Pina Bausch 1940–2009

A Japanese colleague alerted me via email to the passing of Pina Bausch. Her post, dated just after midnight on 1 July, arrived at 10:30 in the morning Chicago time on 30 June, the day of Bausch’s death. Astounded by the news—as were all who heard it that day—I attempted to find out more, but the homepage for her Tanztheater Wuppertal had nothing posted except a brief announcement. So I turned instead to my own memories of seeing Pina Bausch’s company for the first time at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in summer 1984 and fall 1985. What remains most powerful is the kinesthetic memory of watching the company, feeling both forced back against my seat and poised on its edge at the same time. Pina Bausch. (Photo by Atsushi Iijima, courtesy of Those were the seasons when, as Deborah Tanztheater Wuppertal) Jowitt recalled in her recent tribute to Bausch, “audiences were mostly thrilled, critics divided.” Rereading the critical debate from a quarter-century ago, I’m struck by the passion with which critics differentiated German dance theatre from American postmodern dance. As Anna Kisselgoff, then critic for the New York Times, summarized the distinction at a symposium held at Goethe House New York in November 1985, “American dance has tended to go in the direction of formalism, and the German dance as we see it is a form of neo-expressionism” (in Daly 1986:49). Although other participants pushed back against this distinction—including Kisselgoff herself when she noted that “emotion is the new word among American choreographers” (49)—no one present that day challenged the assumption that very real differences marked contemporary dance in Germany and the US. At the time, my own sympathies lay more with the German than with the American critics, for I had recently returned from an extended research trip to the Mary Wigman Archive in West Berlin and found myself in some agreement with Jochen Schmidt, a participant at the Goethe House symposium and then critic for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the German equivalent to the Times, when he said, “I see a lot of younger American choreographers now doing things which classical ballet can do better. They are always trying to become brilliant and fast [...] like hamsters [...] in a wheel [who] go around and around but always remain in the same spot” (49). Engrossed in my research, I was primed to be not so much “thrilled”—Jowitt’s descriptive term—as compelled by my first sustained encounter with Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal. And I certainly wasn’t alone in being moved. As Royd Climenhaga notes in his recent primer on Bausch, he too was in the audience in 1985 and described the sensation of “[feeling] my life [...] being ripped from my own protective cloak, laid bare and strewn across the stage” (2009:31). Yet, however much my own and others’ responses differed from the published critics’ 25 years ago, I too saw Pina Bausch as engaged in a decidedly German project (see Manning 1986). She was a student of Kurt Jooss, a choreographer who had advocated an integration of the formal clarity of ballet with the expressive dimensions of Ausdruckstanz as formulated by his own teacher Rudolf Laban and by Mary Wigman. In 1927, Jooss founded the dance department at the Folkwang School in Essen, dedicated to what he called Tanztheater, a term he coined to differentiate his vision from the standard fare of opera-house ballet, which he called Theatertanz. InMemory

