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Born in Solingen in 1940, Philippina Bausch grew up amid the ruins and new beginnings of postwar Germany. Possessed of a voracious cultural curiosity, she trained and worked with artists as diverse as Kurt Jooss, the quintessential exponent of German Expressionist dance, Paul Taylor, one of the forerunners of American New Dance, and British-born Antony Tudor, one of the fathers of modern ballet. Her creativity also drew upon sources and influences outside dance’s constraining boundaries; her performance-making always contained a mosaic of ideas and explanations, which she handpicked and collated with unparalleled artistic wit and scholarly insight.
It was her powerfully dramatic 1975 version of Rite of Spring — the stage was covered in soil and the dancers were allowed to display the fatigue and difficulties of performing on an uneven surface — that propelled her to the centre of the international dance scene. Her Rite of Spring was not just a new version of the famously controversial 1913 ballet, though. It was also the manifesto for a new choreographic era, as Bausch reinvented dance from scratch, by questioning, challenging, appropriating and revisiting ideas, precepts, conventions and long-held beliefs. She was happy to be the outsider, the one who always stood out and never went with the flow, much to the dismay of some and the delight of many others.
Regarded as impenetrable by her many denigrators — the number of whom is ironically decreasing since the release of the two movies about her — Bausch was both a Wagnerian and a Brechtian. Indeed, her impact on the world of theatre was as powerful as that made, at different times, by those two artists/theorists. Appropriately adapted notions of Gesamtkunstwerk, leitmotiv, estrangement and alienation populate and underpin her dramatically dense, visually powerful and often overwhelmingly lengthy creations, eliciting mystic awe and fascination among viewers.
Pina Bausch was to earn the title of dance’s ‘high priestess’ (an appellation shared with her predecessors Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham), which encapsulated perfectly the almost religious zeal that underscored her unconditional love for her art. The iconic film director Federico Fellini, who worked with her in E la nave va (And the ship sails on, 1983), referred to her as a ‘nun’, although ‘a nun who unexpectedly turns and winks at you’. That wink, a somewhat tongue-in-cheek reminder that there is more to the human condition than doom and gloom, is carefully embedded in all her works, no matter how dramatic they are.
She was often depicted as the dauntingly tyrannical leader of her company, the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. Yet she believed in collaboration and in a constant dialogue with her performers, whose individual talents she considered paramount to the creation of any work. As reported by many, she was not interested in how the performers moved but in ‘what moved them’. All the works she created around specific cities, works that will be presented in the month-long World Cities 2012 season at Sadler’s Wells, were composed as choreographic ‘diaries’, in which each artist’s personal response to the distinctive features of a particular town was elaborated and turned into performance material. These works, therefore, highlight Bausch’s unique ability to collate and narrate those stories — possibly, the best way to celebrate her genius.
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch: World Cities 2012 runs from 6 June to 9 July at Sadler’s Wells.
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