Pina Bausch: the voice from Germany - German dance choreographer

Dance Magazine, Oct, 1996 by Rita Felciano

It's been some twelve years since Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal first appeared at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and provoked one American critic to apply the epithet Eurotrash to the work of Bausch. Up to that time, the German city of Wuppertal was primarily known as the birthplace of Karl Marx's collaborator, Friedrich Engels, and noted for its Schwebebahn, the turn-of-the-century suspension railway that looks as if it had been welded together from leftover pieces of the Eiffel Tower. Now, thanks to Bausch, Wuppertal is a mecca for European dance. Jochen Schmidt, critic for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has watched her work closely ever since she emerged from the protective mantle of Kurt Jooss at the Folkwang Dance Studio in Essen in the early seventies. Schmidt is unequivocal. "Pine is, together with William Forsythe, the most influential choreographer working in Europe today."

In the twenty-three years since Bausch founded her company with some of the dancers who are still with her, she has produced more than thirty full-length, collage-like pieces. Her output includes Fruhlingsopfer ("Rite of Spring," 1975), Kontakthof and Cafe' Muller (both 1978), Arien (1979), Walcer (1982), Ahnen (1987), and Danzon (1994). She has also created a site-inspired work based on her experiences in Lisbon (Viktor, 1986), Madrid (Tanzabend II, which had actually premiered six months earlier in 1991 in Wuppertal), Palermo (Palermo, Palermo; 1989), and Vienna (Ein Trauerspiel ("A Mourning Play," 1994).

This month the Bausch company will return to California for the first time since its appearance at the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival in 1984. It will present Nur Du (Only You): A Piece by Pina Bausch, a commission by a consortium of western and southwestern arts presenters. The work will premiere on October 3 at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, then travel to Los Angeles; Tempe, Arizona; and Austin, Texas. Nur Du is the first work Bausch has created outside Europe. It will be based on themes of the American West.

In the past Bausch's performers have sunk into peat, rammed stiletto heels into sod, crawled over rubble, sloshed through water, and tiptoed through carnations. Her dancers talk and sing and scream. They attack each other, they embrace each other; they walk, crawl, and fall, all the while making familiar gestures-disgusting, obscene, tender, funny. Their partners have included a polar bear, a hippopotamus, and, most recently, a floating whale. Bausch has been praised for focusing on the fundamentals of human behavior and condemned for not varying her thematic material. Her work has been acclaimed for the richness of its textural details and censured for being formless and repetitive.

Though Nur Du is Bausch's first site-inspired piece outside Europe, she is not unfamiliar with the United States--at least with life on the East Coast. Her company often appears at BAM, and she spent four years in New York City, where she enrolled at Juilliard in 1959. During those years, it was neither Balanchine nor Cunningham, the formalist giants of the time, who exerted a pull on her imagination, but choreographers such as Anna Sokolow, Jose Limon, Paul Sanasardo, and Antony Tudor--artists who often think of women and men in terms of how they relate to each other. It's these complicated and often contradictory relationships that are the beating heart of Bausch's work.

Bausch doesn't like to talk about herself. She hates interviews and refuses to give them. When one becomes unavoidable, her resistance is palpable. In a 1993 documentary about her company, for instance, she never once looked at the camera. A few informal encounters earlier this year revealed her to be an intensely private person: quiet, soft-spoken, but perfectly polite, with the same enigmatic smile often seen on her dancers' faces, but giving the impression that she would really much rather be doing something else. Lutz Forster, professor of dance at Folkwang Dance Studio, and an on-again, off-again member of Bausch's company since 1975, offers another reason for her reticence: "Pine is very clear about what she does, but she doesn't want to talk about it because she is suspicious of words. They can so easily be misunderstood."

Still, certain things can be surmised from glimpses of conversations. At one point in a talk with critic Schmidt, she told him what has become her most famous dictum: "I am not interested in how people move, but why they move." At another time, during a panel discussion early in her career, Jooss and Bausch were asked how they had influenced each other. "They didn't say anything for a long time," Schmidt recalls, "but then they both answered with one word: honesty."

Like an archaeologist, Bausch digs up what social conventions and our self-protecting mechanisms insist on hiding. She scratches into the soil of human nature and then assembles her artifacts, shards and all. The picture that emerges is always multihued, though its shadows often tend to be overpowering. Schmidt believes that at least some of Bausch's darkness of the soul is rooted in personal experience: "She was at her most turbulent after the death of the love of her life; after the birth of her son, the work became much sunnier."