Blooming Beneath the Surface: Nelken Reborn

ImpulsTanz [ENA] To witness Nelken once again—now restaged by Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch in collaboration with Boris Charmatz’s Terrain—is to be reminded why this piece remains a cornerstone of contemporary dance theatre. First premiered in 1982, Nelken ("Carnations") retains its dreamlike power and conceptual precision, a hypnotic montage of beauty, absurdity, and human vulnerability.

The iconic set—an undulating field of thousands of silk carnations—invites both enchantment and disruption. Across this floral stage, 19 dancers enact a poetic and often paradoxical sequence of images and physical states. The performance shifts seamlessly between childlike play, tender intimacy, authoritarian ritual, and sudden comedy. The tension between freedom and control pulses throughout. Bausch’s genius lies in how she choreographs not just bodies but human contradictions. Her vocabulary is raw, elegant, sometimes broken—dancers speak, laugh, carry chairs, fall, stand still. The cast in this 2024 revival—diverse in age and background—brings new energy while honouring the original spirit of emotional clarity and theatrical invention.

What sets Nelken apart is not just its surreal visual language—fields of pink carnations underfoot, a man translating movement into sign language, dancers interrogated as they walk across the stage—but its insistence on weaving together contradictory emotional textures. Moments of tenderness unfold next to those of menace or ridicule, often with the subtlest shifts in gesture or tone. Bausch’s choreography resists linear narrative, instead layering repetition, fragmented dialogue, and disjointed scenes into a kaleidoscopic meditation on control, memory, and desire.

In this revival, Charmatz’s involvement seems less about reinterpretation and more about preservation through presence: the staging pays scrupulous attention to rhythm, silence, and relational tension. What emerges is not nostalgia, but a vital renewal—a reminder of dance theatre’s ability to distill the complexity of human experience with equal parts elegance and strangeness. Decades on, Nelken still speaks, perhaps even more urgently, to the fragility and resilience of the body in an uncertain world.