About the work
Pina Bausch's dance piece „Café Müller" was premiered by the Wuppertaler Tanztheater at the Wuppertal Opera House in 1978. It is one of her most iconic works and the only one in which Pina Bausch herself danced regularly — until her death in 2009. The musical basis is arias from Henry Purcell's „Dido and Aeneas" and „The Fairy Queen".
Plot
In a café with white-clothed tables and disordered chairs, six figures move. A woman in a white nightgown (Pina Bausch in the premiere) feels her way through the room as if sleepwalking, with closed eyes. A man (Dominique Mercy at the premiere) panics to remove the chairs from her path so she does not stumble. A second couple — a woman (Malou Airaudo) and a man (Jan Minařík) — lives through a referenceless embrace constantly broken apart by a third man: he lifts the man up, places the woman in his arms, bends the arms into the embracing pose, walks off — the embrace collapses, the woman falls to the floor. They take up the failed ritual again and again, ever faster, ever more desperately. A fifth figure — a nervous little woman with red wig and high heels — bustles through the scene. There is no narrative in the conventional sense, only a spiral of longing, loneliness and the inability to touch.
Cultural significance
Café Müller is, after „Le Sacre du printemps", Pina Bausch's second world success and a prototypical work of Wuppertaler Tanztheater. The fusion of autobiographical fragments of memory (Bausch grew up in her parents' café) with ritualised movement scores was style-forming for German dance theatre. Pedro Almodóvar features the piece centrally in his film „Hable con ella" (Talk to Her, 2002), which broadened the work's international fame.