Pina Bausch (1940 – 2009), died on 30 June, just five days after a cancer diagnosis. Aged 68.

When Isadora Duncan took off her pointe shoes to dance barefoot, a new dance form called Modern Dance was born. Three generations later, Pina Bausch put the shoes back onto the stage and a new genre of dance called Dance Theatre (Tanztheatre) started. As a dance form, Bausch has her dancers adopt stories, emotions, gestures, clothes and props from everyday life. Now, they dance barefoot, but also in sneakers, in high heel shoes and in business shoes. They forgot they are on stage. They called each other by their own name. They draw pictures on their bodies like kids in a carnival. They cry and laugh, and they kiss and fight, like they are at home. When they smoke, they smoke as if they are in their own bathroom sitting on the toilet seat. When they ran, they ran as if they want to catch a bus. Since Pina Bausch, they don’t walk the same.

Pina Bausch is arguably the most important choreographer of the post-war German dance scene. Born in 1940 to an innkeeper family, Bausch said her first education came from the crowd who frequented her parents’ restaurant in a small town called Solingen. All kinds of strange things could happen in a public space called restaurant, and what she has witnessed there could have developed in her an interest in human behaviour. They could have well informed her sense of humour at the absurdity of comédie humaine which we encounter so often in her work.

Pina Bausch started her first professional dance training under Kurt Jooss at the Folkwangschule in Essen and later under Antony Tudor in Juilliard in NYC in 1958. Bausch started an early career as a dancer at the age of 18, she then had her choreographic debut in 1968 which proved to be a great success. Bausch became the artistic director of the newly founded Tanztheatre Wuppertal in 1973. Her first breakthrough came in 1975 with the piece Le Sacre du Printemps. Less scandalized than Nijinsky’s 1913 version though, Bausch shocked her audience with a sand-covered stage and her dancers danced themselves close to physical collapse. In her career, Bausch has created some of the most provocative and innovative works of contemporary dance scene which established her as one of the most important choreographers in the history of modern dance.

The early work of Bausch, such as Le Sacre and Café Muller (1978), bears a strong imprint of German expressionist dance with exaggerated and distorted gestures to visualize the inner emotions and perceptions. However, the settings, the themes (such as loneliness, alienation, humiliation and cruelty), the costumes and the collage-like episodes already became signature of her tanztheatre work, a new form that freely mixes film, text, music, movements, stand-up comedy and variety acts. The resulting presentation is nonlinear, unfocused which sometimes being referred to as “the theatre of fragments”. Bausch’s stage also has much fun. She likes to fill it with chairs, water, roses, carnation, sand, grass, rubbles, etc. In the 1980s, Bausch developed what she calls “site-specific works” in which she incorporated in her basic theme with impressions she gathered in the cities of presentation: Lisbon, Palermo, Madrid, Vienna, Hong Kong and several American cities.

Bausch’s most frequently quoted saying is “I am not interested in how people move, but in what moves them.” That means she has to work in the life of real people. If that reality is ugly, so be it. Though her vision is dark, it is not hopeless. She loves human beings, but also she wants to know the animal inside. The body in dance for Bausch, be it physical mastery of position or episodes of social dancing, is a sign of life and hope, a connection to something outside the individual. That explains why sometimes she resorts to dance hall electronic music instead classical music. Bausch once said that she watched more people dancing in the street than going to the theatre for a classic dance. The banality of most lives may not be inspiring for everyone, but for Bausch, this is the way contemporary men and women derive their joy and suffering.

Selection of pieces:
1974 "Fritz", 1977 "Blaubart", 1978 "Café Müller", "Kontakthof", 1979 "Arien", 1980 "Bandoneon", 1982 "Walzer", "Nelken", 1986 "Viktor", 1989 "Palermo, Palermo", 1997 "Der Fensterputzer", 1998 "Masurca Fogo", 2001 "Agua", 2002 "Die Kinder von gestern, heute und morgen", 2003 „Nefés“, in cooperation with the International Istanbul Theatre Festival and the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, 2004 "Ten Chi", 2005 "Rough Cut", 2006 "Vollmond", 2007 Bamboo Blues", 2008 "Sweet Mambo”.


Pina Bausch - Café Müller (1978)