Pina Bausch finds a new language for life

Approaching her, tip-toed and awestruck, you quickly stumble across something Pina Bausch once said: “I’m interested in what moves people, not how people move”. She was one of Germany’s most momentous dancers and choreographers, famous for her unmistakable style, her mix of expressive dance – which she earned from Kurt Jooss at the Folkwang Hochschule in Ruhrgebiet (the industrialised region of Western Germany) – as well as elements of modern dance she acquired in New York City during the Sixties. 

The invention of dance theatre was happenstance. It was born of the absolute necessity to express precisely what needed to be said. Her language was that of the body, beyond which she was shy, quiet, almost bashful. During one interview, she was wrestling with words when finally she revealed that she was feeling too inhibited to express what it was she sought and felt. Yet on stage, the existential, the essential – all of life’s ‘quests’ – expressed themselves with fierceness and grace. Softened arm movements, like ivy growing outward from the dancer’s innermost being, like a force of nature, an obsessive, powerful desire – a ‘search’ – not to be tamed. “This is not art, this is not skill, what it is, is life”. 

At first, this was just a touch too much life for audiences; irritated, perturbed, there were auditorium doors which were slammed shut. It’s almost impossible to view a play by Pina Bausch just to pass the time. How to keep from getting pulled under emotionally, how to maintain a safe distance? All this, whether you want it or dread it. Perceive it as a polite invitation to identify with the characters at your own peril.

Who was this intense woman with the perennial cigarette suspended between her slender fingers, who scours through the valley of ‘the deeply buried’, as if assembling the 50,000-piece puzzle that is the soul? The woman who searches, who won’t settle for anything less than superficiality and for nothing more than truthfulness. She didn’t just peel open her own inner being, she did so with her dancers as well. She asked them questions, she got up close and personal with them, jotted down their answers on index cards; every scene, every piece originated from this intimate psychological process. 

The scrutiny, the examination: is that it, what is it precisely, is this right, is this how it is or is it totally different? Look again, look more closely, discard, repeat, dig deeper: is this it? She was under the enormous pressure of her own making, making sure she did everything with due diligence. It was not about perfection. It was the merciless pursuit of honesty, where the Great is achieved by the precise targeting of the Small. But that ‘moment when her eyes finally caught it in the movement’ – the dance, the expression, she knew it, she felt it: this is it! She could have made her life easier. She could have been corrupted by success. Alas, being shallow wasn’t her forte.

What drove her was ceaseless exploration and the question of what connects us as humans. She approached foreign countries and cultures free of any concept of ‘exoticness’. The synchronicity and ambiguity of perception. Scenes unfolding, humans, what they inflict upon each other, how they love and fail; Pina Bausch observed all of it when she was just a child sitting beneath a table in her parents’ restaurant. She continued these studies as a young woman in New York City. There wasn’t much in the way of a personal life. Apart from her role as mother to her son, she was mostly only interested in her work.

What distinguished her from many artists was her absolute trust in her own creativity. Again and again, she discovered that she also possessed what others had. “She wasn’t a cool diva, she was approachable,” says Bettina Wagner-Bergelt, who knew Pina Bausch personally. Today, the theatre manager and artistic director of the Tanztheater Wuppertal is sitting in Pina Bausch’s old office where she is tasked with combing through her body of work, a legacy of 44 plays. “There wasn’t a stone left unturned, not for reasons of deliberate provocation or the destruction of the old”, Wagner-Bergelt says. 

“Rather, it was a continuous face-off with reality”. She questioned consensual reality because there is no such thing as consensual. Reality is much more of a manufactured historical and societal mandate. Already in the Seventies, she had men wear women’s clothing if that was what needed to emerge for her to express herself. The Tanztheater Wuppertal goes to great lengths to reconstruct her plays, such as Das Stück mit dem Schiff (‘The Play with the Ship’) that was supposed to premiere in November 2020 – if there hadn’t been another lockdown. This rarely-shown play saw its world premiere in Wuppertal in 1993 and the last time it was put on stage was In Saitama, Japan, 24 years ago. 

The purpose of reviving it again today is to cross-examine Pina’s work, says Wagner-Bergelt. “You have to view the work from an outside perspective and ask yourself how it speaks to you today. We want to ‘re-find’ why it is relevant to today’s audiences. It’s not meant to be a museum piece”. New, young dancers are also involved because it’s not about showing what things were like in the past, but what they are like today. An entirely new cast was hired for Bluebeard; 20-something dancers as well as a 70-year-old couple to stage it with them, the original main characters Blaubart and Judith. It was their unquestionable duty, according to Wagner-Bergelt, to keep questioning Bausch’s work with regard to its contemporary application. “What is it we must learn, how is this relevant to our lives today?” At each and every moment, we want to follow her finding a new language for life as it is lived now, for life in movement.

This article originally appeared in SLEEK #67, which is available now both in print and digital editions.