Vollmond, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch + Terrain Boris Charmatz, Sadler's Wells review - clunkily-named company shows its lighter side

Imagine: you take your seat at the best restaurant in town, the waiter arrives with a flourish to fill your water glass, you hold it out and he pours. And pours, and pours, and pours and pours. The water spills over the rim and splashes into your lap, down your front, over your head. You are left stunned and sopping wet. It is the most exhilarating evening of your life.

This is just one provocation among the myriad short études that make up Vollmond, a late work by Pina Bausch and the latest revival from the company now calling itself Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch + Terrain Boris Charmatz. Who would imagine that an outfit with such a clunky name could produce an evening that is this much fun. Boundaries are pushed, champagne glasses clinked, buckets sloshed, life spooled across the stage in a frenetic, seemingly unending carousel of human emotion. “What’s better,” one dancer in a plunging crimson ballgown purrs provocatively, “Love all at once? Or a teeny weeny bit of love each day?” This is love in all its forms; it is everything everywhere all at once, practically slopping over the edge of the stage and into our laps. It is raw human interaction without limits or politeness; it is love and desire in extremis.But while desperation governs the evening – a man is pecked continuously on the lips so ferociously he is forced offstage, a woman appears to laugh her way maniacally to a self-induced orgasm, another scrubs herself seductively with a lemon, bemoaning her "sourness", while another barks drills at a man unfastening her bra – there are tender moments too. One couple entwine, the woman’s mop of curly hair teasingly placed on her lover’s bare chest and fondly stroked. The whole piece seems to look us square in the face and playfully ask, “What do you want?” More chest hair on your lover? A man who can undo your bra in under three seconds? Well then, make it so.

Newbies to Pina Bausch may be surprised by the amount of spoken text in the show, and indeed the absence of dance, given Bausch's designation as a choreographer. The line separating theatre and dance is a thin one, trodden with awareness and wit by the 12 performers. Yet even the more mundane stories in Vollmond are made hauntingly memorable by the sheer force and dexterity of the bodies that tell them. These are all, irrefutably, dancers.

The word Vollmond translates from the German as both “full moon” and “high tide”. As the dancers weave and leap and clamber like children across designer Peter Pabst’s enormous cratered boulder (pictured above), perhaps a fallen meteorite, we are reminded of the moon’s persistent, mystical pull. Are we all destined to dance and desire and fight each other forever under its magnetic spell? The rock looms throughout, rigid and immovable, impervious to the thrashing of bodies and the swilling of water around and across it.

When asked how he and Bausch communicated with each other, the designer remarked that the less you talk the easier it is to surprise one another. Indeed, the interval – though necessary in the 120-minute running time – felt like being wrested from a dream. It didn’t feel right to discuss it over a glass of wine under artificial lights. I wanted to stay with the moonlight. Vollmond defies language, and the rules we impose on ourselves and each other. Rather, it celebrates the notion of "what if"? – stretches it, dresses it up in ball gowns, fetishises it, flirts with it. What if you run into a thunderstorm and make love to the rain? What if the waiter keeps pouring? Why not?

• Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch + Terrain Boris Charmatz perform Vollmond at Sadler's Wells to 23 February
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