From her childhood, Pina Bausch recalled crawling beneath the tables of a local café and observing the strange dynamics of social choreography. It seemed to her, at a young and impressionable age, that the distance between people was a palpable quantum, bridged only by individual yearning. Loneliness and desire permeated the subtle landscape of the café, a place ostensibly designed for contact and communication. In 1978, Bausch took this remembrance and constructed "Café Müller," a dance piece for café tables, chairs and six dancers. The setting is starkly lit, tables strewn about a spare space with many entries and seemingly no exits. The dancers, members of the Wuppertal Dance Theater, appear wraith-like, meager in substance. Their substance accumulates only through ritualistic gestures in collision with those of other café dwellers. The inability of the dancers to find an authentic embrace is no less real than the concrete obstacles provided by the tables. People come and go in the "Café Müller," stuttering and careening, but never connecting. Director Peter Shafer's task was a difficult one, for Bausch's choreography sets in motion a multiplicity of actions that take place in all corners of the café. Here, it is the wide shot that best captures this hyperactivity, the elaborate devices of the cinema being a distraction. Shafer chose to intercut and isolate the dance, always returning to the grander view. Still, Café Müller remains a strong rendering of Pina Bausch's angular and dire vision of the adult world.