Pina Bausch - From Ritual to Romance

“FOR PINA WHO OPENED OUR EYES TO THE STREET - TO TEXT - TO A WAY TO WALK - TO A WAY TO HEAR - TO A WAY TO SEE“.  Bob Wilson.  
I propose a pathway for approaching the work, drawing on decades of collaboration with Pina Bausch and on the practices that have emerged in her absence and span over diverse roles — stager, rehearsal director, and mentor.
This threestep approach has proven helpful to me in translating dance into concrete action: 
pre-imagine - working with archives, documentary sources, bodily memory, and narratives.
 imagine – questions regarding one’s own biography and identity, introspection, imagination, fantasy and the application of one’s own tools as an artist.
 re-imagine – reflection, feedback and observing from an outside perspective; examining the performers’ relationship to space, timing, musicality, and dynamics.
Pina Bausch:  “MAN KANN ES NUR AHNEN”
where words end, dance begins and feelings are something very precise. 
 It is an experiment in approach, in ceaseless exploration, questioning, and research. Motivated by curiosity, urge, passion, longing, and wondering. 
 

Why can Pina Bausch’s "Le sacre du printemps" be described as the choreography of the century? This question forms the basis of my lecture. My starting point is the fact that the piece has now been performed for more than 50 years, has been danced by several generations of dancers from the Tanztheater Wuppertal, has been staged by various dance companies worldwide, and continues to move both dancers and audiences deeply. Against this backdrop, I will discuss the relationship between ritual and choreography, representation and performance, staging and execution, as well as the significance of the audience for the stage event. In doing so, I will attempt to explain what makes Pina Bausch’s "Sacre" so unique.

In this paper, I perform extracts from a series of letters I have been writing to Pina Bausch as part of new monograph I am currently working on, Landscape and Theatricality: Taste, Ecology and Politics (Manchester University Press, 2027). I am interested in the letter form as it allows one to get closer to people and things, to take the risk of making an address, wagering on a kind of intimacy that critical writing and academic scholarship has tended to refuse. For me, that intimacy is ecological, it opens up a ‘blurred’ or atmospheric space, where self and other can meet and transform each other through their closeness. In the letters, I have been particularly interested in asking Pina about her im/material landscapes, her choreographies of air, where dancers and audiences are able to breath together in a space where history and natural history move through each like so many spectral presences. In this ecology, the eye gives precedence to the mouth and taste becomes a way of being affected, not a category of judgement.

In Café Müller, a scene returns, obstinately: a couple embraces, a third figure methodically separates them, recomposes them in a kiss, prepares the lift. Then the woman's body slips from the man's arms and falls. And the scene begins again. Faster. More violently. Again. The gestures accelerate, breathing becomes labored, bodies seem exhausted from repeating the same sequence. What does this compulsion to repeat, which runs through Pina Bausch's work, reveal to us?
As a clinical psychologist and psychopathologist, I wish to illustrate the choreographer's remarkable intuition about human psychic functioning: the necessity of repeating in order to integrate one's experiences, particularly the most painful ones. This presentation proposes to analyze what the piece Café Müller shows, through the language of bodies, about what subjects go through when facing the experience of loss. The dancers embody different ways of protecting oneself from anxiety: withdrawal into solitude, flight into perpetual agitation, melancholic collapse. But repetition is not merely compulsion and retraumatization: the work also testifies to its transformative power.
For suddenly, something changes: the woman is no longer brutally dropped but gently placed on the ground. In the meantime, the man has worked through something of his loss: how? The scenic repetition reveals its transformative potential: what repeats can also transform. The dancing bodies show us how painful experiences can progressively be worked through, how loss can be traversed.
Through the projection of video excerpts from Café Müller, we will see that Pina Bausch's dance offers a theater of psychic processes, where choreographic repetition echoes this fundamental human necessity: repeat to integrate, repeat to transform, repeat so as not to lose ourselves. Tanz, tanz, sonst sind wir verloren.

