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DANZ QUARTERLY Issue 17
October, November, December 2009
On the death of Pina Bausch
27th July 1940 – 30th June 2009
by Alexandra Kolb
On the plane to Germany in early July, I discovered the most touching death notice in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. It was signed by the dancers of Wuppertal Tanztheater and contained only one word: PINA. The news of the death of the leading figure in European contemporary dance for last three decades’ came as a shock. According to her company’s spokesman, Bausch, aged 68, died only a few days after being diagnosed with cancer. Just two weeks beforehand, she had premiered a new piece to great audience acclaim in Wuppertal. The fondness and deep respect that both dancers and audiences felt for Bausch is largely due to the extraordinary emotional intensity of her works, which explored human phenomena such as love, conflict and gender interplay. Unconstrained, she reached the depths of human nature, and whilst we may sometimes have squirmed, hidden our faces, or laughed out loud, it was because we identified. Famously, Bausch declared that she was not interested in how people move but in what moves them.
Pina Bausch was undoubtedly a trendsetter: a primary architect of Tanztheater (dance theatre) which bridged the traditional divide between art forms, creating a fascinating fusion of set, costume, music, dance and theatre. Her montage was diverse, eschewing narratives and chronologies, and employing a complex palette of mixed-media and a collaged soundtrack of innumerable musical genres and texts. Her choreographic process, which drew on dancers’ personal recollections to generate movements, relied heavily on improvisation. In a post-modern stance, she refused to prescribe meaning and renounced didacticism and moral judgement. Her stage settings were remarkable: floors were covered in mud (Rite of Spring) or by paper flowers (for instance in Carnations), or boasted a pool of water with a large hippopotamus rising from the depths (Arias).
Bausch’s early childhood was shaped by the environment of her parents’ café. From 1955, she studied at the Essen Folkwang School under the German expressionist choreographer Kurt Jooss, who had himself been a disciple of Rudolf von Laban. Bausch thus carried forward the legacy of early 20th century German modern dance. She was awarded a scholarship to further her studies at the Julliard School in New York where she was exposed to Tudor- and Graham-based work, and during the 1961/62 season she danced with the Metropolitan Opera’s ballet company. In the early sixties, she returned to Germany, first as soloist with Jooss’s Folkwang Ballet and upon Jooss’s retirement as his successor, during which time she created her first choreographies. She eventually accepted a post as the director of Wuppertal Ballet. The decision to appoint her was a bold and courageous move by the theatre’s then artistic director Arno Wüstenhofer. At the time, Wuppertal was a nondescript city whose dance scene was shaped by conventional ballet and whose fame rested primarily on its overhead-monorail.
The 1970s marked Bausch’s coming-of-age as a choreographer and a defining period in her career, with important pieces such as Bartok’s Bluebeard Castle, Rite of Spring and the semi-autobiographical Café Müller, all of which pushed at the boundaries of what ‘dance’ could encompass. Café Müller’s famous scene in which a female dancer repeatedly falls from a male’s arms, before rising to embrace him again, took Bausch’s technique of repetition – used to intensify a single gesture or action – to an exhausting extreme. The 1980s saw the production of such works as Viktor and Carnations, an archetypal Bausch composition which fused elements of the jovial and comedic with a threat of menace lurking beneath. Bausch intentionally blurred the barriers between reality and performance: few choreographers have sufficient command to induce every audience member to enact a hug, as she did in Carnations, enrapturing viewers – including my exhilarated contemporary dance students on our visit to London’s Sadler’s Wells in 2005. As Bausch’s fame grew, she received invitations to create works based on residency periods in a variety of countries, including Palermo in 1989 (Palermo Palermo), Hong Kong in 1997 (The Window Cleaner) and Lisbon in 1998 (Masurca Fogo).
Bausch’s choreographies were often controversial. A trip to the US for the 1984 Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music famously triggered a confrontation with the American modern dance scene. Bausch’s style was strongly at odds with both ballet and the formalist approach to the body seen in American post-modern dance. American dance critics and audiences were baffled by her performances, which sometimes even prompted outright hostility. The well-known critic, Arlene Croce, condemned her work as brutal and devoid of content, complaining that “She keeps referring us to the act of brutality or humiliation – to the pornography of pain”. Bausch, however, responded that, “I show violence not to make people want it but not to want it. And I try to understand where this violence comes from”.
Having produced about forty successful full-length works, Bausch achieved iconoclastic status. Her legacy lives on in the choreographers who credit her with primary influence or seek to emulate elements of her choreographic approach, including Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Wim Vandekeybus, Meg Stuart, Lloyd Newson of DV8, and in Germany Sasha Waltz. While her work has appeared in films, such as Almodóvar’s Talk to Her, sadly a 3D film biography by the director Wim Wenders, which was planned to go into production in late 2009, will now never be realised.
She leaves behind her partner and a son, Rolf Salomon.
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