A mangy dog sniffs its way over piles of rubbish and broken stones, until finally it finds its dinner, laid out on a plate, complete with linen tablecloth and cutlery. In Palermo Palermo, Bausch portrays a city in epic decay, but also insatiably greedy for life and food.
This 1989 work begins, shockingly, with the collapse of a giant breeze block wall that leaves the stage covered with five tonnes of rubble. Dancers have to navigate across the stones in bare feet or high-heeled shoes, and throughout the rest of the show, a tide of litter rises around them, from discarded bottles and paper, and from the red gritty dust that drizzles down from above.
It is a place in ruins, yet even so Palermo seems to have got more deeply under Bausch's skin than many other cities in her travelogue series. Her 28 dancers beg and bully each other for love, as they always do, but with an absurdity that often deflects their pain: one woman coats her mouth with sugar before asking to be kissed; another coaxes gifts of salami and meat from her reluctant lover.
Religion and the mafia rule this city, but their power, too, is surreally deflected: Andrey Berezin stalks the stage in preposterous sacred drag – wearing a crown of thorns made from cigarettes and twirling a snake as a fashion accessory; Julie Shanahan, in a mask and evening frock, waits in the shadows with her gun pointed.
Like the Fellini movies that Palermo Palermo obliquely references, there's darkness in this work, but it is the rich, loamy darkness of the imagination. It ends very oddly with the stage crew assembling blossom trees for a scene that never transpires. Yet in that disconcerting image, Bausch seems to trail the hope that out of decay comes the possibility of another spring.
