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Pina Bausch

German dancer, c*ographer, dance teacher and ballet director

Philippine "Pina" Bausch (27 July 1940 – 30 June 2009) was a German dancer and c*ographer 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. 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. She created the company Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, which performs internationally.

Contents

  • 1 Early life
  • 2 Career
  • 3 Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch
  • 4 Personal life
  • 5 Awards and honours
  • 6 Death
    • 6.1 Tributes
  • 7 Influence on other artists
  • 8 Influence on popular culture
  • 9 Works
  • 10 Filmography
  • 11 Gallery
  • 12 Notes
  • 13 References
  • 14 Bibliography
  • 15 External links

Early life

Bausch was born in Solingen, the daughter of August and Anita Bausch, who owned a restaurant with guest rooms which is where she 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.

Career

Bausch was accepted into Kurt Jooss's the Folkwangschule at age of 14.

After graduation in 1959, Bausch left Germany with a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service to continue her studies at the Juilliard School in New York City in 1960, where her teachers included Antony Tudor, José Limón, Alfredo Corvino, and Paul Taylor. Bausch was 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. 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 *isted Jooss on many of the pieces. In 1968, she c*ographed her first piece, Fragmente (Fragments), to music by Béla Bartók. In 1969, she succeeded Jooss as artistic director of the company.

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch

In 1973, Bausch started as artistic director of the Wuppertal Opera ballet, as the Tanztheater Wuppertal:, run as an independent company. Josephine Ann Endicott was an Australian solo dancer before joining the Tanztheater. 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: Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.

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. 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 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."

Poster in front of Schauspielhaus:Wuppertal, 2008

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. Repe*ion is an important structuring device. She stated: "Repe*ion is not repe*ion, ... 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.

In 1983, she played the role of La Principessa Lherimia in Federico Fellini's film And the Ship Sails On. 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 do*entary, Pina. The film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011.

Personal life

Bausch was married to Dutch-born Rolf Borzik, a set and costume designer who died of leukaemia in 1980. Later that year, she met Ronald Kay, and in 1981 they had a son, Rolf Salomon Bausch.

Awards and honours

Among the honours awarded to Bausch are the UK's Laurence Olivier Award and *an's Kyoto Prize. She was awarded the Deutscher Tanzpreis in 1995. In 1999, she was the recipient of the Europe Theatre Prize. In 2008, the city of Frankfurt am Main awarded her its prestigious Goethe Prize. She was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.

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 *an – between 1986 and 2009. Seven of the works have not been seen in the UK.

Death

Bausch died on 30 June 2009 in Wuppertal, North Rhine Westphalia, Germany at the age of 68 of an unstated form of cancer attributable to smoking, five days after diagnosis and two days before shooting was scheduled to begin for the long-planned Wim Wenders do*entary. She is survived by her son Salomon.

Tributes

The same year, c*ographer 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 Pina Bausch and involved performers linking arms and stripping naked a man and woman.

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.

In 2010 the c*ographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and dancer Shantala Shivalingappa premiered their work 'Play', which was dedicated to Pina Bausch's memory. Bausch was the main impetus for the piece as she had brought Cherkaoui and Shivalingappa to collaborate together in 2008 to perform for the final edition of her festival.

Wenders' do*entary, Pina, was released in late 2011 in the United States, and is dedicated to her memory.

Influence on other artists

Bausch's style has influenced performers such as David Bowie, who designed part of his 1987 Gl* 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. Florence + The Machine's vocalist was also influenced by Bausch's work. She became very fond of the work by the Bausch's work and explained that her "work expresses the human condition in a way that I’ve never seen before—she’d do amazing pieces where it would just be a huge pile of rose petals that someone would ski down, or a dance that would be two people playing tag for two hours. It was incredibly visceral and emotional, and very experimental. So dancing for me is just a very calm place to be—you’re just with your body."

Influence on popular culture

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 ins*ution, but its source was quickly identified.

Works

The following table shows works since 1973. Several of Pina Bausch's works were announced as Tanzabend because she chose a *le late in the development of a work. The typical sub*le 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 *les 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 pros*utes 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.

