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Makenna Hague
Prohosky/Graham
Dance 461
02, March 2014
The Expressionist: The story of Pina Bausch
June 2009, five days after being diagnosed with lung cancer, the world lost a leader in
revolutionizing modern dance, German choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch. Over her 68
years, Bausch showed the world through her art work, an exploration of elements that make up
the human experience: beauty, awkwardness, cruelty, insanity, humor and despair. As director of
her own company in Wuppertal, Germany, she inspired a devoted following at home and abroad,
and proved to be very influential. Pina Bausch created art that was relatable to diverse audiences,
the combination of theater and dance allowed her to use experiences from her childhood,
marriage, and education to explore raw human emotion, thoughts, and gestures to create work
that was original and timeless.
Bauschs broad artistic training in Germany inspired her to move to New York as an
outlet for creativity, and thus her career as a choreographer began. She started to choreograph a
number of short pieces in traditional modern dance style. It was not until the summer of 1976
that she bravely terminated her contract with tradition through her choreography. All of Bauschs
pieces dealt with key questions of human existence, tirelessly forcing the audience to face up to
such questions; only her late works mellowed by age take the edge off this hardness.Her dance
training allowed for her natural inventiveness to be enhanced by creative expression. At fourteen
Pina Bausch began studying dance with Kurt Jooss at the Folkwang School in Essen, Germany.
Jooss sought to reconcile the free spirit of the dance revolutionaries with the fundamental rules

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of ballet, the young dance student Bausch thus acquired techniques for free creative expression
as well as the command of clear form. It was at Folkwang where Pina would meet her life
partner and huge inspiration Rolf Borzik. They soon hit it off and from 1970 onwards they lived
together. Rolf Borzik designed sets and costumes. They formed a congenial partnership. They
both agreed that the stylizations typical at the time were not appropriate for new dance theater
pieces, which needed to be anchored firmly in reality. The proximity of the other arts taught at
the Folkwang School, including opera, music, drama, sculpture, painting, photography, design
was also an important influence on her, reflected later in the form of a wholly open approach to
the media in her work as a choreographer.
Pina Baush choreographed a series of works that were original and very unique in theme
and movement, but one piece she choose to choreograph re-visited an earlier idea of the Rite of
Spring. In her setting of Rite shows the violent selection and death of a sacrificial victim. The
stage is quite mysterious in its grim and stark, soil covered stage and by choreography with a
large assemble. . . Some 32 dancers confront each other in thudding convulsive groups, ranked
across a sexual divide. As they unite in great wheeling circles then scatter into a collective frenzy
of coupling, Bausch makes it appear as though they are galvanized by some savage, biological
imperative. As they run and fall, dirt smears their sweaty bodies. By the time the chosen maiden
is led towards her sacrificial solo she seems to be only thing standing against her tribe and their
absolute terror of extinction. Her dread and her ecstasy leave us shaking. There is a social
contrast between the group of men who make the selection and the cowering ranks of women
who provide the victim. There is an implicit sense of rape and, interlaced with the pounding
fury and self-hatred, a whisper of the nightmares

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Caf Muller is a far more intimate work - In an evidently public room a deserted cafe with
scattered tables and chairs, a sleepwalker wanders in a nightgown, with eyes closed. Yet
everything about this scrabbling sleepwalker suggests that she is absorbing into her pores every
single detail of the emotionally stunted behavior around her - just as she has absorbed the life
around her to create her work.
One must assume Caf Muller is based on Bausch's childhood memories of her parents'
establishment. Pina was an interesting child, where at a young age she sought out opportunities
to observe people, understand ordinary daily interactions and desires of those around her. Her
parents ran a restaurant in Solingen attached to a hotel where, along with her siblings, Pina
helped out. Above all she wanted to know what made up a person, what drives them and moves
them deep down. The atmosphere of her early childhood seems to find an echo in her pieces;
music is heard, people come and go, and talk of their yearning for happiness can be evident in
her creation of Caf Muller.
Overlaying the melancholy, meanwhile - so delicate as to be near-invisible - are
passages of exquisite, minimal dance. Arms extended in sad, imploring farewell, bodies
swaying as if animated by some faint, underwater current. The result is as uplifting as it is
intensely sad, and shot through with a haunting familiarity.
There's a hawk-faced man in a suit who enters and exits with blank purpose; an
anguished waiter endlessly clearing away the furniture; a blind woman caught in a revolving
door; and a couple who attempt mutual support but end up battering each other against the wall.
Perhaps they are all already dead: their hopeless, desolated faces certainly suggest this.

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Five other people are present - but their behavior appears both pointless and
obsessional. The action is seen as by a nave child, but also as by an adult who understands the
tragedies and disappointments the caf once harbored. There is the woman who keeps leaping
ardently into the arms of her lover who in turn weakly, sorrowfully keeps dropping her. There is
the man anxious and bespectacled who races through the caf knocking away chairs and tables in
case someone might get hurt or the second women in a red wig who ineffectually gestures kindly
intentions but is unable to attract any notice. It's a mistake to try and decode Bausch pieces;
they're too elusive for that, but Caf Mller seems to clearly be a digest of childhood memories.
Bursts of violence are followed by long stillnesss. Bits of business are systematically
repeated, sometimes with increasing urgency but more often with no variation at all. At every
repetition, less is revealed, and the action that looked gratuitous to begin with dissolves into
meaningless frenzy. What you see is what you get, a highly charged theatrical experience
performed by mature-looking performers who appear spent by life before they even begin living.
The excitement emanates from the highly controlled energy, the brilliant use of space, the
cinematic overlap and flow of imagery.
Fear, also of her own failure, forcefully drove her work. Yet, the desire to be loved is
stronger than fear and that truth stands her choreography. Conflicts and comedy in Bauschs
work stem from these two driving emotions. She never regarded the steps or the movements as
the most important thing; she was never interested in how people move, but in what moves
them. Bausch said of her own attitude toward dance-watching: ''I want to feel something, as a
person. I don't want to be bored.'' Feeling, in fact, was paramount in Miss Bausch's work, and
nowhere did she experiment with emotions more typically than in her desire for repeating scenes

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and gestures. Over the years, her stagings included dancers splashing through pools of water and
flip-flopping on mounds of dirt. Bausch was looking for her own language. "I didn't want to
imitate anybody," she said. "Any movement I knew, I didn't want to use." Her key signature in
her works showed men and women engaged in endless, often violent, power struggles.
Pina Bausch broke the rules of tradition, showing expression and individualism. Bausch
was someone who knew and understood the importance of truth and shared that in her work. Her
continual use of personal experience, and training created pieces of art work that is now seen as
timeless. Her influence allowed audiences to feel uncomfortable, to think differently, and
respond naturally. She explored human existence and shared her thoughts and ideas of what it
was in her dances. Dancers relive her legacy of movement and creativity as they continue to
explore, dream and inspire those they share their own work with.