Pina Bausch: Because she was the most famous and important choreographer in the world

For 35 years the great German choreographer Pina Bausch he has produced a huge number of intensely personal works and almost completely impossible to define and even more to describe.

Pina Bausch’s creations lent themselves to sociological, psychoanalytic, or political interpretations, but she felt a certain rejection of this type of analysis. She simply stated: “I think in my works I speak only of the need to be loved that we all have “.

Maybe that’s the key to understanding how his work touched the sensitivity of the entire audiencein Tokyo and Santiago de Chile, in Sydney and Lisbon, in New York and Jakarta.

Pina Bausch’s influence on dance, and on the theater scene in general, is incalculable. Right now, at the Cervantes Theater in the city of Buenos Aires, a show directed by the Argentine choreographer Diana Szeinblum and featuring the work of Pina has just been premiered.

The first steps

Pina Bausch (1940-2009) was born in the middle of the Second World War in the German city of Solingen. in 1941 the old quarter of Solingen was entirely destroyed by British bombsbut the little Filipina (this was her full name) did not have a conscious memory of the war, despite those early years spent at the bar of her parents’ small hotel, hidden under the tables.

She was a solitary and quiet creature who, despite her shyness, enthusiastically accepted the idea of ​​being part of a children’s ballet. There he was assigned small roles: the elevator operator in an operetta, the little newsboy, the black boy waving fans in the harem.

That is how, Almost without realizing it, he entered the world of theater: “Appearing on stage gave me a mixture of terror and happiness. When I finished school, when I had to think seriously about the future, my decision was made ”. However, she did not imagine herself as a choreographer. I just wanted to dance and so he began to create pieces to be able to interpret them.

hell and heaven

In 1973 this young choreographer, who had already composed a handful of works, arrives in the town of Wuppertal for take charge of the dance cast of the Municipal Theater; Until then, the company had composed a fundamentally neoclassical repertoire.

Pina’s beginnings in Wuppertal were extremely difficult despite the solid support and ample freedom given to her by the director of the Municipal Theater. Even until the late 1970s, the Wuppertal audience was still split on the new director.

On the one hand, a compact group of admirers was supported; for the other, a front of convinced detractors, among which the most violent have covered Pina Bausch with insults at the exit of a function and the most excited would wake her up with phone calls in the middle of the night to order her to leave town. Many of the dancers from that first cast also left her.

But in the modest setting of this provincial town, a kind of miraculous laboratory was already taking shape in the hands of the revolutionary genius of Pina Bausch. In the years, she and her company would be regarded throughout Germany as a symbolically prestigious export item like vehicles. Mercedes Benz.

His personal life

One wonders if Pina has managed to make a personal life, outside of a creative and directing work that consumed whole days practically non-stop throughout the year.

Always – in an interview, at a press conference, when greeting on stage, in informal photos – he seemed on the verge of exhaustion.

But he had two great loves: the first was Rolk Borzik (1944-1980), set designer and painter, with whom Pina Bausch begins to experiment settings transformed by the presence of different materials: covered with peat, as in the famous version of Pina Spring consecrationand in other works, of debris, branches or dry leaves.

Borzik died in 1980 of leukemia and shortly after Pina met, on a tour in South America, Ronald Kay (1941-1917), Chilean writer.

With him she had a son, Rolf Solomon Bausch Kay, the sole heir of Pina’s artistic heritage; the relationship with his mother was conflicting and some people close to the choreographer attribute the dizzying changes of direction of the company, after the death of Pina, – six successive directors to date – to the action of his son.

some misunderstandings

Such is the weight of Pina Bausch’s work that inevitably some mythologies have been created about his work. For example, he created the term and concept “dance-theater” from scratch.

However, this is not the case. The term had already been used in 1928 by Kurt Jooss, a leading figure in German and also modern dance First teacher, principal and practically adoptive father of Pina Bauschin which he soon saw his great choreographic talent.

In the 1960s the great German tradition of modern dance was lost, but in 1970 the term “dance-theater” returned to vogue. Or more than to become fashionable, to express a real revolution in the performing arts of which Pina was the most conspicuous figure.

