How choreographer Pina Bausch revolutionised modern dance

Always provocative and never conventional, Pina Bausch’s raw and humanistic approach to choreography propelled her to international fame, prompting many to see her as the “godmother of European dance theatre.” Over her 40-year career, Bausch — who died on 30 June 2009 — deconstructed the binaries of dance and drama; pleasure and pain; performance and reality. Encouraging her casts to unearth their inner selves through controversial rehearsal techniques, her unstructured performances featured dancers running, howling and laughing across fantastical sets. 

Born in 1940 in Solingen in west Germany, Bausch’s foray into choreography coincided with the wider artistic and cultural developments at the time — experimentalism characterised the zeitgeist of early ‘70s Europe. The stage was fertile ground for exploring new possibilities in movement. It was within this climate that Bausch took over the direction of an opera house in Wuppertal and launched her dance company – the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, in 1973. It is now near impossible to enumerate the plethora of works created in Bausch’s shadow, but here, in her memory, a decade after her death, we revisit what made this vanguard of modern dance so unforgettable. 

Human emotion was at the epicentre of her oeuvre

Bausch famously once said, “I am not interested in how people move, but in what moves them.”  In rehearsals, Bausch was hands-on, provoking her dancers into movement by asking them to delve into their past experiences. Using psychological prompts such as, “Show me in movement the memory of the first time you laughed very hard,” or, “How do you behave when you’ve lost something?”, she then turned the dancer’s responses into choreography. By rejecting traditional narrative-led choreographic techniques in favour of this ontological approach to storytelling, she was able to capture the complexity of the self. 

Her sets and costumes were radical

As early as Rite of Spring in 1975, Bausch was using original backdrops for her works. For this performance, she had the stage covered with wet soil while dancers pulsated and audibly panted among the dirt. The soil became part of their bodies, peat becoming entangled in their hair and sweat. Later, in Nelken – a dance devised a year after the birth of her son in 1981 –  she had the stage carpeted with pink carnations, through which a near-naked woman wanders playing the accordion. It is one of the most sensational, ethereal moments in her repertoire. 

Controversy never deterred her

Bausch was famously condemned by New Yorker critic Arlene Croce for what she saw as entertaining the “pornography of pain”. Indeed, rape was a repeated motif in her work, depicted in full visceral, brutal honesty. Bausch did not shy away from putting other disturbing and humiliating acts on her stage, making some of her work near unwatchable. Rehearsals were equally hard to bear, with dancers occasionally breaking down and crying while practising for the show. 

 In the early days, audiences in Wuppertal, shocked and disgusted at what they were seeing walked out of shows, threw fruit at the dancers and heckled endlessly throughout performances. This was more than compensated for by the legion of supporters of Bausch’s work, notable among them Susan Sontag, Wim Wenders and Helmut Newton. 

She blurred the borders between dance and theatre

While Bausch didn’t invent ‘Tanztheater’ (its roots can be traced to Rudolf von Laban’s choric dance presentations), which translates literally as ‘dance theatre’, her work certainly redefined it for a new era. Undoubtedly, her training under Kurt Jooss – a seminal figure in contemporary dance and an advocate of expressionist choreography – played a significant role in this: as a founder of the Ausdruckstanz (free dance) movement, his teaching combined the elements of dance, music and drama in performance. 

In 1977, Bausch presented her version of Bluebeard, where she premiered the fractured, dramatic style of her later work. She introduced chaotic speech elements, with the dancers calling out seemingly random phrases, as Bluebeard stomped around a stage strewn with dead leaves. Bit by bit, Bausch perfected her own language on stage – seamlessly switching from a pas-de-deux (dance duet) to a children’s song to sinking teeth into a juicy orange in the same performance – until such dramatic elements became synonymous with ‘Bauschan’ choreography. 

She continually challenged gender roles through dance

Drawing deeply on the violent battle between the sexes, Bausch used Tanztheater to examine gender construction and explore its performative qualities. In many of her works the female dancers are hypersexual or overtly vulgar – a satirical play on the over sexualisation of women in society. By contrast, the male dancers sometimes dress in drag, wearing heels or bikinis. In the comic towel scene in Agua, created after a trip to Brazil in 2001, dancers on the beach cover themselves in towels that have bodies pictured on them, transforming the dancers into different people. Compared to classical dance, where men and women were categorised in specific and restrictive stereotypes, Tanztheater provided Bausch with the opportunity to explore a more progressive approach to gender.