This presentation examines one of the most important and most salient effects of Pina Bausch's choreographies, namely, frissons. More specifically, one sub-species of frissons, conflict-induced frissons, feature prominently in a variety of art forms, from music and film to literature, and it is of crucial importance for understanding the audience reaction to some dance performances. This effect is analyzed through a variety of examples from some of the performances of Tanztheater Wuppertal. 

Dans cette communication je propose d’interroger l’évolution du motif du geste rituel dans la pièce Palermo Palermo, entre la réminiscence de traditions locales et l’assomption d’une prise de conscience collective, en m’appuyant sur deux cas de figures : la danse rituelle et la procession. J’émet l’hypothèse que dans la pièce Palermo Palermo, le motif du rituel soit fortement opérationnel, et qu’il s’apparente à une forme de reenactement une re-activation que détermine non seulement sa reconfiguration théâtrale, mais aussi une nouvelle forme d’agentivité. La pièce semble s’appuyer sur une ritualité ancienne pour la réinvestir avec des enjeux collectifs situés dans le présent. De la rage, à l’endurance, à la prière, la réactivation d’une ritualité, critique car distanciée par le dispositif théâtral, fait émerger des nouvelles formes de collectivité.

This presentation delves into an analysis of the creative processes explored by Pina Bausch, in which we find features of interest from an educational and pedagogical perspective, as well as parallels with the didactic approach of Creative Educational Dance. To name a few of these aspects, we would mention the journey from the personal to the collective, shared or collaborative creation, the development of bodily creativity rooted in emotion, or working with diverse bodily expressions. Pina Bausch’s approach presents a model of artistic creation based on emotion, gesture, and bodily memory, with direct applications for teaching dance in non-professional contexts.

As a dancer-researcher, my starting point has been to understand Pina Bausch’s gesture and dancing corporeality in order to identify the foundational elements of her style through the “choreographic solo” and the notion of solitude, which challenge the concepts of “being alone” and “being together” in dance. In other words, how do “dancing alone” and “dancing in relation to others” become possibilities for inhabiting the performance space beyond the number of people on stage?
Much like a vast “planetary garden” [Clément], composed of wandering and migratory plants that have constantly readapted and modified various types of ecosystems, these danced gestures articulate the corporeality of the choreographer herself with that of her performers, who come from different cultures and nationalities.
After exploring some of these choreographic principles through a dance practice, we will focus on Pina Bausch’s mouvement sources, which trace back not only to her training as a dancer—at the Folkwangschule in Essen between 1955 and 1960, and at the Juilliard School in New York between 1960 and 1962—but also to the pedagogical system of movement analysis founded in Germany by her teacher Kurt Jooss and by Sigurd Leeder in 1927, which was later developed in various territories and through the work of other artists, particularly in Chile.

This presentation reflects on a decade of oral history work at the Pina Bausch Archives, examining how dancers’ testimonies illuminate artistic processes, pedagogical lineages, cultural encounters, and personal histories within Tanztheater. Drawing on approximately seventy interviews, the project develops a methodological framework that integrates video testimony with archival materials to document rehearsal practices, generational formation, political and transcultural experiences, and moments of rupture or displacement. By making embodied experience narratable rather than theoretical, the article foregrounds narrative, memory, and institutional context, showing how oral history expands the archive and enables a more nuanced understanding of Tanztheater’s artistic and historical development.

This paper centres on Pina Bausch’s dance-opera Orpheus and Eurydice (1975). Though she would depart almost entirely from linear plot and recognisable choreography in the years that followed this work, the movement language of Orpheus and Eurydice boldly amalgamates classical and contemporary technique, acknowledging the rich legacy inherited from predecessors including George Balanchine, Mary Wigman, and Martha Graham. In framing the piece as a choreographic love letter, I propose that we might understand Bausch’s Orpheus not only as a homage to her antecedents, but also to the transnational and migratory legacy of modern dance in Europe and the United States.