Der Fensterputzer. - Brooklyn Academy of Music Opera House, New York, New York - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1998 by Alice Naude

Pina Bausch understood the power of voyeurism before tabloid TV was even invented. Her dance-theater works are presented on an operatic scale, yet their concerns are the individual drama, the private sorrow, and the small cruelties men and women enact upon each other. Der Fensterputzer ("The Window Washer"), which kicked off the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, was a surprisingly buoyant addition to the oeuvre of Wuppertal's iconic master. Her intent is still to provoke and titillate, yet this work is less shocking and decidedly sweeter.

The piece's dramatic conceit is life as glimpsed by a window washer saddled with the monumental task of cleaning the glass facades of Hong Kong's skyline. As he sponges and squeegees, a clear plastic scrim is periodically lowered from the ceiling to the floor of the stage. The barrier it creates between the performers and the audience underscores our position: faces pressed up against the glass, looking in.

Bausch wants us to look in, and look inward. Her beautiful and disturbing images anticipate the horror or delight of recognizing ourselves within her own dark world. As in Palermo, Polermo, a 1989 work set in the Sicilian city, Hong Kong is merely a backdrop. Bausch integrates pieces of its life: the mountain of red bauhinia flowers, the rope bridge, the karaoke, and the crowded people-and-bicycle-filled streets. Yet her well-known theatrical tropes carry the show's style: the vintage dresses, the stiletto heels, the obsessions with cleaning and sweeping. Then there are the absurdist encounters, such as a man who seems to be speaking seductively to a woman while his words are that of a loudspeaker paging a passenger in an airport. Or there are the men who, one after another tumble into and leap out of a woman's bed while she tries to fluff up the pillows and stay out of their way. Both vignettes are comic takes on the harried, anonymous mating rituals of modern life.

In Bausch's work, the repetition and layering of these small scenes often build a mood of loneliness and cruelty. But Der Fensterputzer has a lighter touch. Its selection of music ranging from Chinese popular songs to Dizzy Gillespie is almost lyrical. Its humor is more delightful than cutting. This piece has more actual dancing than any Bausch work in recent memory. And while the choreography may be unvarying, it is danced with a quiet, self-absorbed joy -- especially by the tireless Rainer Behr and the heart-breakingly vulnerable Dominique Mercy.

Bausch's work has been criticized for always looking the same. She herself has mused that she may have been working on the same piece for twenty years. And although Der Fensterputzer sometimes feels fragmented and diffuse, it remains compelling because, like life, there's always the promise that something interesting is about to happen. If Bausch is a one-trick pony, her tricks are our truths -- exaggerated, distorted, dramatized. The voyeuristic pleasure of her work is about catching glimpses of one-self, writ large.