Remembering Pina Bausch
Pina Bausch, one of the most influential dance makers of the 20th century, died in Wuppertal on Tuesday, June 30, 2009, just five days after being diagnosed with cancer.
Born in Solingen, Germany in 1940, Bausch began dancing at the Folkwang School in Essen (directed by influential German choreographer Kurt Jooss) before moving to New York on a scholarship to study at Julliard. She danced in the Metropolitan Opera under Anthony Tudor, briefly with Paul Taylor’s company, and as a soloist for Jooss’s Folkwang Ballet. Though she was a gifted dancer, Bausch’s real calling was making dances.
She began choreographing in 1968, and succeeded Jooss as director of the Folkwang Ballet the following year. In 1973, she took over a company in Wuppertal, Germany, which was renamed Tanztheater Wuppertal. She would remain there for the rest of her life, creating a remarkable body of work.
Her spellbinding (and sometimes hours-long) productions pushed the limits of concert dance and often included text, song and dramatic set elements. In “Café Müller” (1978), dancers crash into tables and chairs as a female dancer (for a long time, Bausch) performs a sorrowful solo; for her “Rite of Spring” (1975), separate packs of women and men dance convulsively on a stage completely covered with soil; in “Palermo, Palermo” (1989) an enormous wall the width of the stage comes crashing down and dancers move through dust and debris in a fashion that Anna Kisselgoff called “unexpectedly humorous but subliminally grim” following the 1991 premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
Not only did Bausch excite the field of modern dance, but she was influential in theater and film, as well. She played the role of La Principessa Lherimia in Federico Fellini's film “E La Nave Va,” and Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar included Bausch's work in his 2002 movie "Talk to Her." “She sparked very diverse emotions in me and always inspired me," Almodóvar said in an interview published by the AFP.
As Almodovar describes her personality, so was her work: moving and provocative, sparking multiple emotions—often in the same inexplicable moment. Bausch’s worlds were at once strange and unfamiliar, and entrancingly recognizable. Her dances were like dreamscapes, a series of encounters that did not resemble the reality we see around us, but the reality that we feel. Comprised of numerous vignettes strung together like the beads of a necklace (some pink like blush, and some black as onyx), her work often illuminated the dark, temperamental nature of male-female relationships. But, there was also light.
“When you see the work—the repetition of human love gestures, aborted wishes, rejection, inadequacy, desolation and absurdity—you still come out thrilled to be a member of the human race. There has been no one like her,” actress Fiona Shaw recently said in the Guardian.
In 2005, Neil Bartlett (also in the Guardian) remarked, “No theater was as brutally or as elegantly in the present tense as Bausch's, no women are more powerful than hers, no men more tender, no steps, slaps, looks or touches were ever as real.”
Bausch leaves behind a company and a legacy that will not be forgotten. She is survived by her husband Ronald and their son, Rolf.