When I first saw Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring (1975) I remember feeling a deep hunger. My belly rumbled, my torso tightened and the muscles sucked into my belly button as my body concaved in on itself. I could feel my arms wanting to desperately reach out and seek things to fill me up, to bring close to me, to suck up and consume. I wanted to devour the world.
I watched it the first year of my Performing Arts undergraduate, where I thought I would major in dance and movement. In the end I didn’t, switching in the final semester to acting, after struggling to feel fully comfortable with my body moving through space for people to watch. I decided I preferred to hide behind words.
Dance has always been a space of thirst, for cravings, for desire – a way to seek out and pursue, a way to rampage through ideas. Moving to be sated. Finishing dance exams growing up I would always be hungry, never being able to eat when nervous. Navigating how to feel in leotards, in front of mirrors, on stage, but also feeling powerful because of the strength needed to move as I did. Running backstage in shows, throwing one costume off and another on as you race to the next stage entrance, snatching snacks between scenes. Furious rituals. Frantic. Bausch’s work captured so many feelings I had about the body and my relationship with space. And being seen.
With all this in mind, it makes sense that Bausch’s work became pieces of film in their own right and indeed Café Müller was performed specifically for film, for German tv, in 1985. Bausch’s work turns the male gaze into something brutal, she gives agency to the female form but in the end, in Rite of Spring, a young woman still dies, dances herself to death, for the ritual of Spring. A time of planning and hoping for abundance, of bounty.
I saw Bausch’s Café Müller also in that first year of university, it is a piece that since 1980 has been performed as a double bill with the Rite of Spring. Bausch influenced film director Pedro Almodovar, in particular Café Müller; her choreography is so character driven and visual it is easy to see how it could inspire cinematic storytelling.
These two Bausch pieces are linked to food. A sense of hunger, desire, visceral-ness that Rite of Spring inspires is one aspect, but more the fact these pieces cannot exist if not for food and drink.
The Rite of Spring (Le sacre du printemps) was originally composed by Igor Stravinsky for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe in 1913, it had a subtitle of ‘Pictures of pagan Russia in two parts’. It was met with chaos and uproar at its physical nature and violent subject. The story is one that marks the beginning of Spring, which to me is the time of sowing seed or planting new crops, and a village ritual and ceremony is performed. This ceremony is part of the farming cycle, a ritual for good harvests. This is a piece of film-theatre about agriculture; it is about the fragility of nature and of our physical dependency on it.
With Café Müller we are then taken to the place of consumption, where agriculture becomes commodity. For me, the lack of food makes the idea of food more pronounced. I like this film – or piece – less, but it has stayed with me more in my everyday life. Every restaurant or bar space that I have worked in, as front of house, I can’t help but be reminded of it. Café Müller - a café without consumables, is it still a café?
Without the rituals of eating, or the rituals of planting, we are left with two pieces exploring the relationship with space, with each other, in places where foods live. Which is why they are both food films for me, what happens when we are just left with the structures of eating, but no food?
Food appears often in dance - ballets and balls, and sugar plum fairies. The Nutcracker is an epic food frolic with absolute banger tunes. It is a sugar filled frenzy, where earthly delights come to life as a young girl gets enticed into this dream-world by a soldier; a luring to be explored another time, but a story that is part of my lexicon that leads to me linking dance with food. There is Gisele (1841), which is celebrating the wine harvest, and Whipped Cream by Alexei Ramatansky (2017) is a ballet about a boy who ate too much at his first communion and got sick. Dance and food have always been intertwined.
Flashdance (1983) is a food film. Like Bausch’s pieces, it features places built around food and eating, this is where the major action happens. Unlike Bausch’s pieces, food is very much consumed and depicted. The eating in this movie is a signifier in both the way it is eaten and what is eaten.
The Rite of Spring and Café Müller are the predecessors to Flashdance (many will disagree with me for polluting masterpieces in dance with a pop culture film that hasn’t entirely aged well (mute the section when the cook, Richie, gets up on stage to do his stand-up), but they would be wrong).