The method of composition

It is true that widespread idea that Pina he composed his works from the improvisations of his dancers?

This is not exactly the case. Instead, during the creation process, Pina proposed an idea or theme to the dancers and gave them time to come up with a dance sequence. So, that dance material may or may not find a place in the new job. Or perhaps appear, but in a practically unrecognizable form.

Pineapple used to make changes to the choreography, sometimes very close to the before and even after. But she rarely explained the reasons for these changes to the interpreters.

counted Domenico Misericordiaa dancer who was part of the company from start to finish: “The audience was waiting for us at the exit of the theater to tell us ‘how deep your characters are, how deeply rooted you are in the spirit of Pina'”.

To conclude: “And we obviously told them that in the first performances we only thought frantically if we should go out on the right or left side of the stage, with whom, at what time and in what costumes”.

The profile of the dancers

Cristiana Morganti – who has been part of the Wuppertal company for 22 years – told this reporter the following in February 2020, during a visit to Buenos Aires with her show Moving with the pineapple:

“There are great misunderstandings about how Pina chose her performers. It must be said that the dancers, once they entered they remained without time limits. Now, the auditions, when there were, first consisted of a ballet class and this was the first important filter. “

And he continued: «In the 80s there were clowns or jugglers, that is, people who had never studied dance and who were very surprised when Pina asked them to do bar dance exercises or diagonal dance sequences. For Pina, the technique was fundamental and she was already looking for highly educated people who had a strong command of the movement ”.

the human condition

Someone said that one way to measure the influence of Pina Bausch’s work is that no one has had as many imitators as her for the past forty-five years.

But perhaps it is more important to note the original and powerful way in which he managed to grasp the pains and joys of the human condition in a unique stage language that addressed everything he needed: dance, of course, but also words, songs, objects, materials.

Each piece by Pina Bausch is, at the same time, light and dark, mysterious and transparenthermetic and clear.

It was from before blaubartin 1977. that Pina was more decidedly inclined towards a type of fragmentary narrative: collages of parallel stories, of dissimilar climates in which violence, tenderness, humor, desperation, brutality and ridicule follow one another or overlap.

I’m works full of life and enormous melancholyalthough in their last phase they would become lighter and happier, more celebratory than the dance.

Pina in Buenos Aires and her tango lessons

The Wuppertal company has performed twice in Buenos Aires: the first in 1980, with four works; one of them was his wonderful Müller coffee and the other, the no less wonderful Spring Rite. They returned in 1995 with Bandoneon, inspired by the tango music that Pina had found on her previous trip. An important work.

It was also on this trip that started taking tango lessons with Tete Rusconi, former municipal employee of Buenos Aires and inveterate milonguero, who Pina then took to Wuppertal for several years to give tango courses to her dancers.

a family resemblance

The Wuppertal company had a unique identity: a very heterogeneous group of artists in physique and personality, from many countries around the world (an Argentine too, Silvia Farías, even though she grew up in Ecuador) and of very different ages. At one point three generations coincided in the same cast.

Where did that “family resemblance” that distinguished them come from? On the one hand, the affinity with the same Pina who was looking for, “When I choose a dancer it is, among other things, because I really want to know him”,

And on the other hand, the cast shared – for many hours of the day and for most of the year – practice sessions, the daily lesson, creation residencies in other countries and international tours. It would be impossible to conceive a work by Pina Bausch that did not have such a cast, with these life experiences.

In an interview from the 1990s, Pina Bausch answered the question of what her dancers had in common: “Maybe shyness. They are all very shy, even if they don’t seem like that. That’s right, I like this one of them. If you are shy, you are also more sensitive and more capable of building strength on stage, “he said.

“There are people who show up to my auditions and do or say amazing things. They get naked or whatever, not realizing it’s not what I’m looking for.. Even more, I think shyness was a necessary state to work with me ”.

Pina Bausch died on 30 June 2009 in Wuppertal – where else? -, Germany.

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