Philippine "Pina" Bausch (27 July 1940 – 30 June 2009) was a German dancer and choreographer who was a significant contributor to a neo-expressionist dance tradition now known as Tanztheater. Bausch's approach was noted for a stylized blend of dance movement, prominent sound design, and involved stage sets, as well as for engaging the dancers under her to help in the development of a piece, and her work had an influence on modern dance from the 1970s forward. She created the company Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, which performs internationally.
Early life and education
Philippine Bausch, later known as Pina,[1][2][3][a] was born in Solingen, Germany, on 27 July 1940.[4] Her parents were August and Anita Bausch, who owned a restaurant with guest rooms, where Pina was born. The restaurant provided Pina with a venue to start performing at a very young age. She would perform for all of the guests in the hotel and occasionally go into their rooms and dance while they were trying to read the newspaper. It was then that her parents saw her potential.[5] These experiences at the restaurant would be a great influence for her choreography of Café Müller.[citation needed]
Bausch was very soon performing with Tudor at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet Company, and with Paul Taylor at New American Ballet. When, in 1960, Taylor was invited to premiere a new work named Tablet in Spoleto, Italy, he took Bausch with him. In New York Bausch also performed with the Paul Sanasardo and Donya Feuer Dance Company and collaborated on two pieces with them in 1961.[8] It was in New York City that Pina stated, "New York is like a jungle but at the same time it gives you a feeling of total freedom. In these two years, I have found myself."
In 1962, Bausch joined Jooss' new Folkwang-Ballett (Folkwang Ballet) as a soloist and assisted Jooss on many of the pieces. In 1968, she choreographed her first piece, Fragmente (Fragments), to music by Béla Bartók.[9] In 1969, she succeeded Jooss as artistic director of the company.[6]
Influences and style
Bausch's approach was noted for a stylized blend of dance movement, prominent sound design, and involved stage sets, as well as for engaging the dancers under her to help in the development of a piece.[10] Her work, regarded as a continuation of the European and American expressionist movements, incorporated many expressly dramatic elements and often explored themes connected to trauma, particularly trauma arising out of relationships.[11]
The term "dance theatre" (tanztheater) can be traced back to Rudolf Laban's theories. While Laban used the phrase in comparison with movement choirs, he didn't specify the content of dance theatre. It was his students such as Kurt Jooss and Mary Wigman who further developed their own theories regarding tanztheater.[12] Having Jooss as a teacher and mentor, Bausch's pieces were largely influenced by the German expressionist dance tradition of Ausdruckstanz. Her pieces were simple and rejected the classical forms of ballet. The dances generally had little to no plot, no progression, and no sense of a specific geographical place.[13]
When studying in New York, Bausch sought influence from Martha Graham, José Limón, and Anna Sokolow. Antony Tudor, who was one of Bausch's teachers at Juilliard and her mentor at her time at the Metropolitan Ballet Theater was These American influences can be seen in Bausch's choice of gestures and phrasing. For example, a defining characteristic of Bausch's work is the continuous repetition of movements, as seen in Rite of Spring[12][14]
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch
In 1973, Bausch was appointed artistic director of the Opernhaus Wuppertal ballet, as the Tanztheater Wuppertal [de], run as an independent company. The company has a large repertoire of original pieces, and regularly tours throughout the world from its home base of the Opernhaus Wuppertal. It was renamed later as Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.[citation needed]Josephine Ann Endicott.[15][16] and Meryl Tankard were two Australian dancer/choreographers who worked at the Tanztheater and with Bausch over many years.[17][18]
Frühlingsopfer, premiered in 1975, pictured in 2009
Her best-known dance-theatre works include the melancholic Café Müller (1985), in which dancers stumble around the stage crashing into tables and chairs. Bausch had most of the dancers perform this piece with their eyes closed. The thrilling Frühlingsopfer (The Rite of Spring) (1975) required the stage to be completely covered with soil.[19] She stated: "It is almost unimportant whether a work finds an understanding audience. One has to do it because one believes that it is the right thing to do. We are not only here to please, we cannot help challenging the spectator."
One of the themes in her work was relationships. She had a very specific process in which she went about creating emotions. "Improvisation and the memory of [the dancer's] own experiences ... she asks questions—about parents, childhood, feelings in specific situations, the use of objects, dislikes, injuries, aspirations. From the answers develop gestures, sentences, dialogues, little scenes." The dancer is free to choose any expressive mode, whether it is verbal or physical when answering these questions. It is with this freedom that the dancer feels secure in going deep within themselves. When talking about her process she stated, "There is no book. There is no set. There is no music. There is only life and us. It's absolutely frightening to do a work when you have nothing to hold on to." She stated, "In the end, it's composition. What you do with things. There's nothing there to start with. There are only answers: sentences, little scenes someone's shown you. It's all separate to start with. Then at a certain point I'll take something which I think is right and join it to something else. This with that, that with something else. One thing with various other things. And by the time I've found the next thing is right, then the little thing I had is already a lot bigger."
