“What happens if the story goes on?”

La Suite by German choreographer Fabien Prioville poses this question after Pina Bausch’s Café Muller and finds several phrases in response. 

Pina’s Café Muller, which was first performed in 1978, shows a series of characters passing through an empty café strewn with chairs. As Anna Kisselgoff writes in The New York Times, Café Muller is “a highly charged theatrical experience performed by mature-looking performers who appear spent by life before they even begin living”. The characters—such as two sleepwalking women (one of them performed by Pina), a waiter, a frenetic, skittish red-haired woman, a catatonic male character—embody a deep sense of anguish and desolation that pervades the performance and its afterglow.

A confrontation with this major choreographic work by Pina and the legacy that she represents, sets itself up for many challenges and Fabien Prioville’s La Suite faces these on several occasions during the performance. 

German choreographer Fabien Prioville’s La Suite at Attakkalari India Biennial 2017 Darshan Manakkal

Based on the original characters from Café Muller, Prioville’s characters take us on sporadic peregrinations of their lives through movement and speech. The audience now hears the story of the café from the perspective of the red-haired woman, who is only a minor character in Pina’s work. While this brings out the many interesting and inventive possibilities to the pasts or futures of the various characters encountered, the characters seem shallow and lack the intensity of their former selves in Café Muller. Fabien Prioville revisits some of the encounters from the original piece but his choreography is distinct. At a conversation with the participants of the Writing on Dance Laboratory, he shared that his process of creating La Suite had not been anything like Pina’s process of making Café Muller. While he said that he did pose questions and give images to the performers, their own personal experiences shaped the narrative and encounters amongst the characters on stage. La Suite stands especially apart from Café Muller in its brave use of text and speech and even elements of humour. Vivien Wood, who plays the role of the red-haired woman, narrates her encounters with three men, seemingly the ones we see on stage. However, the fragmented nature of the stories allows the identities of these characters to continuously shift, and their relationships, to meander, unbound. Just as in Café Muller, it is impossible to determine the exact narrative and circumstances that La Suite relates. One might say that every time the characters meet, there is a tormented struggle between the remembrance and obliteration of their shared histories. 

German choreographer Fabien Prioville’s La Suite at Attakkalari India Biennial 2017 Darshan Manakkal

In some parts, the choreography of La Suite is also disturbed and jagged with disruptions such as a duet between Prioville and Zuzana Zahradnikova, which although framed as such intentionally, comes across as incoherent with the rest of the work. 

Throughout the performance, what continues to enrich the experience is the live music and vocals. Emma Bonnici’s solemn and painful voice, we learned during that conversation with Prioville, stands in for the Pina character because he “wouldn’t have found anyone to stand in for Pina”. “So, I didn’t want to put a person in her role but for me, Pina is more like an aura, a colour, a voice in Café Muller. Sometimes you hear it, sometimes you forget about it”, he said. 

In incorporating a singing voice in his work, Prioville could move away from the original musical score of Café Muller and infuse La Suite with touches of the blues, tango, and experimental music. These sideways creative interventions by the choreographer seem to pervade every other element of the performance, too. Through our conversation with Prioville, we learnt that he approaches scenography, light, sound, and choreography with a sense of design, which renders this work comprehensive but also open to disruption. Prioville’s use of simple plastic chairs, a plastic table, and masking tape—all white and very common and essential—indicate his preference for art pauvre (poor art). He also intentionally doesn’t use wooden chairs—an iconic element of Rolf Borzik’s set design for Café Muller—to avoid being trapped by it. 

German choreographer Fabien Prioville’s La Suite at Attakkalari India Biennial 2017 Darshan Manakkal

This could be said of the minor narratives within the work but also in its relation to Pina’s work. Prioville emphasised that despite being inspired by the afterwards of the characters in Café Muller, one could situate La Suite either before or after Pina’s work. “You don’t have to have seen Pina’s Café Muller to enjoy the work but it could give you the desire to watch it. It could also be watched the other way around. There are enough elements in my work to make a story on their own. The relation of the characters still remains unexplained in this version.” Nevertheless, the striking depth and unforgettable imagery of Pina’s Café Muller doesn’t allow La Suite to be received as anything but an epilogue.