Water seems to be pooling in a shallow puddle. Bodies — at first you see one or two, then four, then nine — are inert on and under various surfaces. And is that a priest’s confessional at the back of the stage? A shower cubicle as well?
This is the first, disorienting glimpse of Pina Bausch’s 1978 dance “He Takes Her by the Hand and Leads Her Into the Castle, the Others Follow,” and it’s a perfect image of the choreographer’s collision of the real and unreal, the ordinary and the fantastical, the familiar that edges into surreal dream.
Friday, at the Wuppertal Opera House, was the first time in 29 years that audiences could see Bausch’s company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, perform this important early work, which was created when the director Peter Zadek asked her to stage a version of “Macbeth” for a Shakespeare festival. (The lengthy title is said to have come from a stage direction at the end of the sixth scene in Act 1, though it’s not in my edition.)
The piece — restaged here by two original cast members, Josephine Ann Endicott and Hans Dieter Knebel — is important in the company’s history because it was the moment that Bausch, still largely unknown outside Germany, began to ask her dancers questions as a way of generating material. She would use this method until her death in 2009, as she created the epic, fantastical works that became a genre, Tanztheater (or dance theater), and gradually drew a fervent, worldwide following.
But “He Takes Her by the Hand” is also stunningly good, with a raw power and intensity that became muted in Bausch’s later works, which were increasingly dancey and joyful. Ingredients that would become familiar to Tanztheater Wuppertal fans are, astonishingly, fully formed here: dramatic vignettes that accrue to form a strange, coherent world; an eclectic musical mix that includes Chet Atkins, Debussy and Verdi; an exhilarating, repetitive line dance (here a marvelous diagonal procession); childhood rituals; adult fears and dreams; the circularity that haunts human behavior.
In 3 1/2 hours, there is no linear narrative, but there is a great deal of speech — almost all in German, much of it performed by two actors (Maik Solbach and Johanna Wokalek, wonderful) who supplement the seven dancers onstage. Some text is from “Macbeth”; some is a retelling of the story, and some appears to be unrelated.
But nothing is random in Bausch’s works, and it slowly becomes clear (even if you don’t speak German) that this is a meditation on the themes of power, responsibility, culpability and consequences in “Macbeth.” The piece opens with sleeping dancers tossing and twitching wildly, tormented by nightmares, and continues through repeated, varied depictions of female manipulation and helplessness, male power and subjugation. The performers compulsively wash themselves — the shower turns out to be operative, and the puddle useful — sniffing their bodies for odor and changing their clothes, but failing to change their identities. “Take me hence,” the women call plaintively to the men, who move their inert bodies to new places on the stage but can’t remove them from their murderous nightmares.
The superb performers are immured within themselves. Jonathan Fredrickson and Julie Shanahan glower and bicker incessantly on a chaise longue; Breanna O’Mara giggles and apologizes; Oleg Stepanov dances, entranced, to a jukebox tune; Julian Stierle keeps reappearing, a Banquo phantom at windows with one finger in the air, testing the winds of change.
Everyone is Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in “He Takes Her by the Hand.” The lust for power, the destructive act, the pervasive guilt, the inextricable consequences: Here, these all take place in our heads, and in our homes.
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‘He Takes Her by the Hand’ runs through May 26 at the Wuppertal Opera House, Germany; wuppertaler-buehnen.de.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.