Pinna Bausch - The Window Washer (Full HD Dance Performance)

1997 Der Fensterputzer’

Staged in Hong Kong

Choreography - Pinna Bausch
Set Design - Peter Pabst

Peter Pabst’s set is dominated by a four metre high mountain of crimson flowers so lush that you want to dive right into it. The dancers do just that, several times, somersaulting joyfully into its plush sides or skiing down its slopes. Ditta Miranda Jasjfi peers out from inside it, like a hibernating creature emerging from its burrow into springtime. Those flowers appear everywhere. They fall from above like a soft rain. They are grabbed in big fistfuls and flung sky-high like exploding firecrackers. They are piled up into grid patterns like a municipal ground plan, so that you almost sense the buildings towering in the space above. One woman flings herself to the ground as if she’s jumped off a skyscraper, and a team of men arrive through the floral streets to carry off the corpse. In separate, flower-demarcated cubbyholes, couples copulate; through the roads people mill and run; and finally the flowers are swept up or blown away. It’s a brief scene, but in it you see cycles of life, love, death and then oblivion.

Der Fensterputzer’s music is every bit as deracinated. Bausch responds to Hong Kong’s traffic by turning to Portuguese Fado, Romanian gypsy laments and folk tunes from Argentina — songs of yearning that immortalise old loves and long-lost sensations. Her movement, too, with its anemone arms that draw in to allow precise hand gestures, seems to be catching at moments as they drift past, and preserving them in small, private rituals. The dancers often touch their own bodies, rearranging bits of themselves as if they were Chinese puzzles with a hidden inside.

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