The opening of the film sets it up as seedy. A sea of male faces watching a woman on stage; there is an idea of consumption, the male gaze on the female form – to be eaten, devoured. But as the scene, and the dance, unfolds you realise that the dance routine is complex with detailed and technical staging – it ends with perfectly executed and precise falling of water on Alex Owen, the protagonist. She doesn’t get naked, she doesn’t rest passive for the gaze. We then see the space; it is set in a burger bar. The consumption is physical food and drink, not bodies. We meet the love interest Nick Hurley, in the audience, and learn he is the boss of the steel mill in town and not a regular to this spot, and that Alex is his employee. The next scene is in the kitchen where the cook Richie talks to his girlfriend Jeanie, the waitress, about dreams of being a comedian. Within minutes this dancing-burger-joint scene tells us about the social divide in the city (Pittsburgh) and the gendered negotiations that will unfold, and that it is a place of dreams and hopes.
Throughout the film burgers are eaten one handed, with beer in the other, as people mainly stand. The shuffling and jostling and the idea that this bar is a repeated routine in the customers life is reminiscent of Café Müller. Alex and her fellow dancers’ routines are emotive, visceral contemporary dance-movement pieces worthy of Bausch (and all the greats – Duncan, Graham and Cunningham). Later we see the bodies of dancers at the dance school limbering up, again a feeling of repetition, of bodies in space barely recognising each other as they move through together; there is no food here, it is a space that Alex feels excluded from, it feels dangerous. The strip bar across the road does not serve food, the appetite is for women and it is not a safe place.
The relationship between Alex and Nick unfolds across times and places of eating. He initially introduces himself to her during her lunch break, enforcing his presence on her space – he can, he’s her boss. This is an occurring theme, they argue in front of other employees and negotiate their relationship during lunchtimes. Interrupting a person during their break, when they need to fuel themselves (especially with the backdrop of the physical job Alex has, a welder at a steel mill by day, and a dancer by night) is an act of power. But Alex refuses to be controlled and she sets her boundaries by leaving, by not eating her lunch in his presence. Lunch features a lot, Nick says he grew up so poor he had “hand me down lunches”; when he tries to buy her lunch at work with the line “it’s only lunch,” she responds “I don’t want you to buy me anything.”
But the scene I love the most involves the best outfit of the 80s, and lobster. Dressed in a tuxedo Alex sits across from Nick at a fancy restaurant – white tablecloths, silverware, the whole cliched shebang. It is clear at this point the class divide between the two, and this scene allows us to once again see how Alex takes control of a situation that she could be uncomfortable in. She makes the rules, she has agency of her body, and her life, and her desire. Instead of meeting expectations or following etiquette she eats the lobster with her hands; she plays with it, she licks and sucks and bites. Her feet find her way onto Nick’s lap under the table… And, when interrupted by Nick's ex-wife appearing at the table, Alex takes off her tuxedo jacket to reveal she is only wearing the white tuxedo ‘bib’ and white ‘cuffs’. Alex owns this space.
“How was the lobster?” Nick asks.
“It sucks.” Alex answers.
Excuse the images and video from my laptop that needs a clean, but this is blogging baby, it's rough and ready... and tbh I think the images shine through the smeary screen. The dance pieces are so wild, imagine a pub putting this on in the corner and everyone watching and eating a smash burger - it needs to happen.
And of course, the opening sequence is shot so perfectly. She is a welder and a dancer!
I also want to say a big thank you to Jonathan Nunn who supported me in writing this piece, even though personal issues meant that I was so so late in writing it that I totally missed the deadline for Vittles. But being able to do the research and most importantly, be able to write these thoughts and feelings, is hugely important and helps me develop as a writer. This is unedited and I would love to publish this - or a piece in this vein - for a wider audience, if anyone would like it!
A ton of research into dance and food has been left out - a) I go on research tangents, b) the task was to keep it to dance films.
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