'Palermo Palermo' blazes Charleroi

Undoubtedly an anthropological workshop full of surplus human authenticity: this is how one can consider the artistic residency in Palermo of Pina Bausch and her company in the spring of 1989 to give life to 'Das Palermo-Stück', the primordial and provisional title of what would shortly after become an emblem of the screaming Sicilian identity. A project born from the embryonic idea of Pietro Carriglio - at the time artistic director of the Teatro Biondo in Palermo - and translated into three intense weeks spent by the German troupe in the heart of the island's capital in a yearning glimpse of ruthless reality traversed by "biblical wind", "dirt", "refined cold", "infinite movements", as Bausch recalled. A gift never divorced from the historical course of the time - remember the fall of the Berlin Wall a month before the show's debut and the concomitant numerous rebirths of the Sicilian city - reworked and rethought in the peculiar poetics of Bausch's repertoire applied to Palermo's multiple antinonimes.

Thirty-seven years after the creation of this theatrical work, we return to rediscover, with the new generation of artists from the Tanztheater Wuppertal, the density of meaning and significance proposed in the German choreographer's survey among the Sicilians of the time. Today, it is the packed programme of Charleroi Danse that hosts and dusts off the possession, the indolence, the inflexible and fierce morality of a Sicily ritualised in the choreographic sequences imagined by the queen of dance theatre.

In each segment, any didactic pretense of presenting the many Palermo is vigorously repudiated. Thus, amidst the rubble, the predominant life of the city stirs in a dramaturgical development that continues to convince particularly in the shamelessness of the women and the apparent resolute masculinity of the time. Here, the virile sex - and "feeling superior for something", Bausch would say - attempts to adore and give "ciatu" to an idolised, neglected and "annihilated" femininity amidst the sounds of the marranzano and the chirping of cicadas. And it is precisely this rocking - 'l'annacata' in Sicilian - that is one of the many 'leitmotifs' of the piece that is also repeated in the work's closing. In fact, the ensemble accompanies the piece's conclusion by swinging and evoking, on the notes of one of the most traditional funeral marches of the Easter rites on the island, the inescapable religiosity of the devout people intent on playing scrupulously with the feeble balance of the apples placed on their heads: a reminder of the precarious stability and a possible "transformation of devils into angels" would recall Bausch?

Questions are always open and after Palermo, Milan, Bari, Antwerp, Paris, New York, Hanover, London, Kawasaki, Düsseldorf, Weimar, Taipei, Berlin, Ludwigshafen, Lille, Ottawa, Montreal and Montpellier, Bausch's piece is now on fire at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Charleroi, awaiting a hoped-for return to Italia for one of the unforgettable choreographer's landmark creations.

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Charleroi