I have no memory of what I was expecting when the Pina Bausch company first came to London. But 31 years later I can still remember how the audience looked, at the end of the four-hour revelation that was 1980. Dazed, battered and exhilarated, groups were spontaneously forming along the pavement, trying to imitate the Busby Berkeley-style hand jive that was the evening's signature dance motif. Half jubilant, half poignant and very surreal, that jive seemed embody the evening's particular genius, existing in the unnameable spaces between emotion.

1980 was made soon after the death of Bausch's partner and collaborator Rolf Borzik, and there was, and is, an ache of sadness in it. You hear it in the music – faded, popular songs, the exquisitely elegiac Willow Song from Othello – and see it throughout the work's collage of dance, spoken monologue and theatrical vignette. From the beauty-contest lineup in which the cast compete, ridiculously, to charm and impress, to the artlessly exhibitionist scenes of sunbathing and flirtation, or the

brightly pointless exchange of social rituals, 1980 is filled with images of people trying desperately to disguise that they're scared, confused and alone.

Those grownup images of suffering are refracted through even more disturbing memories of childhood: a man hunched alone over his porridge, intoning "One for Papa, one for Mama..." with each obedient spoonful; a woman flicking a lighter on and off, as she sings Happy Birthday to herself. Even when the dancers enact scenes of parental love, the tone is scarily ambivalent: one mother looks as if she might sooner bite her baby than kiss him, another lovingly dresses her son in lipstick and stockings.

The lush, green turf that covers the stage is partly a symbol of false nostalgia, a childhood that sets the pattern for adult pain. But on that grass the dancers are also set free to play. If parts of 1980 are shadowed with yearning, others are alight with anarchy and magic. As challenging as it is, 1980 is also captivatingly entertaining, shot through with delicious comedy, a brilliance of poetic touch.

It's carried here, as always, by the astounding Wuppertal dancers. However bizarre and dysfunctional their stage behaviour, they can unite a theatre into complete unguarded intimacy. The human condition may be unfathomable and unpredictable, but Bausch and her company beguile us into believing that we're all in it together.

• Performing Pina Bausch's 1980 – in her dancers' words

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