Theatre Practitioners: Pina Bausch

Theatre Practitioner 5:
Philippina Bausch
Born: July 27, 1940, Solingen, Germany
Died: June 30, 2009, Wuppertal, Germany
Influenced By: Observing people and music

Pina Bausch was born in 1940 where her parents owned a restaurant in Solingen and so her passion for dance evolved from here where she would entertain the customers with impromptu dances. This carried forward into her early childhood and the atmosphere of her life through her pieces of dance and music were lively and happy even though war was also a common theme in her pieces as her early life experience revolved around war which caused sudden outbursts of panic and fear of an unknown danger.

Her drive for choreography and dance started at a young age and continued with her for her whole life. She received dance training at Folkwang School in Essen and shortly after that, the director of Wuppertal's Theatres, engaged her as choreographer in the autumn of 1973. The company gradually achieved international recognition with combination of poetic and everyday elements incorporated into development of the dances. She also spent a year in Juilliard as a special student and got to work with many significant performers.

Bausch's working methods and techniques can be divided into three broad phrases. Around 1975 and 1977, her earliest works were the most conventionally choreographic with a development and a denouement (such as a story/plot). These were drawn from the personal lives of performers and the mediums included song, film, costume, set design and props.

Pivotal in establishing theatre as a dance form. Started pushing boundaries.
Chose an aspect (leaves, cloth, sand, etc) or motif behind movement

Impact on world of theatre and contributions: 
Pina sensed that the world had irretrievably changed and she determined to reinvent the language of dance to release it from traditional confines. Pina Bausch brought dance, theatre and German expressionism together – a blend of raw emotionalism, stark movement, earthly pathos and humour. Pina demanded from her dancers an open and authentic response to her vision and ideas, whether that be through dance, song, mime, spoken words or other. Dance technique and young bodies were not prerequisites for this revolutionized language of dance. Some of the Tanztheater dancers have been with the company for 35 years. As Pina said, “I’m not concerned with the way my dancers move, but what moves my dancers.” Bausch changed dance fundamentally by removing the smiling ethereal ballerina attempting to float above us, replacing her with a fusion of radical interactive theatre, surreal imagery and ‘danced body language’. In contemporary dance today the influence of Bausch is seen in its rawness, relative freedom and willingness to explore a variety of forms so as to expose an internal world. Her influence is also seen in the way choreographers work with their dancers – a 2-pronged process where through improvisation ‘tasks’ the choreographer allows the soul of the dancer to enter the process.