Masurca Fogo (review)

Masurca Fogo, a piece first developed for the 1998 Lisbon World Exposition in celebration of Pina Bausch's company's twenty-fifth anniversary, opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October of 2001. It can easily be said that Masurca Fogo is perhaps one of the lightest of the choreographer's productions, a break from her angst-ridden vision of human relationships and the human predicament.

Before an enthusiastic and packed audience, the multi-national Wuppertal Dance Company did not disappoint as it performed many close-to-impossible gymnastic and dance movements with an extraordinary sense of fluidity, grace, and authority. The scenes were diverse in range. They included vignettes with music and visual projection on the stage; the latter was a new production element for a Bausch performance and included moving images of cattle, ocean waves and opening flowers. The projections, all of which were moving images, both created and added another layer of movement to the stage and the already moving dancer-actors; sometimes the pace of the moving images countered the dancer-actors and sometimes it did not. In addition to adding more movement to the stage tableau, the images also gave color and texture, creating a surreal atmosphere on the stage.

Bausch focuses on human interactions, and more often than not on the darker side of those relationships. Her stage displays human angst through a series of diverse choreographed dancetheatre tableaux. The scenes often include disputes between men and women, and show how they carry with them a burden that cannot be resolved so easily. The scenes however are all portrayed in a semi-realistic choreography, making them accessible to the audience. Oftentimes, to counter the heaviness of the portrayed human relationships, Bausch creates a moment of humor. The humor, though, does not exclude the general conflict being portrayed; if anything, Bausch uses the conflict in order to create a humorous scene from it. In Masurca Fogo, however, Bausch relaxes and creates a lighter piece about people and their interactions with one another. Neither the angst nor the violence of her previous productions is visible here. Instead, she uses the stage to show and tell the more humane side of people's relationships.

Some of the more innovative and memorable vignettes from the production included a woman with a red bucket balanced on her head, who walked down the aisle and interacted with the audience as she tried to sell additional buckets; a white chicken center stage-left, which pecked at an open watermelon, while a man, dressed in black, entered, shook hands with the audience and talked about Venezuela, replacing "good-bye" for his "hellos"; performers who used the same spray can as both a deodorant and a repellant; a long plastic sheet that was transformed by the actors into a water slide; and, finally, a man dressed in a navy blue suit who pushed a woman in a bubble-filled, old-fashioned white bath-tub, as she gave him dishes, one at a time, to dry (which he did) and to place in a row downstage.

Bausch's company signature often includes taller than average dancer-actors, a constant soundtrack with a diverse selection of pieces, the repetition of phrases both in speech and in movement, the usage of natural elements (such as water or soil), and a completely open stage for the choreography. A simple element may serve as the set, along with a few props—usually tables, chairs, and a cigarette or two. Sometimes, as in Masurca Fogo, the offstage barrier was broken and the dancer-actors interacted briefly with the audience—for instance, they fell over the stage and into the audience's space, or they shook hands with or spoke to audience members.

In Masurca Fogo both the set and the finale captured the aesthetics of the piece. The seaside setting was created by two large artificial rocks on either side of the...