The immortal work of Pina Bausch

The final moments of Pina Bausch’s Sweet Mambo set the dancer Julie Shanahan in a long, satin dress, in a field of billowing white curtains. Music soars around her, melancholy and haunting, as she moves relentlessly, swirling and struggling, arms outstretched, moving onwards, beating against the current.

Sweet Mambo was created in 2008, a year before Bausch’s death, and it’s hard not to see it as a conversation with mortality – and immortality. Made with six of the women she had worked with longest, with three men added at the last minute, it is full of wistful feeling and secret stories, underlined by the repeated refrain: “Don’t forget me.”

What makes this revival even more emotional is that, of its nine performers, seven were in the original cast. They were in their 30s and 40s when they created it, now they are in their 50s and 60s and, in the case of Nazareth Panadero, 70. Their presence alters the nature of the movement but not its intent. They give the piece its purpose and definition, an understanding that is built into their bones.

The work is built around a sequence of long solos, performed in Peter Pabst’s simple, effective set with its lines of curtains on which videos – one of the 1938 German comedy of romance and infidelity Der Blaufuchs (The Blue Fox), one of long grass – are intermittently projected. The soundtrack is a compelling mix of pop songs and slightly threatening instrumentals.

The dance, as always with Bausch, is punctuated by vignettes of interaction: the dancers step forward to tell us stories or offer advice. In a repeated gesture, the three men peel down the shoulder straps of the women’s long dresses and gently kiss their backs. At another moment, they crouch behind the curtains so the women can recline sensuously on top.

The piece is full of images that linger. In one nightmarish scene, as a storm rages on the backcloth,Shanahan rushes desperately towards a voice that is calling her and is constantly carried back to where she started. In another, Julie Anne Stanzak and Andrey Berezin duet sinuously to Portishead while he softly pulls her hair.

Panadero says with a wild laugh, “The old cannot do what they know, the young do not know what they can do”, and that sense of time passing, of lost youth and knowing age winds through Sweet Mambo with incredible power. Bausch died just days after her cancer diagnosis, but watching her penultimate work, it’s impossible not to feel that she had a sense of what was coming.

A great achievement of her heirs has been to maintain her relevance. The reputation of Glen Tetley, dominant in his 1960s and 70s heyday, has rather faded. Yet Tetley’s combination of the expansive extensions of ballet with the contractions of contemporary technique had an influence on the repertory of classical companies.

The Royal Ballet is paying tribute to the centenary of his birth with a rare revival of his 1962 Pierrot Lunaire, set to Schoenberg’s atonal song cycle. In Rouben Ter-Arutunian’s design, coolly lit by John B Read, Marcelino Sambé’s innocent Pierrot swings and stretches atop a scaffolding tower, catching moonbeams.

His joy-filled world is invaded first by Columbine (Mayara Magri), representative of all women, who shows herself first as a virgin and then as a temptress, and by Brighella (Matthew Ball), with a dark eye mask and a sword, the masculine force of power and violence. The oddity of the conceit is redeemed by choreography of great invention, and the dancers bring their stock characters to exceptionally well-drawn life. Sambé, in particular, is immensely touching and poetic as Pierrot, seeking the moon as the world ties him down.

Photograph by Karl-Heinz Krauskopf