"I had a hard time finding the title," Pina Bausch tells me during an interview about her most recent work, "Nefes." The Turkish for "Breath" is the title of the latest in a series of works which the choreographer, who will turn 65 in July this year, has created in collaboration with theaters around the world, this time with Istanbul's theater festival.
"Breathtaking" might have been an even more appropriate word; In the scene that opens the piece, dancer Fernando Suels, clad only in a bathing towel, comes to the front of the stage and proclaims in Japanese that "The Hammam is very hot," before being beaten by his masseur. Then, peering into the cavernous, sparsely lit stage of the Shinjuku Bunka Center, as a woman dressed in flowing silk starts to brush her hair as though she was beating a carpet to the sullen rhythms of Mercan Dede's music, we need little more to transport us into one of those steamy Turkish bath-houses that feature in so many 19th-century engravings.
But before you've had the chance to catch your breath, Indonesian dancer Ditta Miranda Jasjfi (for it was she), who is by now lying on the floor, is wound up in her sari by Suels, who sweeps her up into a Bollywood-style kiss. Minutes later the beat changes and the sylphlike Indian Dancer Shantala Shivalingappa is performing a solo to the sounds of Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla -- all arms and fingers, like the goddess Kali, tracing millions of butterflies with her infinitely supple digits. As with "Tenchi (Heaven and Earth)," which was researched and set in Saitama and premiered there last year, Bausch's genius is to use a time and a place as a starting point for a mosaic of dance and dramaturgy: mixing speech and mime; combining the language of formalized dances with improvised expression, the intimacy of shared romantic moments and frustrated attempts at communication.