town, you know?” Tankard turned up “with two suitcases full of vintage clothes. I had all these 40s dresses – I used to wear cocktail hats, smoke Sobranies.” Rolf Borzik, Bausch’s partner and designer, saw she loved clothes. “He would say, go to the market, buy some dresses, we’ll put them in the show.” She sees Echoes as a posthumous creative collaboration with Borzik who filmed more than 20 tapes of footage that she edited and who died in 1980.
Tankard, who graduated from the Australian Film and Television School in 2010, pursued the project after a movie she had written stalled in development. Borzik’s footage is kept in the vast archives of the Pina Bausch Foundation, overseen by the choreographer’s son, Salomon Bausch. “We always wanted the archive to be something productive, something living,” he says. “I couldn’t imagine a better way to do this than this project.” Echoes makes a fascinating companion piece to Boris Charmatz’s treatment of another 1978 classic, Café Müller, which he presented six times in a row, interspersed with the cast’s personal memories of Bausch, in a phenomenal new production at the Avignon festival in 2024. (Charmatz has since left his post as artistic director of the company.)
Why did Borzik document Kontakthof in so much detail? “He was curious – taking pictures, filming, drawing, it’s part of who he was,” says Salomon Bausch. “For rehearsal purposes, they used videos a lot.” Those original materials are still essential for revivals. Taylor Drury, who joined the company in 2020, says that after veteran company members have passed on precise insights and instructions (“their body knowledge”), today’s casts look at the original performance videos for inspiration.
Watching Echoes was “really trippy” for Drury. “We’d been performing Kontakthof and then to be in the audience in the same theatre with the same set, seeing the original cast members paired with the videos we have referenced as source material … It was overwhelming.” Drury says there is a “plethora of history and knowledge” around Kontakthof. For her generation, the task is “carrying forward the legacy, staying true to it, while also finding ourselves in the work”.
Once they had settled on the idea for Echoes, “we thought we shouldn’t wait too long,” says Salomon Bausch. “People don’t get younger!” Some cast members were still active in professional dance, such as Endicott who has restaged several pieces, including Kontakthof. Lutz Förster, who temporarily ran the company after Bausch’s death, danced on and off in Kontakthof for almost 20 years. Others spent a much shorter time in the company and moved on from dance. Echoes – which has a series of international tour dates – is a significant commitment for its cast who are mostly in their 70s. Tankard hadn’t danced on stage for years. But rehearsals proved a triumph for muscle memory. The dancers discovered a different attitude to the material – Elisabeth Clarke says it feels lighter as she has less to prove now.
Kontakthof has some horrifying sequences, yet started out exploring tenderness. Bausch could take a caress and turn it into aggression, says Tankard. “I was quite shocked by how much physical violence there was in Kontakthof.” At three hours, it was gruelling to perform. “I said to Pina when I left [in 1984], I just can’t give you any more, I’m sorry. Emotionally, physically, everything … She said, ‘You should be grateful that you have been asked to give.’”
Back home in Australia: “I couldn’t get an agent. They said, ‘Oh, you’re not an actor, you’re a dancer … you’re too weird, you don’t fit into a box.’” The shyness she mentions in Echoes was another hindrance. “I think that came from the ballet or from being a Catholic, probably. You’re told to be humble. But nowadays if you don’t get out there and sell yourself, forget it.” She reflects on how dancers today hop across the work of many choreographers: “You get so little time to just find the movement from within, or to be involved emotionally and connected.”
Tankard realised, upon their reunion, how little she had got to know her co-stars first time round. “We’ve had time to really value each other.” They all had their fears but the show is notable for its camaraderie. Someone told her after seeing Echoes: who’d have thought Kontakthof, with all its battling characters, would now be about friendship? Tankard smiles as she reflects on those haunting projections towering over the cast. “Our younger selves, I think, gave us a bit of confidence.”