Male-female interaction is a theme found throughout her work, which has been an inspiration for—and reached a wider audience through—the movie Talk to Her, directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Her pieces are constructed of short units of dialogue and action, often of a surreal nature. Repetition is an important structuring device. She stated: "Repetition is not repetition, ... The same action makes you feel something completely different by the end." Her large multi-media productions often involve elaborate sets and eclectic music. In Vollmond, half of the stage is taken up by a giant, rocky hill, and the score includes everything from Portuguese music to k.d. lang.[20]
In 1983, she played the role of La Principessa Lherimia in Federico Fellini's film And the Ship Sails On.[21] The Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch made its American debut in Los Angeles as the opening performance of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival.
In 2009, Bausch started to collaborate with film director Wim Wenders on a 3D documentary, Pina. The film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011.
Stage design
A distinct aspect of Pina Bausch's works is the stage design, which were designed by Rolf Borzik and then Peter Pabst after Borzik's passing. Bausch's sets altered the stage floor itself and were often filled with elements of nature. In Rite of Spring, the stage is covered in dirt, In Vollomont(Full Moon), there is a large boulder on the stage with buckets of water as props, and in Nelken (Carnations), the stage is covered in carnations. The set pieces were often used as obstacles to challenge the dancers and enhance the emotion aspect of their performance. Pabst states that "A set should never be impressive on its own, only via the actors" . In Café Müller, the dancers need to navigate through the chairs and tables with their eyes closed. In Vollomont, dancers are required to dance on wet floors and climb onto the boulder.[12]
Early criticism
Although Pina Bausch's style and theories of dance are now widely appreciated and have global influence, Bausch also faced substantial initial criticism. When Bausch took over as the director of the Wuppertal Ballet, the audience in Wuppertal were more used to traditional ballet repertoire like Swan Lake, finding the themes and movements of Bausch's works violent. The audience often threw tomatoes, walked out of performances, and sent Bausch threatening letters.[12][22][23] Critics also often commented on the jarring repetitive movements Bausch used to depict the abusive men/women relationships. American critic Arlene Croce famously described Bausch's work as "pornography of pain".[23]
In 1999, she was the recipient of the VII Europe Theatre Prize,[24] with the following motivation:
Since she took over the direction of the Wuppertal Tanztheater 25 years ago, Pina Bausch has used her training and experience as a soloist in classical ballet to literally invent a new genre, a combination of theatre, dance, music, and visual arts in which score and improvisation come together, very close to the dream of a total theatre that juxtaposes the individual talents of an extraordinary ensemble with a precise concept of time and space. The results are deconstructions of Stravinsky or Bartok, reconstructions of Shakespeare or Brecht, or productions based on a theme - an anniversary, a dance, a farewell, a city - conceived as children's games or parlour games and orchestrated like review acts in order to rummage in the everyday life of the dancers, who pretend to have stopped dancing, subjected to public questioning and left to the flow of free associations, citing over and over but without ruling out psychoanalytical stripteases.
In these group productions, the great teacher Pina Bausch, who never forgets that she was once the blind princess in a visionary film by Fellini, forces her actors to assume a role and a type of ceremonial, where extremely varied personal experiences and backgrounds combine with the precise geometry of the rhythmic movements. Although the motifs change, from one animal or flower to another, each show extends into the next to become part of a hypothetical single continuum, in other words the rite of a show, the story of the community that performs it with the joy of disguise and the solitude of cohabitation. However, behind the often heartbreaking splendour of the visual tableaux, the seductive feline and ineluctable manner in which the troupe advances in single file, and the pattern of the movements, regular but cleverly out of tune, through this lifelong self-portrayal the great artist offers all her spectators an ironic and desperate mirror in which to reflect their existential condition.[25]
Bausch was first married to Polish-born Rolf Borzik, a set and costume designer who died of leukaemia in 1980.[27] Later that year, she met Ronald Kay, and in 1981 they had a son.[28]
Death and legacy
Bausch died on 30 June 2009 in Wuppertal, North Rhine Westphalia, Germany aged 68[29] of an unstated form of cancer five days after diagnosis[10] and two days before shooting was scheduled to begin for the long-planned Wim Wenders documentary.[citation needed]
Her work had an influence on modern dance from the 1970s forward.[10]
The same year, choreographer and experimental theatre-maker Dimitris Papaioannou created a piece called Nowhere to inaugurate the renovated main stage of the Greek National Theatre in Athens. The show's central and most prolific scene was dedicated to the memory of Bausch, and involved performers linking arms and stripping naked a man and woman.[30]
