EROTIC ‘KONTAKTHOF’ : PINA BAUSCH CELEBRATES ALIENATION

At the beginning of their stint at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week, Pina Bausch and her brave ensemble of dancing actors offered an Angst orgy involving, among other elements, a watery stage and a potentially friendly hippopotamus.

Friday night the Tanztheater virtuosos of Wuppertal turned to something more conservative--for them. It is called “Kontakthof.”

The title can mean a number of things: Meeting Place or Contact Court seem most apt. The work itself--a three-hour psychodance of thwarted love, loathing, confrontation and humiliation--luxuriates in ambiguity. What else is new?

If one is drawn to the relentlessly bleak and ugly Bausch aesthetic, one cannot help but be fascinated by “Kontakthof.” It conveys the customary messages yet entails more formal choreography--mostly sarcastic distortions of ballroom maneuvers--and less gimmickry than her other works lead one to expect.

In its oppressive, primitive, one-sided, repetitive, faintly expressionistic way, “Kontakthof” creates images that make intriguing comments on the dark nature of human relations. For a while.

The scene is a bare, drab, white-walled dance hall. The room contains one window, a piano, a row of black chairs (an often-favored Bausch prop) and a curtained stage within the stage that eventually accommodates a short nature movie about wild ducks. Don’t ask me to explain the fowl film.

“Kontakthof” represents the Bausch of 1977, the Bausch of the memorably neurotic “Cafe Mueller” that opened the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles. There are no stuffed animals here, no dried leaves on the floor, no wading pools or grass or peat moss. All we get is blood, sweat and smears.

Well, that’s not quite accurate. We also get 27 men and women in baggy suits and cheap cocktail dresses, all trying desperately to be tender to each other. Their attempts--surprise!--are not successful.

At the Kontakthof , a stroke becomes a slap, a kiss becomes a bite, an embrace turns into a small act of torture, a smile freezes into a grimace. For the most part, the participants perform their mutually degrading acts with blank faces and polite demeanor. Hysteria lurks beneath the surface, but seldom breaks through.

Bausch remains a prime exponent of the emotional assault. Her characters, marvelously independent and brashly defined, assault each other in quest of erotic and/or amorous communication. Pretending just to play games, they also assault the intellectual sympathies and endurance capacities of the audience.

It is all very deep, very modern, very serious, very disturbing, very German and, for at least one stubbornly insensitive iconoclast, very tedious.

The tedium isn’t instantaneous. At first one is intrigued by the inventive decadence of it all.

The resident zombies teach each other to bump and grind grotesquely, accompanied by the “Third Man” theme of Anton Karas. They grope for warmth in a hopelessly icy environment. They preen and parade, constantly switch partners, puff out their cheeks, stick out their tongues, bare their teeth, massage their lips.

They mock sensuality, mock themselves, mock each other and mock us.

The inmates of the Kontakthof execute a sleazy tango, again and again and again. They practice posture distortions. They wallow politely in sadomasochism, grovel, mechanically applaud each other’s misery and, taking turns at a microphone, contribute snippets of true-confession babble in a rainbow of languages.

One dancer repeatedly solicits coins from the audience so she can enjoy the not-so-subtle pleasure of riding an automated hobby horse. It is a nice touch the first three times around.

And so it goes. A man and a woman, seated at opposite sides of the stage, try to arouse each other simultaneously with a modest striptease. Another man abuses a blow-up doll. A woman gets increasingly hysterical as she intones a repetitious crescendo on the word Darling, to the embarrassment of her fleeing colleagues.

Later, the same acquiescent woman becomes the recipient of callous caresses from a chorus of seemingly distracted men. Just when the brutalization has peaked, everyone forms an ironic chorus line. Everyone smirks. Everyone struts until the lights go out.

They don’t go out a moment too soon. If nothing else, Pina Bausch has given us a marathon exploration of alienation. Alienation ueber Alles .