pina bausch

Pina Bausch died today in Wuppertal, Germany, the industrial town she has enlivened since 1972 with the work of her company, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.  

Her work may be most known to the non-dance world by its appearance in the Almodovar film Talk to Her.  A scene from Cafe Muller appears in the opening.  Pina and another dancer wind around a room full of chairs with their hands out and eyes closed, wearing nightgowns.  A man tosses the chairs out of the way.  They cease on the wall stage right, and slide down.  Pina frightened me in that scene many years before I studied her work: she was very thin and severe, with great pain in her tense elbows, and a futile lifting of both legs just a few degrees from the floor before dropping them down to join the rest of her body.  Pina Bausch in that scene is depicted above. 

I have since been inspired by her other works, which depict people in bizarre action.  In Nelken, the floor is covered in carnations, and in one scene a man in a ball gown alone onstage is running around, shouting at the audience.  Another scene, I believe this is from Muller, has a woman in a very regular dress standing center, while ten or so men go about the deliberate work of touching her, dissociative and nonsexual, on the nose, the forearm, the skirt-hem, the hair, and her body sways from all the hands though they each only exert slight force.  She combines normal elements to achieve the absurd, or perverts a single action by its repetition to surreal effect.  All the dancers are acting as people, not anything ethereal, no dancerly proportion of distance, and that is what is absorbing about these scenes.  

A few of my favorite segments I could find are below.