Fur die Kinder von Gestern, Heute und Morgen (For the Children of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow) (review)

If there is one theme that permeates the work of Pina Bausch, it is that of children's games. In her previous productions such as Palermo, Palermoor Carnations, these games have typically illuminated a world that is cruel, distant, cold, and alienating. Bausch's newest piece, For the Children of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, created in 2002 with her Wuppertal Dancetheater ensemble, is once again steeped in child's play. So, what is new? Nothing and everything.

Für Die Kinderis not new, because Bausch has repeatedly been telling stories of mankind through metaphors and children's games. But for the first time Bausch openly and warmly acknowledges her reference to children, in her title and on the stage, and the piece develops as a hopeful dedication to humankind and its children. This optimism offers a radical departure from her prior dark and pessimistic criticisms of adults represented as children. She no longer hides behind children, pointing out her criticisms through them; rather, she celebrates the spirit, imaginative freedom, and potential of childhood. The dancer-actors no longer need to represent children representing the adult world; their challenge becomes representing children being children.

The work opens with the typical Bausch playfulness, but the first scene already marks a departure from her usual heavy, angst-ridden messages. A man balances himself on two tables with seemingly impossible gymnastics as another man enters, sits atop a desk, and catches the first, saving him from falling and crashing. In Bausch's work, crashes and falls often serve as favored dancetheater metaphors for the human condition. Her 1991 Palermo, Palermo, for example, opened with a gigantic wall crashing, and many of her pieces, most notably Café Müller(1986), depict bodies painfully falling and rising in order to fall and rise again. The child's play in Für Die Kinder, however, reverses the metaphor; the performers' interaction defines friendship as preventing another from crashing.

The piece unfolds as a succession of similar scenes, with children working together to play games, share experiences, or re-enact situations from adult life. The design elements aided such child's play, featuring elegant, bold, and playful motifs. Costume designer Marion Cito clothed the performers in elegant but loose-fitting contemporary clothing to suggest children in comfortable, playful modes. The set design by Peter Pabst created an environment for playfulness. It consisted of a gigantic white room, with two doors to the left and right, and a large window at the back. The white-out effect transformed entrances and exits into gentle fade-in/fade-outs, as if the performers entered in a dream or illusion. So subtle were these appearances that at more than one point the stage seemed suddenly filled with dancers, leaving the audience wondering how the performers got there.

Throughout, Bausch takes every opportunity to inject humor and irony into the children's re-creations of adult scenarios, introducing paradoxes that reverse grown-up social conventions. Her actor-dancers fade onto the stage holding broom ends in their hands, for example, and the audience laughs. Bausch builds upon this comic moment, using the broom ends as a child would, brushing the hair of her actor-dancers. The stage then fills with performers brushing one another's hair with broom ends. Some dancers even break the fourth wall, leaning over to brush the hair of audience members. Then, when the audience is fully amused and amazed at this paradox, this outside-of-expectation use of an everyday adult artifact, the women dancers begin to use their high-heeled shoes—which a second ago were only shoes—to part their hair. Suddenly, as in a child's world, nothing becomes irrational or impossible. Two men with cigarette lighters light each other's index fingers. Women act as men and vice versa. Actors speak in a...