Dance in Film · 2011
Pina (2011)
Wim Wenders's 3D tribute to Pina Bausch, capturing her revolutionary Tanztheater company performing signature works.
Pina is a 2011 dance documentary centred on ballroom and social dance. For dancers, it's a chance to see the style performed on screen — the phrasing, partnering, and musicality that the same dances carry onto a real floor.
Jump to the 17 indexed dance sequences ↓
Where to watch: Streaming (various)
Trailer
Official trailer.
The dance sequences in Pina
17 sequences, 1 with a timestamp — what is danced, by whom, and where to find it.
- 00:01:23
Nelken season-gesture prologue
Danced by Unidentified Tanztheater Wuppertal dancer · Choreography Pina Bausch
The four crisp gestures that turn warm, hot, cool and cold into a miniature calendar.
A lone dancer names spring, summer, autumn and winter while compact hand-and-arm signs translate temperature into the body. Wenders isolates the gestures against the stage before the film scatters their vocabulary across Wuppertal, making this tiny phrase the documentary's visual refrain.
Stream or rental only — the timestamp is for when you have it playing. 00:01:23 is the first spoken season cue in the named BR.1080p subtitle reference; the release-specific timing may shift. U.S. streaming/rental access verified 2026-08-04.
Archival Pina Bausch solo
Danced by Pina Bausch · Choreography Pina Bausch
Bausch's ghostlike monochrome figure swaying while her company watches the embedded screen.
Black-and-white footage places Pina Bausch's spare swaying solo on a flat screen inside Wenders' dimensional film. The troupe watches their absent choreographer move in Café Müller, so the older image becomes both a dance record and a visible object of mourning.
Stream or rental only — the timestamp is for when you have it playing. Timestamp left blank: the dance onset falls in a subtitle-silent passage in the named BR.1080p reference; commercial editions may shift. U.S. streaming/rental access verified 2026-08-04.
Café Müller
Danced by Tanztheater Wuppertal dancers · Choreography Pina Bausch
Blind forward motion, chairs and frantic clearing produce danger through repeated spatial obstruction.
Editing and production design move between physical space and a heightened performance world without losing the dancers' bodily through-line. The choreography externalizes thought through scale, repetition and contrast, so the sequence lands as an argument made in movement.
Café Müller — forced embrace loop
Danced by Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble · Choreography Pina Bausch
The couple's embrace turning into ever-faster lifts and falls under another man's hands.
A third figure repeatedly arranges a couple into embrace, kiss, lift and collapse, then returns them to the beginning before they can recover. As the performers accelerate the imposed sequence, tenderness becomes a mechanical failure loop whose growing speed is funny and frightening at once.
Stream or rental only — the timestamp is for when you have it playing. Timestamp left blank: the dance onset falls in a subtitle-silent passage in the named BR.1080p reference; commercial editions may shift. U.S. streaming/rental access verified 2026-08-04. Henry Purcell supplies the music for Café Müller.
Café Müller — sleepwalker among chairs
Danced by Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble · Choreography Pina Bausch
The chair-clearer racing to save the sleepwalking woman from the next collision.
A woman advances as if asleep through Café Müller's crowded chairs while a man scrambles ahead, flinging each obstacle out of her path. The camera's closeness makes every near-collision register in the body, especially when the blind trajectory keeps moving after the furniture has crashed aside.
Stream or rental only — the timestamp is for when you have it playing. Timestamp left blank: the dance onset falls in a subtitle-silent passage in the named BR.1080p reference; commercial editions may shift. U.S. streaming/rental access verified 2026-08-04. Henry Purcell supplies the music for Café Müller.
Kontakthof
Danced by Tanztheater Wuppertal dancers · Choreography Pina Bausch
Frontal social rituals accumulate through repetition until small gestures read as coercion, need and display.
Wide frames make the ensemble geometry readable, while selective cuts redirect attention without breaking the musical phrase. Layered entrances and changing formations turn the group itself into a visual rhythm, giving the number scale without sacrificing clarity.
Kontakthof — three generations of courtship
Danced by Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble; Kontakthof cast aged 65–80; Kontakthof teenage cast aged 14 and older · Choreography Pina Bausch
Teenagers and senior citizens inheriting the same nervous line of courtship gestures.
Wenders cuts the same courtship room among the company, senior adults and teenagers, letting repeated smiles, inspections and social-dance manners age in front of the viewer. Chairs and formal clothes stay constant while hesitant young bodies and weathered older bodies expose different costs inside the identical ritual.
Stream or rental only — the timestamp is for when you have it playing. Timestamp left blank: the dance onset falls in a subtitle-silent passage in the named BR.1080p reference; commercial editions may shift. U.S. streaming/rental access verified 2026-08-04. The soundtrack draws on Juan Llossas, Charlie Chaplin, Anton Karas, Jean Sibelius and others.
Le Sacre du printemps — peat-field sacrifice
Danced by Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble · Choreography Pina Bausch
The chosen woman in red surrounded by an earth-streaked ensemble on the peat-covered stage.
Barefoot dancers drive through a stage carpeted with dark peat, wading, leaping and rolling until earth clings to skin and pale costumes. Wenders' mobile 3D camera enters the heaving crowd, while the red dress and sacrificial selection make Stravinsky's pressure feel both communal and brutally focused.
Stream or rental only — the timestamp is for when you have it playing. Timestamp left blank: the dance onset falls in a subtitle-silent passage in the named BR.1080p reference; commercial editions may shift. U.S. streaming/rental access verified 2026-08-04. The excerpt uses Igor Stravinsky's score.
