“It is a beautiful process the way they have taught people who are brand-new, some very young,” she said. Because many of the Wuppertal dancers are older and can’t perform such a physically demanding piece, they enlisted freelancers and students from the Folkwang University of the Arts to make up part of the ensemble. “We need 12 couples in addition to the central pair, and it demands huge energy and technique, particularly in the partnering,” she said.

In Bausch’s piece the opera’s libretto, by Bela Balazs, forms a loose counterpoint to the actions. The score features just two singers (Bausch used a German-language version with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Hertha Topper), the curious bride Judith, and the homicidal Bluebeard, who is reluctantly persuaded by his new wife to open the locked doors of the castle, until at last his murdered wives are found, frozen in his memory.

In Bausch’s version, the characters and the ensemble represent multiple versions of the couple’s gendered battle, repeatedly enacting the violence, fear, sexual obsession and love that animate the relationship. “All the men are Bluebeard and all the women are Judith,” Ms. Kaufmann said.

The action is set in an empty room with tall French windows and a floor covered in shriveled brown leaves. Here, men and women are yanked roughly along the floor, set upon mercilessly, hurled against walls, swung into the air, piled upon each other’s bodies and forcefully pushed away. It all plays out in endless cycles of repetition. And long, painstaking rehearsals.

At the Lichtburg, a disused cinema where Bausch created pieces for her company, Mr. Minarik and Ms. Libonati took three couples through the sequence in which Judith falls through Bluebeard’s outstretched arms to the floor. (Ten times.)

“Hold, hold — then down!” Ms. Libonati called out, stressing the suspended moment before Judith falls on her back. Although Mr. Minarik said later that there was no literal interpretation of the words, Bausch uses images and content from the libretto to generate movement, here echoing Judith’s plea to enter the castle, or to lie down and perish on its threshold.