Café Müller was originally the title of a four-part evening. In 1978, Pina Bausch invited choreographers Gerhard Bohner, Gigi-Gheorghe Caciuléanu and Hans Pop to work with her ensemble. Following the same cues, three more pieces were created in addition to Pina Bausch’s piece. Only the piece by Pina Bausch is still performed today. Since 1980, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch presented Café Müller as a double bill with The Rite of Spring.
Rolf Borzik designed the original stage set. Peter Pabst adapted the set for a performance in 1987 in Athens (Greece). The stage of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus was smaller than usual. He came up with the idea to use glass walls for the smaller stage. Sometimes, this set design is still used today.
Café Müller mirrors Bausch’s experiences in her family’s café of the same name during post-war Germany period, where she spent many hours watching adults struggling to survive in a devastated society. The café is a space of everyday life, with all its melancholy, feebleness, fears, and the longing to be understood, but it is also a place where there is hope to find love. It is afterhours; the ghosts of the departed customers stumble blindly into walls and onto chairs but fail to find one another. Café Müller is a spectacular piece of dance theatre that tells the story of desire and loneliness.
Pina Bausch wrote dance history. She not only founded the world-famous company in Wuppertal, she shaped a whole genre – dance theatre – and influenced countless other artists, choreographers and directors worldwide who credit her and her work. When she first arrived in Wuppertal in 1973, no-one guessed she would reinvent modern dance there. The young dancer and choreographer (1940-2009) took over the ballet company at the Wuppertaler Bühnen (the combined municipal theatres) and soon renamed it the Tanztheater Wuppertal (‘Wuppertal dance theatre’), because that was her goal: to unite dance and theatre. She made forty-six works, and even decades after their creation they move us, stir us, touch a nerve. Many of the works are still in the company’s repertoire and the company maintains and preserves this heritage with great devotion, care and energy.
Premiere 05/20/1978
Dance Dominique Mercy, Jan Minařík, Malou Airaudo, Meryl Tankard, Pina Bausch, Rolf Borzik