It started one night in , when I hit an unintended button on my remote control. I was confronted with what looked like an alternative Miss World contest: a line of provocatively solemn women in long silk s gowns were baiting an equally teasingly serious line of men in tuxedos. They all seemed to be playing party games.
Who was winning? I sat transfixed for the next three hours. By the end it was an uneasy tie, I decided, each performer both victor and victim. Whoever had conceived it had a complex, sophisticated vision of human affairs as a messy mosaic of warring impulses.
Holidays from now on were plotted around its schedule. Paris was easiest. I would queue early in the morning outside the Chatelet Theatre for a day ticket when the company made its annual visit. I went to Edinburgh, to Berlin, to Wuppertal itself. I have never tired of wanting to immerse myself in this uniquely rich world, to expose myself to what it flings out at me β beauty, pain, anxiety, laughter.
The occasional hippo lumbering through six inches of water. I wanted more than anything to re-encounter the dancers who are the fibre and tissue of the pieces and who so generously give of themselves β apparently as themselves β that you end up thinking you know them. Beatrice and Jan? Helena and Dominique? I once asked her where the inspiration for her pieces came from.
There was the usual long pause, the signature smiling shrug and nod of the head. So I have to confess feeling something of a fraud, writing this piece. If you have been exhilarated, stirred and moved by what her dancers do, then you too are an expert. You get it. And she has changed for ever my sense of what can be achieved inside a theatre.
