World Cities, London's new month-long season of Pina Bausch travelogue productions – created in response to various locations worldwide from 1986 onwards – opens with the earliest and in many ways the harshest of them all. In contrast to Bausch's later, light- and dance-filled works, Viktor feels steeped in the violence and venality of Rome, the city that inspired its creation.
The show looks, in fact, as though it has been dug out of the city's bowels, the stage flanked by 20ft high walls of mud, so that the 29 dancers appear to be performing in a mass grave, or perhaps an archeological dig. As they make love, trade, quarrel, despair, they look like a doomed species, a tribe of lost souls. All the while, a man with a spade meticulously shovels earth back down on to them, the minutes of the production ticking by in dry spatters of mud.
As always with Bausch, you have to immerse yourself into the slipstream of her imagination, picking up images as they come. Love and death are entwined from the start, as two corpses are joined in marriage, their bodies shoehorned into a limp embrace. When that same couple reappear, he's a pimp, she's his whore, laughing and displaying her breasts at his finger-clicking command.
In 1986, when Viktor was created, Bausch was inclined to see bleakness, aberrancy, loss in human relationships, and during this three-and-a-half hour collage of dance and theatre we watch grieving widows, blank-faced women lifting up their skirts, men who fumble and giggle like schoolboys. No one but Bausch could conjure an image of such surreal cruelty as that of a woman who is forced to take quantities of water into her mouth, and then spurt it out like a living fountain.
It was 1999 when I first saw this piece. Now that Bausch's repertory has become much more familiar, I'm conscious of its excessive length and occasional slackness. And yet the work's dreamy immersive rhythm is central to its logic. It gives us time to get acquainted with the extraordinary personalities of the Wuppertal dancers, and it means that moments of beauty and comedy, when they do occur, are all the more exhilarating.
During the scene where women in ballgowns are swung through the air to the soundtrack of 1930s love songs, the stage floods with joy. As for the hilarious moment in Wednesday night's pet auction scene, when two of the (live) dogs engaged in an unchoreographed shag – that seemed strangely perfect. A little moment of sexual madness. Life caught on the wing.
