Dance

In June 2009 Germany’s best known choreographer Pina Bausch has died of cancer, aged just 68. Since 1973 Pina Bausch achieved world wide reputation with the Tanztheater Wuppertal.

Of course, we all knew that she did not exactly lead a healthy life. The phrase from her piece Walzer, “Another glass of wine and a ciggie – but it’s not time to go home yet”, was unfortunately also Pina Bausch’s philosophy. She could not give up smoking, and the evening in Mumbai when, well after midnight, the feudal Oberoi Hotel reopened its long-closed bar for the choreographer and her retinue was just one example of how she liked to turn night into day. But as she stood in the midst of her dancers and received the applause after the premiere of her latest piece, she seemed just the same as ever. There was no thinking that she might be conquered by cancer a few days later.

Her death came as a shock, not only to her fans in Germany, but to the whole dance world. For decades, she was the global figurehead of new dance, and her performances all over the world were sold out in no time, with tickets being almost impossible to obtain. Her aesthetic influence was immense, as can be seen in countless dance pieces between Adelaide and Rio, Toronto and Tokyo. She has even penetrated places where she never made a guest appearance through videos passed on surreptitiously. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Pina Bausch changed the world of dance like no-one else.

A young genius

That was not sung to her as she lay in her cradle. Patrons of her parents’ pub in Solingen noticed that little Philippine moved “like a contortionist”. So her parents let her go to a children’s ballet school. At the age of 15, she was accepted by the dance studio of the Folkwang School in Essen and was the most talented student it ever had. After years in New York, where she absorbed the new things to be seen, she took up a teaching post in Essen, danced in Kurt Jooss’s newly-founded Folkwang Ballet Company, and when that became too boring, she began to choreograph.

Arno Wüstenhöfer offered her the directorship of the Tanztheater Wuppertal in 1973. She never left Wuppertal again permanently, never planned years in advance, but always did just what was necessary at any particular moment. Yet her development was surprisingly linear. She had soon crossed all the frontiers of contemporary dance, torn down all the fences and redefined the concept of dance. Thenceforth, Pina Bausch’s name stood for a theatre of liberated bodies and liberated minds, for a dance theatre of humanity searching for love, tenderness and trust between the partners, and for a new language of dance enriched by words and songs.

Improving the male-dominated world

At the beginning of her time in Wuppertal, she choreographed a number of short pieces including her grandiose interpretation of Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps and Gluck’s two operas Iphigenie auf Tauris and Orpheus und Eurydike - wonderful pieces in traditional modern dance style. It was not until the summer of 1976 that she terminated her contract with tradition with her choreography of Die sieben Todsünden (The Seven Deadly Sins) by Brecht and Weill, which attempted nothing less than to improve the male-dominated world. Boldly balanced between dance, theatre and show business, the choreographer satisfied her audience’s need to be amused without in the process giving up even a hand’s breadth of her commitment.

Practically all the choreographer’s pieces deal with key questions of human existence, tirelessly forcing the audience to face up to such questions; only her late works mellowed by age take the edge off this hardness. Fear, also of her own failure, is a major driving force here. But the desire to be loved is stronger than fear. The conflicts, but also the comedy in Bausch’s pieces, stem from the antagonism between these two emotions. She never regarded the steps or the movements as the most important thing; she was never interested in “how people move, but in what moves them,” After working with dancers and actors on a version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in Bochum in 1978, she began work on each new piece with questions. The questions provoked the dancers to respond: verbally and physically. Theatrical and dance scenes developed from these responses which the choreographer then combined to form a larger whole.

From the mid-eighties onwards, Bausch’s subjects broadened and they increasingly included environmental themes. Together with her dancers, she sought new impressions from far afield: in Rome and Madrid, America, Japan and India, Brazil and finally in Chile. The ensemble received the news of her death in Wroclaw; it will continue to exist for the time being. The next two seasons are fully planned. But what the recently-published programme for 2009/2010 still hopefully announces, a Neues Stück 2010 (New Piece 2010), will sadly remain an empty promise for ever.