Pina Bausch was a master of making an audience uncomfortable. In Sweet Mambo, which has finally received its London debut 18 years after it was created, a woman (Julie Stanzak) in an elegant gown is walked around the stage by a man, her long hair the leash. At another moment a woman (Julie Shanahan) is repeatedly dragged backwards by two men as she tries to run to a friend, her screams piercing through the theatre. Later the same men chase her with a table, causing her to fall down with exhaustion again and again. More disturbing scenes involve a man repeatedly pulling up a female dancer’s (Naomi Britto) skirt, exposing her underwear, as she tries to ignore him. It’s a harrowing watch at times, but that’s also the point.
There is no story to Sweet Mambo. Bausch’s penultimate work, performed by Tanztheater Wuppertal, is staged as a series of poignant vignettes – set to a vivacious jazz, electronica and folk soundtrack – that all speak to the beautiful, painful and also funny experience of being human.
Some of Bausch’s longest Tanztheater Wuppertal collaborators worked with her on the creation of Sweet Mambo in 2008, with many of them returning to perform the piece in 2026, all to the benefit of the performance which speaks back to the ageism of the dance world. All but one of the remaining women are in their fifties and sixties. One of them is the 70-year-old Nazareth Panadero (‘don’t forget,’ she says, when proudly telling us her name), a formidable woman with an exuberant Spanish accent. Panadero provides many of the gags that cut through the melancholy. She struts on stage in a voluminous bright pink dress and a blonde wig, cackling into a microphone. She laughs into a plastic bag and saves it for later. ‘Hold on, I have something in the oven’ says Nazareth. Other charming moments involve Stanzak asking a member of the audience to help her unzip her dress, and plastic cups being bowled over with coconuts.
Sweet Mambo benefits from new blood too. Naomi Brito, the youngest of the dancers, is mesmerising. Brito opens the show by softly playing a singing bowl, before flawlessly executing a blissful solo in which she is so fluid she appears to have entered a flow state. Later she dances a duet with Andrey Berezin (all of the three men are dressed in black shirts and black trousers) but it’s more of a solo; as he buzzes around her like an annoying fly I can’t take my eyes off Brito in her slinky red dress.
All of this beauty is bolstered by Peter Babst’s sublime set, made simply of long white curtains. The billowing drapes are as transfixing as the dancers, and so are the women’s hyper-feminine chiffon, silk and taffeta skirts, designed by Marion Cito. More than just a decoration, dancers move silhouetted inside in a blooming cocoon of gauze, while at other moments they are wrapped up and hung upside down in the material.
It might all sound mad, and in true Pina Bausch fashion it is. Sweet Mambo won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. Bausch brings a Lynchian weirdness to the production – which is why she is so adept at making you squirm in your seat, particularly when creepy men are repeatedly pestering, touching and tormenting the female dancers (a key theme in Bausch’s work). Often, it’s best not to question why the dancers are crawling around on the floor in animal masks, rubbing their faces on each other’s backs, or chucking buckets of water over themselves, but instead examine what it makes you feel. Which is a lot.
We are dragged through ecstasy, sentimentality, grief, jealousy and desolation. The audience is utterly gripped. When a dancer runs off stage people hover above their seats, craning their necks to get a peek into the wings, just in case they are missing something. Sweet Mambo is a piece that feels distinctly human, seesawing between the sublime and creepy, awkward and unexpected moments. It’s absurd, but despite all the murky, dark stuff, it manages to also enforce a heartfelt joie de vivre.