LUGANO.

Kontakthof – Echoes of ‘78, by the Australian dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Meryl Tankard, had its last show in Lugano, at LAC, during the Festival Lugano Dance Project 2026. Tankard, as the other eight performers in Kontakthof – Echoes of ‘78, was in the first cast of the original Kontakthof, the iconic piece created by Pina Bausch with the Tanztheater Wuppertal, which premiered in 1978. At that time, Pina Bausch expressed a wish: to have Kontakthof restaged when the original members of the piece would be old. Bausch died in 2009, and the project was forgotten.

Two years ago, Salomon Bausch, Pina’s son and the artistic director of Pina Bausch Foundation, thought his mother’s wish couldn’t wait any longer. First of all, he called Meryl Tankard and Josephine Ann Endicott, the two main protagonists of the piece, and suggested that they restage the piece. Originally, Kontakthof was performed by twenty dancers. Six of them had died in the meantime, and the other five were not in good health anymore. How could the Foundation continue with the project? One solution could be to find dancers who had performed Kontakthof in the early eighties, but Meryl Tankard was uncertain about this. The original piece lasted three hours, too long and tough for anyone now in their seventies.

Meryl, who had last danced Kontakthof in 1988, asked Salomon Bausch for some videos of the performance: she needed them to refresh her memory. She discovered some precious black-and-white films shot by Rolf Borzik, who was the set and costume designer for the piece and Pina’s partner. Fragments shot from the first row of the stalls: with many close-ups, many details. In a word, pure emotion! 

Tankard had a brilliant idea: to edit the fragments into a film that could be projected in various ways on the stage, where the nine original dancers, with Tankard and Endicott (read the interview), Elisabeth Clarke, Lutz Förster, John Giffin, Ed Kortlandt, Beatrice Libonati, Anne Martin, Arthur Rosenfeld, who had accepted the proposal to be in the show again, would perform. The set is a large room with a horizontal line of chairs on the back. Twenty chairs for twenty dancers. But now the dancers are only nine: eleven chairs are empty. In Borzik’s film, the twenty dancers were very young. Now the old dancers perform live with the moving images of themselves and their young friends. Sometimes we see couples dancing in the film projected on a transparent gauze put downstage, in front of the real people dancing alone… Tenderness, fear, human relationships, humour, and so much love. The result was very touching, the performers were extraordinary, and the visual concept between past and present was original and had a very strong impact on the imagination. The audience welcomed the performance with a standing ovation. A great success that will stay in our hearts for a long time.

Photo: Kontakthof – Echoes of ’78 ©Ursula Kaufmann