In Der Fensterputzer (The Window-Washer), World Cities 2012 moves on to Hong Kong – the beguiling, absurd and sometimes achingly beautiful vision of the city that Bausch choreographed back in 1997. Peter Pabst's set evokes a world of rarefied artifice and dizzying perspective. A mountain of crimson petals dominates a lacquer-black stage: backdrops of neon advertising slip in and out of view, and high above the dancers' teeming activity, the window washer of the title is suspended in a cradle, serenely getting on with his work
Bausch seems fascinated by surfaces here: both the brilliantly coloured surfaces of the city and the elaborate facades of its inhabitants. Some of the material has an obvious east-Asian slant – women sing Chinese songs in high fluting voices, smiling and nodding in perfect unison. But Bausch expands her premise to embrace a world of ritualised gallantries and perfectly achieved appearance. People are constantly offering each other small, surreal services – one man reverently shaves a woman's legs with a cut-throat razor. No one blinks an eye when another man steps graciously across the stage with a small dog under each arm, a diamante necklace and a cigarette holder.
Yet if politeness smooths over the most deviant behaviour, the dancers' exquisite performances offer glimpses of more intimate, troubled emotions. It's a tension between public and private that make parts of Der Fensterputzer as good as anything Bausch has created.
The second half, while no less entertaining, is more predictable and scattershot in its effects – until the sudden change of tone in the penultimate scene. On a darkening stage, the dancers trudge single file over the mountain of petals, while behind them are projected images of devastated landscapes – dead forests, parched earth. Hong Kong is a city of brilliant, elaborate human life; it's also a precarious bauble on a dying planet.