In 2010 the dance company Les Ballets C de la B performed Out of Context – for Pina, which was dedicated to Bausch's memory. The show was directed and conceived by the company's founder Alain Platel, for whom Bausch was a friend and mentor.[31][32]
In 2010 the choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and dancer Shantala Shivalingappa premiered their work Play, which was dedicated to Bausch's memory. Bausch was the main impetus for the piece as she had brought Cherkaoui and Shivalingappa to collaborate in 2008 to perform for the final edition of her festival.[33][34]
Wenders' documentary, Pina, was released in late 2011 in the United States, and is dedicated to her memory.[citation needed]
Works by Bausch were staged in June and July 2012 as a highlight of the Cultural Olympiad preceding the Olympic Games 2012 in London. The works were created when Bausch was invited to visit and stay in 10 global locations – in India, Brazil, Palermo, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Budapest, Istanbul, Santiago, Rome, and Japan – between 1986 and 2009. Seven of the works had not been seen in the UK.[35]
Bausch's style has influenced performers such as David Bowie, who designed part of his 1987 Glass Spider Tour with Bausch in mind. For the tour, Bowie "wanted to bridge together some kind of symbolist theatre and modern dance" and used Bausch's early work as a guideline.[36]
Promotional trailers for the third season of American Horror Story: Coven included a clip for the episode "Detention" and were likely influenced by Bausch's work Blaubart. Stills from the performance and the episode show a group of women seemingly defying gravity as they cling to the walls high above the ground, toes pointed down and hands pressed above them. The photo of Bausch's performance was previously released on Reddit as well as Twitter with the implication that it was from a Russian mental institution, but its source was quickly identified.[37]
Works
The following table shows works since 1973. Several of Pina Bausch's works were announced as Tanzabend because she chose a title late in the development of a work.[38] The typical subtitle from 1978 was Stück von Pina Bausch (A piece by Pina Bausch). The translations are given as on the website of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. Some of the German titles are ambiguous. "Kontakthof" is composed of Kontakt ("contact") and Hof ("court, courtyard"), resulting in "courtyard of contact," which is also a technical term for an area in some brothels where the first contact with prostitutes is possible. "Ich bring dich um die Ecke," literally "I'll take you around the corner," can mean "I'll accompany you around the corner" but also colloquially "I'll kill you." "Ahnen" can mean "ancestors," but also (as a verb) "to foresee", "bode", "suspect."
The details about the music for the works until 1986 follow a book by Raimund Hoghe who was dramaturge in Wuppertal.[39]
Folk music from Lombardy, Tuscany, Southern Italy, Sardinia and Bolivia, medieval dance music, Russian Waltz, music from New Orleans, dance music of the 1930s, music by Tchaikovsky, Buxtehude, Dvořák and Khachaturian, a.o.
1987
Ahnen
Suspecting
ambiguous title
1989
Palermo Palermo
1991
Tanzabend II
Dance Evening II
1993
Das Stück mit dem Schiff
The Piece with the Ship
1994
Ein Trauerspiel
A Tragedy
1995
Danzón
1996
Nur Du
Only you
1997
Der Fensterputzer
The window washer
1998
Masurca Fogo
1999
O Dido
2000
Wiesenland
Meadowland
Kontakthof – Mit Damen und Herren ab 65
Kontakthof – with men and women of age 65 and up
2001
Água
Portuguese for "Water"
2002
Für die Kinder von gestern, heute und morgen
For the children of yesterday, today, and tomorrow
2011 Understanding Pina: The Legacy of Pina Bausch. Documentary. Dir.: Kathy Sullivan and Howard Silver
Gallery
Pina Bausch's Nelken (Carnations), 2005
Footnotes
^Some sources erroneously spell her name "Philippina".
References
^Schmidt, J.; Weigelt, G. (1992). Tanztheater in Deutschland (in German). Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen Verlag. p. 38. ISBN978-3-549-05206-8. OCLC31968991. Retrieved 5 April 2019. »Ich mach ja immer, immer wieder mach ich ganz verzweifelte Anstrengungen zu tanzen«, sagt Pina Bausch. Auf die alte, traditionelle Weise ... Freunde der Familien nahmen die kleine Philippine mit ins Kinderballett. »Ich bin da mitgegangen ...
^Schmidt, Jochen (1998). "Tanzen gegen die Angst": Pina Bausch. ETB / ETB (in German). Düsseldorf: Econ & List Taschenbuch Verlag. p. 27. ISBN978-3-612-26513-5. OCLC41184006. Retrieved 5 April 2019. Geben wir es ruhig zu: das Bild der kleinen Philippine Bausch, wie sie – fünfjährig, sechsjährig? – inmitten anderer Kinder am Boden liegt, das Bein in den Nacken gelegt, vor Stolz errötend ob des zweifelhaften Kompliments der Lehrerin, hat ...
^Bremser, M.; Sanders, L. (2005). Fifty Contemporary Choreographers. Routledge Key Guides. Taylor & Francis. p. 28. ISBN978-1-134-85018-1. Retrieved 5 April 2019. Born Philippine Bausch in Solingen. Germany, 27 July 1940. Studied with Kurt Jooss at the Folkwang ...
Climenhaga, Royd, ed. (2012). The Pina Bausch Sourcebook: The Making of Tanztheater. Routledge. ISBN978-0-415-61801-4.
Hoghe, Raimund (1986). Pina Bausch / Theatergeschichten (in German). Suhrkamp.
Servos, Norbert (2008). Pina Bausch: Dance Theatre. K. Kieser. ISBN978-3-935456-22-7.
Martinez, Alessandro (2002). Sur les traces de Pina-Tracing Pina's footsteps, (translation: Bachelier S., Devalier F., Garkisch C), ed. Premio Europa per il Teatro, 2002. ISBN978-8-8901-0140-3.
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