FOUNDED by the Phoenicians in 8BC, the Sicilian city of Palermo has since been invaded by Greeks, Romans, Goths, Saracens and Normans. In 1989 another influential visitor arrived: Pina Bausch, with her trailblazing Tanztheater Wuppertal, who created this extraordinary and demanding epic work there.
Palermo Palmero is crammed with oppositions: death and rebirth, destruction and recreation, squalor and glamour, repulsion and desire.
The curtains part to reveal a huge wall. We gaze in silence at it, the weight of expectation growing as heavy as the bricks that make up this imposing edifice. Suddenly, the entire structure collapses thunderously. A woman picks her way through the dust and rubble, and summons two men to her side. “Take my hand! Hug me!” she implores, pushing them fiercely away when they obey. The desperate indignity of her conflicted yearnings reaches a juicy climax when they pelt her with tomatoes.
This is the first of many appearances by the edible. A woman clamps a sheaf of spaghetti beneath one arm; a man’s suit is stuffed with salami. The Italianate flavour suggested by these foods is playfully conjured elsewhere, too, with sharply dressed dancers strutting or perching at café tables. But any romance is undercut. A man chases a barefoot young woman relentlessly — a lover’s game, or is she fleeing in fear? Another empties a bag full of copper coins at a woman’s feet, as if evaluating her and finding her cheap. A procession of funeral mourners scatter random objects until the stage is covered with the detritus, not just of crumbling buildings, but of past lives. It becomes a scene of modern urban decay; those insulting coins, still lying where they were flung down earlier, resemble a pool of vomit.
There’s more: religious iconography, frenzied, repetitive dances to an eclectic multinational score, juxtapositions so surreal it’s as if three different movies are colliding on one set. But ravishing though it all is to look at, it doesn’t consistently grip; you could happily walk away, surfeited, long before its three hours are up.
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And perversely, for a piece so hellbent on sensual assault, it often seems emotionally chilly. Bausch is highly skilled at signalling to us what she intends us to feel; she is less successful in making us actually feel it.
Palermo Palermo can be frustrating, bewildering, and even, with its obsessively reiterated patterns of abstract movement, slightly tedious. But whatever else it is, it’s a stunning sight.
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