Pina Bausch

Pina Bausch was a German choreographer and director who transformed what dance could contain and what audiences might feel. Born Philippine Bausch on July 27, 1940, in Solingen, she grew up in her family's restaurant attached to a small hotel—an environment of arrivals, departures, music, conversation, and longing that shaped her lifelong attentiveness to fundamental human impulses. At fourteen she entered the Folkwang School in Essen, where she studied with Kurt Jooss, a major figure in German expressive dance who sought a disciplined meeting between ballet's formal clarity and the freer discoveries of Ausdruckstanz. The school's proximity of dance to music, opera, theatre, photography, painting, and sculpture gave the young artist a model of the stage as a meeting place for many forms.

In 1958, Bausch received the Folkwang Leistungspreis and a German Academic Exchange Service scholarship for study at the Juilliard School in New York. There, teachers including Antony Tudor, José Limón, Alfredo Corvino, and Margret Craske exposed her to ballet, modern dance, jazz, opera, and popular culture without the rigid hierarchy between "serious" and popular music she had encountered in Germany. She performed with Paul Taylor, Paul Sanasardo, and Donya Feuer, and worked in the ballet company at the Metropolitan Opera. That openness to plural sources remained audible throughout her career.

Jooss invited Bausch back to Essen in 1962. She returned as a soloist in the Folkwang Dance Studio, danced in Jooss's repertory, and began making work when the ensemble needed new pieces. Her early choreographies included *Fragment* and *Im Wind der Zeit*; the latter won first prize at the International Choreographic Workshop in Cologne in 1969. Guest projects in Wuppertal followed, establishing her as both a formidable dancer and a maker able to give precise form to elusive emotional states.

In the 1973/74 season, Wuppertal theatre director Arno Wüstenhöfer appointed Bausch to lead the city's ballet ensemble. She renamed it Tanztheater Wuppertal, signaling a commitment to dramatic and choreographic means beyond conventional ballet. Her earliest Wuppertal works tested different forms at remarkable speed: *Fritz*; Gluck's dance operas *Iphigenie auf Tauris* and *Orpheus und Eurydike*; the Brecht-Weill double bill *The Seven Deadly Sins* and *Don't Be Afraid*; and, in 1975, her epochal staging of Stravinsky's *The Rite of Spring*. Danced on a thick field of peat designed by Rolf Borzik, *The Rite of Spring* made exhaustion, weight, group pressure, fear, and sacrifice materially present. Early Wuppertal audiences did not always welcome Bausch's unsettling departures, but the intensity that provoked resistance ultimately helped transform international expectations of dance.

During the later 1970s, Bausch's art became unmistakably its own. In *Bluebeard. While Listening to a Tape Recording of Béla Bartók's Opera "Duke Bluebeard's Castle"* (1977), recorded music is stopped, rewound, and replayed until repetition becomes a dramatic action. *Café Müller* (1978), set to Purcell and performed in Borzik's room of chairs and tables, turned collision, care, compulsion, and sleepwalking vulnerability into an enduring stage image; Bausch herself danced in its original cast. *Kontakthof* (1978) examined social presentation and the uneasy bargaining of intimacy, later returning in versions performed by adults over sixty-five and by teenagers. These works exemplify her conviction that ordinary actions—walking, laughing, touching, displaying the body—can be as choreographically charged as a technically difficult step.

Bausch's method made the performers' humanity part of the material. Rather than arrive with every sequence fixed, she posed questions and tasks; dancers answered in speech, gesture, memory, action, or movement. She then selected, transformed, ordered, and refined this material into tightly composed works. The dancers were not anonymous instruments. Their ages, accents, histories, temperaments, and physical particularities remained visible. The authorship was unmistakably Bausch's in its selection and composition, yet it was relational and depended on the ensemble. So did the visual and musical worlds. Her life partner Rolf Borzik designed sets and costumes until his death in 1980. Peter Pabst subsequently created the transformative environments of twenty-six productions; Marion Cito shaped the costumes; dramaturge Raimund Hoghe and musical collaborators Matthias Burkert and Andreas Eisenschneider were also central to the mature Wuppertal language.

From the 1980s onward, Tanztheater Wuppertal became one of the world's defining performance ensembles. *1980 — A Piece by Pina Bausch*, *Nelken (Carnations)*, *Two Cigarettes in the Dark*, and *Viktor* expanded her gallery of social ritual, memory, comedy, tenderness, and danger. *Viktor*, developed in Rome in 1986, opened a long sequence of works arising from residencies and international collaborations. Later projects engaged encounters with Palermo, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Lisbon, Budapest, Istanbul, Saitama, Seoul, India, Brazil, and Chile. Works such as *Der Fensterputzer*, *Masurca Fogo*, *Água*, *Nefés*, *Ten Chi*, *Bamboo Blues*, *Vollmond*, and *Sweet Mambo* kept renewing the vocabulary. Water crashed across Peter Pabst's stage in *Vollmond*; carnations covered it in *Nelken*; a wall fell in *Palermo Palermo*. The environment changed the performers' actions, risk, timing, and physical truth.

International honors eventually matched Bausch's influence. She received Japan's Praemium Imperiale in 1999, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Dance at the Venice Biennale in 2007, and the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy the same year. Her presence crossed into cinema: Federico Fellini cast her in *And the Ship Sails On*; Pedro Almodóvar placed excerpts from *Café Müller* and *Masurca Fogo* in *Talk to Her*; and Bausch wrote, choreographed, and directed the film *The Complaint of the Empress*. In 2009 she completed the Chile-inspired *…como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si…*. She died in Wuppertal on June 30 of that year, aged sixty-eight. Wim Wenders and the company subsequently completed *Pina*, a 3-D film tribute that premiered in 2011 and brought her work to a vast new audience.