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Dance

Precious nonsense: Pina Bausch's Nelken, at Sadler's Wells, reviewed

24 February 2024

9:00 AM

24 February 2024

9:00 AM

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch: Nelken

Sadler’s Wells

Festival of New Choreography

Royal Opera House, in rep until 25 February

Fifteen years after her death and the shrine to Pina Bausch is still thick with incense and adulation. Whether one acknowledges her as a genius or not, there’s no doubt that her influence has been baneful – a cult that has spawned a thousand imitators, all following her absurdist idiom, all mesmerised by subversions of everyday logic, all ultimately trapped in a vacuous dead-end aesthetic in which anything goes, the weirder the better.

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