Dance byDavid Jays
Pina Bausch floods the stage with water or heaps it with earth. In her dance theatre, a pretty carpet of artificial flowers is patrolled by real, slavering Alsatians while a model hippo bobs through a vast pool. Her work is epic, upsetting and spectacular. Or so we believe, because Bausch has not brought her company to London for 17 years. She is Europe's most celebrated and influential choreographer, and her work has been used as an inspiration, a reference point, a joke. It just hasn't been seen.
Bausch has been to Edinburgh, and played the European festival circuit. It is nonetheless sobering to think that for years the capital has missed out on her. It is as if we had been unable to see the latest Scorsese movie or received Don DeLillo's Underworld via second-hand reports and fuzzy photocopies. Living in our thrumming metropolis can make us provincial.
Bausch founded her company Tanztheater Wuppertal in 1974, and her recurring subject is the agonising negotiation between the sexes. Women swathed in long gowns face tuxedoed tormentors, or throw themselves with cruel repetition at heedless men, crashing remorselessly to the floor. Bausch's imagination darts towards extremity - the dancers often hurl themselves against the walls, as if defying the physical confines of the theatre - and she can gather squadrons of dancers and devise scenarios of imagistic ambition that slender-coffered Britons can only dream of. Next week Londoners can see Viktor (1986), a staging dominated by a huge earth-work.
Even an unseen work has potency. Film, photos and descriptions fill my mind with images of Bausch's work, no less thrilling for being possibly misleading. The anxious influence of art that survives through conjecture infects every medium, a canon of works lost, unfinished or absent. Shakespeareans have long been tantalised by lost plays like Love's Labours Won and Cardenio, while conductors dream of Verdi's projected King Lear. The forthcoming Hitchcock retrospective at the National Film Theatre will lack his second film, The Mountain Eagle, of which no print survives. Stills tease us with strangulation: who knows what seeds the film contains of Hitchcock's smirking perversity?
Bausch has been lured by the rebuilt Sadler's Wells, the perfect venue for such visitations of the unseen. Almost six months after its opening, the building is still in progress: there are warnings about wet paint, the bubbling well is out of order and, deliriously, there are signs that tell you where the signs will eventually be. It was all too appropriate that both the Royal Ballet and Royal Opera were themselves threatened with dissolution while performing there, companies which might have faded into air even as we were watching them.
It was Sadler's Wells that secured William Forsythe's Ballett Frankfurt, perhaps the most significant performances last year, whose anguished, jittery scenarios attracted audiences of dancers, theatre directors, neurotic realists and people with unfeasible glasses. They, too, were flocking to view the unseen, but themselves became a spectacle, as will the Bauschistas. More than at any other theatre, audiences are Sadler's Wells ornament: the glass frontage, open auditorium and airy foyers place us on show as we catwalk down the wide staircases, smoulder at passing buses. The result is an air of flattering speculation, glances snaring glances, intervals bristling with dangerous liaisons. The previously unseen artwork has been twinned with an audience released from darkness: the never-before-seen viewed by the see-me-and-weep.
"Viktor" plays from 27-30 January at Sadler's Wells, London EC1 (0171-863 8000)
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