It would do Pina Bausch's epic dance piece Vollmond a disservice to say only (as I do now) that it was jubilant, beautiful, sarcastic, funny, wild, exhilarating, elegant, loving, critical, and again—beautiful.

To do it even a decent service is beyond my abilities, as it would require evoking the enormous rock, the shallow canal, the plumes of water cast from buckets, the syncopation, the incredible cello music, the nearly-inaudible sounds, the slow-mo bullet dancer breaking through a human screen, the man rolling his whole body down to the floor, flipping at the neck, and rolling to his feet again—and the physique of the young dancers, clad in simple trousers and dresses, the physique of the poignantly-placed older dancer, whose stiffer body nonetheless impresses with its flights of flexion, and reaching, lyrical sequences of uplifting pathos.

How does it happen?

Especially when much of the material narrowly avoids the quality of a rebus—like the moment a woman smacks herself across the stage with a coathanger (stick) while munching on a carrot. I kept wondering why these worked instead of seeming like childish jokes. Maybe because of the refined and unified texture of the piece—everything in a sort of two-tone simplicity. Or maybe because of the basic elegance of the dancing itself: the harmoniousness of bodies holding themselves up. Everything was hanging by a thread, but not falling.

Other bits are clowningly transcendent, like when a woman sits with a wine glass held out, waiting to be served; a man in a tux comes out with a liter bottle of water and begins filling it, and filling it, and filling it...

At one point there was a nice old man with a bucket on a big rock, washing himself by calling up the water in the bucket, always throwing the bucket in with a lovely arc. At another it seemed like Apocalypse Now: a series of sombre, silent people frogging through the canal in a tropical rain.

How does it happen, I don't know. I do declare that Pina Bausch, deceased 2009, was fully alive in these 20 dancers and their gender-dynamical exaltations.

I had a marvelous weekend in New York.