Poet Lynn Emanuel’s “Blonde Bombshell” meets Café Müller by choreographer Pina Bausch.

By Karen Hildebrand

An elegant light-filled space inside the São Luiz Theater in Lisbon resembles the marble terrace of a palace. A Botticelli style mural fills the wall behind the stage. As I enter, a commemorative plaque catches my eye:

Pina Bausch
Dancou Café Müller
Pela Ultija Vez Em Maio De 2008
No Teatro São Luiz
[trans. Pina Bausch danced Café Muller last time in May 2008 at the São Luiz Theater]

It’s 2017. I’m in Lisbon to attend a literary festival—on vacation from my job in NYC, where I work for Dance Magazine. In a matter of minutes, I will stand on this stage and read my poems—the same stage where the storied choreographer Pina Bausch once performed a dance work I adore. After twenty years of deep engagement with both poetry and dance, it seems I’ve arrived at the literal intersection of my two artistic paths.

Café Müller is a signature dance theater work of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, the troupe Bausch created and directed in Germany from 1973 until her death in 2009. The setting is a dim and abandoned café, cluttered with wooden chairs and toppled cocktail tables. Three dancers move about with their eyes closed, feeling their way, shoulder to wall, and otherwise wandering like ghostly apparitions. The character that Bausch herself portrayed in this work appears in a simple white slip dress, a nightgown really. Another woman also wears white—a loose-fitting housedress that she repeatedly whisks off over her head and tosses to the floor. The dancers bump into chairs and risk stubbing their bare feet. We hear the sound of the chairs scraping the floor as a man in a suit does his best to clear a path ahead of them. A different man in a suit arranges the housedress woman into a romantic embrace with a white-shirted man, as if they are store mannequins. A red-headed woman wearing high heeled pumps and overcoat frets like a clucking hen as she observes the scene. Mysterious and dreamlike, Café Müller is a visual poem.

Recently, as I reviewed Café Müller on video, a Lynn Emanuel poem, “Blonde Bombshell,” sprang to mind. From her collection, The Nerve of It (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), “Blonde Bombshell” is a free verse lyric in 18 lines. The poet uses a plural “we” perspective to place both her speaker and reader in the audience at a movie theater. I could almost hear Emanuel’s poem as a sound track laid over Bausch’s movement. The vivid imagery and surprising associative leaps are akin to the physical risks of Bausch and her fellow performers.

These two works nicely illustrate the way poetry and dance employ similar tools to accomplish their aims. For instance, poetry and dance both use metaphor to convey emotion. Both rely on effective structure and pacing to successfully hold audience attention. Café Müller and “Blonde Bombshell” share other concerns as well. For instance, both works ground us in specific physical settings—in this case, a café and a movie theater. Bausch’s sightless characters read as a metaphor for “love is blind,” while Emanuel’s blonde is so blonde as to be “blinding.” Emanuel’s cinematic language enables me to “picture” her scene just as readily as the action that Bausch places directly before my eyes. But I think the single strongest element that bonds these two artists is the heightened tonal range they share. Each consciously exaggerates reality with an elevated wit and tone of voice.

Emmanuel opens her poem with a dismissal of romantic love that stretches out over nearly four lines: “Love is boring and passe, all that old baggage, / the bloody bric-a-brac, the bad, the gothic, / retrograde, obscurantist hum and drum of it / needs to be swept away.” This sentiment matches well with Bausch’s embracing couple, who go about the motions of romantic love as if sleepwalking. Bausch further amplifies a cynical view of love when a tender moment unexpectedly turns violent. At first, the woman slides like a limp noodle from the arms of the man who has been cradling her. She stands and they repeat the sequence over and over, speeding it up until he’s repeatedly slamming her body to the floor.

