Two Cigarettes in the Dark. - BAM Opera House - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, March, 1995 by Robert Greskovic

Tanztheater Wuppertal, directed by Pina Bausch, marked its twentieth anniversary in 1993. Among the works revived to celebrate the milestone was Two Cigarettes in the Dark, a two-act piece Bausch created in 1985. Advertising copy termed this Bausch's "lightest," "funniest," "most emotionally satisfying," and "most accessible" work. As someone who has gone from being bewildered to being mesmerized by Bausch's art, I cannot say I found any of these superlatives accurate.

With its cast of six women and five men frequently isolated as solo or duo units, Two Cigarettes plays out rather like a chamber work. The large white room (designed by Peter Pabst) that frames these individuals provides a grand but austere environment. Each of three expansive walls has a picture window: one is filled with aquariums of live fish; a second reveals a terrarium that looks like a lush Henri Rousseau forest; and the third has sand planted with large cacti. The men and women who inhabit this interior, sometimes appearing in the water or in the flora behind the windows, either wear evening dress or are stripped to bathing suits and underwear.

Deep-voiced and robust Mechthild Grossmann cavorts in striking contrast to the wan, reedy-voiced Helena Pikon. The first act of goings-on in this pristine space has moments of theatrical interest, but much of the time Bausch seems to have relinquished her keen directorial control to her performers' own whims. As a put-upon character, Dominique Mercy gives a performance more tedious than comic. Uncommonly handsome Antonio Carallo stares and grins a lot.

For the second half of Cigarettes Bausch has reined in her performers and galvanized their shtick. A good deal of the random and/or coy activity of part one surfaces in part two, but with more resonance, as if the echo of a voice could ring with truer depth than the call itself. The piece de resistance of this act is a dance by four couples, performed sitting down. Tightly grouped together as if in a lifeboat, the couples scrunch around the floor on their behinds, occasionally coming to grief against the walls of the room as they follow all the cataclysmic twists and climaxes of Ravel's La Valse. In the first act Quincella Swyningan inched about similarly while siffing on a fur coat; Urs Michael Kaufmann towed a supine Pikon like a tugboat.

By the end, the windows have been covered by white blinds and nearly everyone has had a cigarette. A stuffed cow and scampering black dog have each enchantingly come and gone. To a recording (by Alberta Hunter) of the song that gives the work its title, almost all the men and women repeatedly sashay downstage in another version of the vamping dance Bausch likes so much. Meanwhile, Grossmann, in topless evening gown and with a cigarette dangling from her lips, numbly stacks bricks (of peat?) and Kaufmann basks off to one side, having sprayed himself white.