By Michael Crabb Clement Crisp, the eminent, irreverent, and some might argue outrageous late dean of British dance critics, did not believe in half measures. His freely admitted but always well-argued prejudices oscillated from one extreme to the other, even within the frame of a single review. For example, in the matter of a Tanztheater
Pina Bausch’s Bluebeard. While Listening to a Tape Recording of Béla Bartók’s “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle” premiered in 1977, just four years after she became artistic director of Tanztheater Wuppertal. In January, at Opernhaus Wuppertal, the show was restaged for the first time since 1994, the long delay due to difficulties over music rights. The cast
by Kathleen Smith A huge boulder dominates the stage for the entirety of Pina Bausch’s Vollmond (Full Moon), presented by the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in November. Solid and intractable, it is the antithesis of the other essential feature of Vollmond (and several of Bausch’s works), water. Over the course of 150 minutes, with one