Neither artist depicts a  linear story. Instead they share impressions—Bausch, with episodes of physical movement, from quiet gesture to full-out, racing abandon; Emanuel, with flashes of finely tuned description, like “blue fire of the movie screen” and “mote-filled finger of light”:

we sit in the dark of the Roxy beside grandmothers
with their shanks tied up in the tourniquets
of rolled stockings and open ourselves, like earth
to rain, to the blue fire of the movie screen
where love surrenders suddenly to gangsters
and their cuties. There in the narrow,
mote-filled finger of light, is a blonde,
so blonde, so blinding, she is a blizzard, a huge
spook, and lights up like the sun the audience
in its galoshes. She bulges like a deuce coupe.

As I watch Café Muller, I feel physical sensations in my own body: I hunch my shoulders and suck in my breath as I worry the dancers will stub a toe. I curl my own toes in empathetic trepidation. The action of moving furniture out of the way seems perfect symbolism for how a poet (or any artist for that matter) can make way for the subconscious to emerge into their work. How else to explain the startling way Emanuel describes the grandmothers’ legs as “shanks tied up in tourniquets of rolled stockings.” Personally, I might question such an image, but Emanuel kicks that chair out of the way and trusts her intuition. Like the dancers’ trust of their fellow dancers, the poet trusts that her reader will grasp what she means. Bausch and Emanuel are well-matched in their level of risk taking.

Both these works also include a volta, or turn—that defining element of the traditional sonnet that marks a shift in tone or subject. Emanuel’s turn arrives in her final four lines.

When we see her we say good-bye to Kansas.
She is everything spare, cool, and clean,
like a gas station on a dark night and the cold
dependable light of rage coming in on schedule like a bus.

After having described the onscreen blonde as “She is everything spare, cool, and clean,” the poet takes us out of our velvet movie theater seats and into a gas station. And with the final “dependable light of rage,” she reveals the strong emotion that underpins the entire poem. In Café Müller, a similar rage infests the white-shirted man and woman as they fling themselves violently about. The turn comes after this, in a quieter moment when the redhead finds herself alone onstage. She removes her shoes and overcoat to reveal a modest blue dress, and we understand her outerwear is a protective shield. Without it, she now engages in an achingly hesitant solo, where it seems she’s longing to step into the passion of life as participant rather than observer. Even her red hair is revealed as a guise—it’s a wig. I find an aspirational connection between this character and the movie star blonde of Emanuel’s poem who “lights up like the sun the audience in its galoshes.”

No matter what connections one might generally draw between concert dance and poetry (for one, they share a reputation as difficult to comprehend) there remains at least one fundamental difference. Once recorded, a poem becomes an artifact that continues to exist in the world, while live performance is ephemeral. You can read and re-read a poem for pleasure and understanding, but with dance you might get only one look. As a dance critic, I try to leave a written record but my words are not fully adequate to convey the alchemy of the live experience. We have video, yes, but filming becomes another experience entirely by introducing camera angles and zooming in for a close-up. Live dance is different every time it is performed—different casts and locations, state of injuries, weather conditions.

Some of the best advice I’ve heard for appreciating dance, however, holds true for poetry as well. After a show, a dance work will continue to speak to me via images that linger in my mind’s eye. The best poetry accomplishes something similar. Take Emanuel’s gas station on a dark night. That’s a concrete image that I can picture because I’ve seen gas stations at night—in life and in the movies. With dance, the image is visceral. I observe and feel it before I can completely make sense of it. Poetry and dance are like two distinct threads that each seek to connect mind and heart.

Café Müller ends with Bausch’s character fading into the dark. She leaves the café wearing the discarded wig and overcoat and carrying the shoes, a fringe of nightgown glowing below the hem of the coat. Consider that physical image for a minute next to Emanuel’s final three lines: “She is everything spare, cool, and clean, / like a gas station on a dark night and the cold / dependable light of rage coming in on schedule like a bus.” To me, the two uncannily mirror each other as aspects of the same woman.

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Karen Hildebrand is the author of Crossing Pleasure Avenue (Indolent Books). Former editorial director for Dance Magazine, she served as editor in chief of Dance Teacher for a decade. Her recent writing on dance appears in The Brooklyn Rail and Fjord Review and her poetry criticism is published in Lily Poetry Review and LEON Literary Review. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Originally from Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn.