The Blood Wedding of the Earth

common ground(s)

The Rite of Spring

Cal Performances

Zellerbach Hall

When Stravinsky composed Le sacre de printemps, and Nijinsky first choreographed it, for a notorious Paris premiere served with a heavy helping of riot and hysterics, one would be forgiven for guessing that things African were hanging in the air at the time. After all, Picasso had for years been inspired by the masks of Africa in drawings, sculpture and paintings such as Les demoiselles d’Avignon, already famous, and the cubism that commanded much of the Parisian artworld had deeply African roots.

But who would have guessed it would take until the 2020s, by way of a brilliantly original German choreographer and her adventurous son, in tandem with a Senegalese dance school and an echt-British performance company, to, at last, fully manifest the profound Africanness of one of the anchoring works of European modernism?

Well, sometimes even this world rises to justice. And the inspired synthesis of Stravinsky’s controlled howl, Pina Bausch’s relentless choreography, and the brave and brilliant talents of 38 young dancers from 14 African countries was made fully and bracingly manifest in Berkeley, thanks to Cal Performances, over a recent mid-February weekend.

Pina Bausch originally choreographed the piece on her own company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, in 1975, and anyone who saw Wim Wenders’ seminal film Pina will remember the triumphant work of her dancers. But seeing the same moves on the bodies of African dancers feels so apt, so right, it seems astonishing no one has done it before now.

The visceral, chthonic thrill of the piece is impossible to capture on page or screen without tearing both to pieces and rearranging the fragments into a vital and dazzling chaos that begins in sleep and ends in a death whose colossal significance is the resurrection of the earth itself. At the heart of the piece, we are in a pre-verbal world of ritual, fear, and hope, a dramatic myth whose logic is that of life itself, hinging as it does on death for it to be born at all.

The celebrated Senegalese dancer and teacher Germaine Acogny, who appeared in the accompanying piece common ground(s), is quoted in the program notes as saying, “When I first saw Pina’s Rite of Spring, I felt it was an African rite.” She goes on to say she was impressed by how many of the moves within the dance reminded her of those native to African dance, and the entire aura of the work feels intimately African “because it is something universal.”

The piece is fundamentally a group effort; there are no solos as such until the very end, when the Chosen One (an exquisitely vulnerable Khadija Cisse) dances for long agonizingly suspenseful minutes as she seems literally to dance herself to death before our eyes – it is the one conclusion to Le sacre this viewer has seen in which I believed the dancer might this time actually expire at the end.

Other standouts included a princess who effortlessly led the young women, Shelly Ohene-Nyako, and a king-in-waiting, Bazoumana Kouyaté, who dominated among the men. But the sharp coordination of the dancers as a group in a piece that flirts with chaos in the only way that works artistically – by keeping it under complete control – was a truly strange thrill to behold. Full justice was done to Bausch’s conception, if what I recall from Wenders’ film, which, sadly, was filmed just after Bausch’s death, was a fair expression of it. For me, this performance was the crowning of a work of unique artistic power.

The production, from the Pina Bausch Foundation, the École des Sables, of Senegal (and co-founded by Germaine Acogny), and Sadler’s Wells of London, and the program of which it is a part, was initiated by Foundation chair Salomon Bausch as part of a “transmission project” to keep alive and relevant the work of Pina Bausch after her untimely death in 2009. Its planned premiere in 2020 at the Théâtre National Daniel Serano in Dakar was canceled due to the pandemic, but it refused to be kept down, and was finally premiered two years later and came to the United States recently on a tour that began in New York and ended in Berkeley.

A side note about the production: following Bausch’s original conception, the dance was performed on a layer of peat that had to be spread by a small army of stagehands across a large tarpaulin laid out across the stage during intermission. It came from Canada and had to be carried from city to city throughout the tour. It is an essential part of the dance: by the end of the work, the dancers are partly covered by it in a sign of their marriage to the earth and its perpetual cycle of life and death: it is both life ritual and death ritual, wedding and funeral, a digging of graves and the cradling of a child.

The first half of the program included a piece for two female dancers: common ground(s), performed by two legends, the afore-mentioned Germaine Acogny and a dancer who worked with Bausch at the beginning of the latter’s career, Malou Airaudo. The work was a simple but profound meditation on female friendship and the life of women. The senior dancers make no pretense to virtuosity, but instead emphasize their wisdom, maturity and groundedness in the daily and annual cycles of life and growth. At one point they speak, in French and English, before returning to the wordless eloquence of dance and the rites of daily life. The music was by Fabrice Bouillon LaForest, performed on strings and keyboard but evoking the sounds of Africa and the earth, cicadas, winged creatures, and animals in the night. It was a work of peace only to be broken by the eruption of spring.

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Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist and essayist. His most recent books are the first stories in the “Otherwise” series for middle-grade readers: If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment of Biestia.