Adieu, Pina Bausch

Pina Bausch, Pina Ballerina. No other dancer in the world embodied more beauty, glamor, emotion and movement. Her eyes, shoulders, a sinewy neck, a smile, a man's hat, men's trousers, a cigarette, that's how they were known: taciturn, filigree and enigmatic, self-loving, delicate and ironic. Madonna and sphinx at the same time. Born in Solingen, she revolutionized the stages of the world from the neighboring city of Wuppertal.

Everything I do I do as a dancer.

"Everything I do, I do as a dancer, everything, everything!", Said Pina Bausch two years before her death. It began when the shy daughter of an innkeeper sat dreamily between legs under tavern tables. Since the age of four, the little Philippine danced, as her baptismal name. After completing her studies at the Folkwang School in Essen and two years of modern dance studies in New York, she returned to the Folkwang Ballet. At 33, she became a ballet director and chief choreographer at the Wuppertal theaters. One burying tutus and dying swans in the abysses of the stage vault. Scandalous in their beginnings. Because as a choreographer, she not only let her ensemble dance, but also tell stories, play, sing, scream and do things that were never seen on stage before. "Fake, fake, fake - all wrong," cried New York ballet pope Clive Barnes hoarsely. "Relations to the schizoid", a German critic attested in 1974. When hippopotamus dancers disguised in their "arias" in 1979, men in dresses and women with naked breasts made water battles on stage, the premiere audience changed to hooligans who shouted and screamed wildly beat each other. In Germany she was booed, praised in France as "Fée de Wuppertal".



There were no rigid choreographies with Pina Bausch

"It was and always is all about me: how can I express what I feel?" She said. Without words. Because in the beginning was not the word, but feeling and movement. The emotion.

Pina Bausch revolutionized the theater world.

For this she has broken radically with traditional dance and has focused entirely on body language and body images. Fearing words, she said, but also out of respect. Because she did not dare to put into words what moved her.

There were no rigid choreographies with Pina Bausch. Their starting materials were the people and their bodies, which carry traces of lived and unlived life in themselves.

On guest tours between Rome and Hong Kong, she and her ensemble collected rhythms, images and smells. With questions she approached the topics. Love and gender struggle, grief, fear, childhood and the environment. In small scenes she let the dancers play what they felt. They raced against walls or climbed up a section of wall, hopping for 8000 cloves, pedaling among giant cacti, or crawling through the water as in "Masurca Fogo." In the "Café Müller" Pina Bausch danced herself through her childhood. "What do you do not do anything to be loved," she said.



Nobody knew what she wanted to do with the rehearsals, she could not say it herself. At the end, she put everything together like a collage. Done were her pieces at the premiere rare, humor they always had, titles they got later, and frenetic cheered the audience. "We are puffing", the writer Péter Esterházy once called this state. For the dance theater of Pina Bausch did not have to be understood, but felt.

She was once asked why she had not migrated to the metropolises that courted her around the world. The answer of the dancer: "I believe in the imagination, if I want the sun to shine, then I'll just let it go, also in Wuppertal."

Pina Bausch died on June 30, 2009 - five days after a cancer diagnosis, 18 days after the premiere of her last play at the Wuppertal Opera House.

Sirène 2.0 (part 2) + Adieu Pina Bausch (Marta & the Psycho Sons) (March 2024).



Wuppertal, cigarette, Madonna, Solingen, New York, Pina Bausch