Filmography

  • 1980 Die Generalprobe. Do*entary. Dir.: Werner Schroeter
  • 1983 What Are Pina Bausch and Her Dancers Doing in Wuppertal?. Do*entary. Dir.: Klaus Wildenhahn
  • 1983 Plaisir du théâtre. TV mini-series do*entary. Dir.: Georges Bensoussan
  • 1983 And the Ship Sails On. Drama. Dir.: Federico Fellini
  • 1983 Un jour Pina m'a demandé. TV do*entary. Dir.: Chantal Akerman
  • 1990 The Complaint of an Empress. Dir.: Pina Bausch
  • 1990 3res 14torze 16tze. TV series. Episode dated 26 January 1990. Dir.: Cristina Ferrer
  • 1998 Lissabon Wuppertal Lisboa. TV do*entary. Dir.: Fernando Lopes
  • 2002 Talk to Her. Drama. Dir.: Pedro Almodóvar
  • 2002 Pina Bausch – A Portrait by Peter Lindbergh based on 'Der Fensterputzer'. TV short. Dir.: Peter Lindbergh
  • 2004 La mandrágora. TV series. Dir.: Miguel Sarmiento
  • 2006 Pina Bausch. TV do*entary. Dir.: Anne Linsel
  • 2010 Dancing Dreams. Do*entary. Dir.: Rainer Hoffmann, Anne Linsel
  • 2011 Pina – Dance Dance Otherwise We Are Lost. Do*entary. Dir.: Wim Wenders
  • 2011 Understanding Pina: The Legacy of Pina Bausch. Do*entary. Dir.: Kathy Sullivan and Howard Silver

Gallery

Pina Bausch's Nelken (Carnations), 2005

Notes

    References

      Bibliography

      Books
      • Gabriele Klein: Pina Bausch’s Dance Theater. Company, Artistic Practices and Reception. transcript, Bielefeld 2020, ISBN:978-3-8376-5055-6.
      • Climenhaga, Royd (2008). Pina Bausch. Routledge Performance Prac*ioners. Routledge. ISBN:978-1-134-18757-7.
      • Climenhaga, Royd, ed. (2012). The Pina Bausch Sourcebook: The Making of Tanztheater. Routledge. ISBN:978-0-415-61801-4.
      • Hoghe, Raimund (1986). Pina Bausch / Theatergeschichten (in German). Suhrkamp.
      • Servos, Norbert (2008). Pina Bausch: Dance Theatre. K. Kieser. ISBN:978-3-935456-22-7.
      Newspapers
      • "Pina Bausch". The Daily Telegraph. 1 July 2009. Retrieved 24 March 2013.
      • Dieutre, Vincent (1 July 2009). "The Death of the German C*ographer Pina Bausch". l'Humanité. Retrieved 24 March 2013.
      • Higgins, Charlotte (30 June 2009). "Pina Bausch, 1940–2009 / We have lost dance's most visionary, influential figure, who redrew the map of the theatre arts". The Guardian. Retrieved 24 March 2013.
      • Wakin, Daniel Wakin (30 June 2009). "Pina Bausch, German C*ographer, Dies at 68". The New York Times. Retrieved 24 March 2013.
      Online sources
      • Lawson, Valerie (2002). "Pina, Queen Of The Deep / Pina Bausch, Tanztheater Wuppertal". Ballet Magazine. Archived from the original on 19 October 2012. Retrieved 24 March 2013.
      • Schmidt, Jochen (2009). "Pina Bausch, in: 50 C*ographers". Goethe Ins*ut. Retrieved 24 March 2013.
      • Tashiro, Mimi (1999). "Pina Bausch: Life and work". Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts. Retrieved 24 March 2013.

      External links

      • Pina Bausch Foundation
      • Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch
      • Archival footage of Lutz Forster performing in Pina Bausch's For the Children of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow in 2013 at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.
      • Archival footage of a complete performance (c. 1989) of Pina Bausch's Palermo Palermo
      Tributes
      • The Guardian
      • The Guardian
      • The Guardian
      • l'Humanité
      Photography
      • Dance photo, Mechthild Großmann by Peter Lind 1986
      • Dance photo, Helena Pikon by Peter Lind 1986
      • Dance photo, Jan Minarik & Dominique Mercy by Peter Lind 1986