Nelken gesture line
Danced by Tanztheater Wuppertal dancers · Choreography Pina Bausch
A simple traveling line translates seasonal change into repeatable hand gesture and shared timing.
Wide frames make the ensemble geometry readable, while selective cuts redirect attention without breaking the musical phrase. Layered entrances and changing formations turn the group itself into a visual rhythm, giving the number scale without sacrificing clarity.
Nelken season-gesture procession
Danced by Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble · Choreography Pina Bausch
The full ensemble carrying warm, hot, cool and cold along the ridge in one unbroken line.
High above Wuppertal, the whole troupe advances in a long line while hips sway and arms repeat the spring-summer-autumn-winter signs introduced by one dancer at the start. The city and slag-heap horizon replace theater scenery, and the shared phrase converts an individual demonstration into a moving company memorial.
Stream or rental only — the timestamp is for when you have it playing. Timestamp left blank: the dance onset falls in a subtitle-silent passage in the named BR.1080p reference; commercial editions may shift. U.S. streaming/rental access verified 2026-08-04.
Rainer Behr's precipice solo
Danced by Rainer Behr · Choreography Pina Bausch
Behr's solitary figure working the loose ground with open countryside dropping away behind him.
Rainer Behr dances alone on dusty, broken ground at the edge of a precipice overlooking fields. His steps kick the landscape into motion underfoot, extending Bausch's stage elements—earth, stone and sand—into a real horizon where there is no theatrical border to contain him.
Stream or rental only — the timestamp is for when you have it playing. Timestamp left blank: the dance onset falls in a subtitle-silent passage in the named BR.1080p reference; commercial editions may shift. U.S. streaming/rental access verified 2026-08-04.
Red-gown tree procession
Danced by Unidentified Tanztheater Wuppertal woman; Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble · Choreography Pina Bausch
The red-gowned woman carrying an entire young tree while the procession passes before her.
A woman in a red gown bears a small tree strapped upright to her back while a measured single-file procession crosses the foreground. The living burden and deliberately ordinary walk create a Bausch image at once ceremonial and absurd, with Wenders holding both vertical tree and horizontal human line in the frame.
Stream or rental only — the timestamp is for when you have it playing. Timestamp left blank: the dance onset falls in a subtitle-silent passage in the named BR.1080p reference; commercial editions may shift. U.S. streaming/rental access verified 2026-08-04.
Sidewalk trust-fall duet
Danced by Unidentified Tanztheater Wuppertal woman and man · Choreography Pina Bausch
The second rigid-body fall stopping just before the woman's face reaches the concrete.
On an empty sidewalk, the woman in a long black dress holds her knees straight and drops like a plank toward the pavement. Her partner catches her with her face inches from the concrete, resets her upright, circles, and receives the same dangerous fall again.
Stream or rental only — the timestamp is for when you have it playing. Timestamp left blank: the dance onset falls in a subtitle-silent passage in the named BR.1080p reference; commercial editions may shift. U.S. streaming/rental access verified 2026-08-04.
Suspension-railway tributes
Danced by Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble · Choreography Pina Bausch
Dancers answering the rattling suspension railway from both its carriage and the space below the track.
Short tributes unfold inside and beneath Wuppertal's suspended railway, with dancers occupying a machine that normally carries the city rather than presenting a stage. Wenders uses the tram's moving cabin and overhead track as changing partners, binding private remembrance to the geography of Bausch's home company.
Stream or rental only — the timestamp is for when you have it playing. Timestamp left blank: the dance onset falls in a subtitle-silent passage in the named BR.1080p reference; commercial editions may shift. U.S. streaming/rental access verified 2026-08-04.
The Rite of Spring
Danced by Tanztheater Wuppertal dancers · Choreography Pina Bausch
Earth-covered flooring makes every stamp and collapse materially visible while 3D depth clarifies the crowd's pressure.
The camera expands and contracts with the number, moving from architectural wides to selective details at musical turning points. Scale, costume and formation changes amplify the choreography instead of replacing it, so the spectacle remains anchored in dancing bodies.
Vollmond — rock, rain and water
Danced by Rainer Behr; Silvia Farias Heredia; Ditta Miranda Jasjfi; Dominique Mercy; Nazareth Panadero; Helena Pikon; Jorge Puerta Armenta; Azusa Seyama; Julie Anne Stanzak; Michael Strecker; Fernando Suels; Kenji Takagi · Choreography Pina Bausch
Bodies and bucketfuls of water exploding around the moonlike boulder.
A massive rock divides the stage as the Vollmond cast runs through rain, spits arcs of water and hurls brimming buckets at one another. The camera tracks close enough for droplets and bodies to cross the same depth, turning Peter Pabst's flooded set into a shoreline that the dancers alternately celebrate and assault.
Stream or rental only — the timestamp is for when you have it playing. Timestamp left blank: the dance onset falls in a subtitle-silent passage in the named BR.1080p reference; commercial editions may shift. U.S. streaming/rental access verified 2026-08-04. The Vollmond excerpt uses music selected from Amon Tobin, Balanescu Quartet, Cat Power, Carl Craig, Jun Miyake, Leftfield and others.
Vollmond / Full Moon
Danced by Tanztheater Wuppertal dancers · Choreography Pina Bausch
Water, rock and airborne bodies share the frame, making weather an active choreographic partner.
The camera expands and contracts with the number, moving from architectural wides to selective details at musical turning points. Scale, costume and formation changes amplify the choreography instead of replacing it, so the spectacle remains anchored in dancing bodies.
Poster artwork and title data from TMDB. This site uses TMDB and the TMDB APIs but is not endorsed, certified, or otherwise approved by TMDB.