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2010.54.1.10 by guest on 29 September 2021 When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they demanded that Jooss dismiss his Jewish composer Fritz Cohen, but he refused and took his company into exile in Great Britain. In 1949, Jooss returned to a now divided Germany and took up his earlier position at the Folkwang School. When he retired in 1968, Pina Bausch, then a leading soloist in his company, replaced him in Essen, and in 1973 she moved the company to Wuppertal, a city just 15 miles away in the gritty Ruhr zone. From the perspective of Jochen Schmidt and other German critics, Bausch took up Jooss’s legacy of socially critical dance, a legacy evidenced above all in The Green Table, his signature work which premiered in 1932 and widely toured during his exile. In this antiwar fable, the male dancers take the roles of diplomats, soldiers, and revolutionaries, while the female dancers take the roles of the mothers, daughters, and sweethearts left behind. Bausch took the role of the Mother in a 1966 production at Folkwang, and she restaged the work during her first season at Wuppertal. In an interview decades later she recalled, “No woman could portray a woman as convincingly as Jooss did. He impersonated an old mother or a young girl or another femle type with such nuance” (in Stöckemann 2001:362). Although Jooss’s choreography projected stable images of masculinity and femininity onstage, his offstage pedagogy and coaching revealed the expressive potential of cross-gendered behavior. In effect, Bausch took his offstage practice onstage, and in so doing she dramatized the widespread questioning of traditional gender roles in the 1960s and 1970s. During their first seasons at BAM, Tanztheater Wuppertal presented a retrospective of Bausch’s work over the previous decade: Le Sacre du Printemps (1975), The Seven Deadly Sins (1976), Blaubart (1977), Café Müller (1978), Kontakthof (1978), Arien (1979), 1980 (1980), Auf dem Gebirge hat man ein Geschrei gehört/On the Mountain a Cry Was Heard (1984). What struck us all was the explosive male-female role play and cross-dressing in her work. In fact, that is exactly what many critics found so galling. As Marcia Siegel commented, “Pina Bausch says she is concerned with love and human relations; the only human concerns I saw on her stage were self-loathing, fear and anxiety, cruelty, and a misanthropic glee at coaxing another person into one’s power” (TDR 1986:82). Watching her works, some of us wondered if her explicit focus on gender relations didn’t hint at an implicit preoccupation with the recent German past—the years before and after the Second World War when the parents of Bausch’s generation collaborated with the Nazis and then denied that collaboration. Bausch’s works recalled the years at mid-century through snatches of popular music and fragments of social dance, through design elements that looked like discarded furniture and thrift-store clothes—spiked heels and satin evening gowns, tuxedoes and smoking jackets. Inhabiting these haunted stage worlds, her dancers acted out violent games and unconscious fantasies, rehearsing and reversing rigid images of masculinity and femininity. Their endless role-playing dramatized not only the performativity of gender—a term not then in circulation, for the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble was still a few years off—but also the interchangeability of victim and victimizer. This conflation and confusion critiqued the postwar myth—and reality—of collaborators transformed into model citizens. Reconsidering her body of work 25 years later, I no longer see her significance only in relation to German history and the history of German dance. As Tanztheater Wuppertal toured further and further afield over the past two decades, as Bausch’s European contemporaries came into their own as dance innovators, as American postmodern dance veered away from formalism and embraced—and fragmented—narrative and affect, it became clear that Bausch had become one of, if not the most influential choreographer of late-20th-century globalization. As Kisselgoff noted at the Goethe House symposium in 1985, “Emotion is the new word among American choreographers” (in Daly 1986:49). She was an astute observer, and it has now become a commonplace that the 1980s saw “the rebirth of content,” as Sally Banes noted in her In Memory 1987 revision of Terpsichore in Sneakers (xxiv). Banes offered a broad range of examples, from Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane to Karole Armitage, Johanna Boyce, Jane Comfort, Molissa Fenley,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2010.54.1.10 by guest on 29 September 2021 Ralph Lemon, and Wendy Perron. Thus, it is clear that the new interest in content was present even before Tanztheater Wuppertal came to town. Yet, it is also indisputable that the New York dance world turned out en masse to see the company at BAM in 1984 and 1985. And so it seems impossible to disentangle the possible influence of Bausch from other sources for the renewed interest in storytelling, affect, identity, and social commentary. Consider one of many possible examples: Did Bill T. Jones’s Last Night at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land (1990) perhaps owe something to Bausch, both in terms of form—its sprawling episodic structure—and in terms of content—its willingness to grapple with the racial and sexual violence of American history? Impossible to say for sure, but surely plausible. More to the point: why have American critics and historians of modern and postmodern dance avoided asking such questions? Is it because we have relied too much on the frame of the nation-state to structure our histories? Whereas scholars have hardly begun to excavate the influence of Tanztheater Wuppertal on American dance, its influence on European dance has been well established. In 1978 the company first appeared in France, in 1981 in Italy, in 1984 in Britain and Sweden, and critics note that Bausch’s innovations both paralleled and prompted related trends across Europe. In her wake, other choreographers—Lloyd Newsom in London, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker in Brussels, Marta Carrasco in Barcelona, to name just a few—defiantly created alternatives to opera-house ballet, juxtaposing vivid theatrical images, and blurring any recognizable distinction between “dance” and “theatre.” Together, Bausch and her contemporaries effected a para- digm shift in performance-making during the 1980s. Yet without Bausch’s example, it seems unlikely that the underlying dissatisfaction with the status quo would have exploded so bril- liantly across Europe. The influence of Pina Bausch has extended well beyond Europe. In 1979 the company first traveled to Asia and in 1980 to South America, several years before appearing in the United States and Great Britain. On her 1979 tour to India, young Bengali nationalists protested performances of Le Sacre du Printemps in Kolkata, declaring that nudity did not belong on Indian stages. Performances in other Indian cities encountered less resistance, but not until the company brought Nelken (1982) to India in 1994 was the company a “runaway success,” according to Sunil Kothari (2009). Twelve years later the company returned to India to conduct research for Bamboo Blues (2007), and the following year returned again to present the work in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata. Bamboo Blues was the last of a series of works created in response to extended travel outside Wuppertal. The worldwide network of Goethe Institutes supported these residencies for creative research in Rome (Viktor, 1986), Palermo (Palermo, Palermo, 1989), Madrid (Tanzabend II, 1991), Vienna (Ein Trauerspiel, 1994), Los Angeles (Nur Du, 1996), Lisbon (Masurca Fogo, 1998), São Paulo (Água, 2001), and Istanbul (Nefés, 2003), in addition to Hong Kong (Der Fensterputzer, 1997), Japan (Ten Chi, 2004), and Seoul (Rough Cut, 2005). Even Asian cities not involved in an extended residency with Tanztheater Wuppertal felt the influence of Bausch. Her company visited Taipei twice, first in 1997 and then again in 2007, when the company members learned the Chinese transliteration for the text in Mascurga Fogo. The visits inspired what Lin Ya-tin has described as an “abundance of works made a la Pina Bausch’s tanztheater aesthetics, incorporating theatre elements, collage, repetition, text, and even breaking the ‘fourth wall’” (2009). The worldwide impact of Tanztheater Wuppertal demonstrates how limited have been our accounts of modern and postmodern dance that rely on the frame of the nation-state or even on a transatlantic perspective that examines interrelations between Europe and the United States. Ramsay Burt has argued “that innovative dance artists on each side of the Atlantic over the last forty years have had more in common with each other than most existing dance literature [...] has suggested” (2006:1–2). His study, titled Judson Dance Theatre, points toward repetition as a structuring device for Bausch and her American contemporaries Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, and Yvonne Rainer. He also notes how Bausch extended the example of the Judson choreogra- InMemory

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2010.54.1.10 by guest on 29 September 2021 phers by presenting performers as people moving rather than as dancers executing signature movement vocabularies. Burt’s study certainly is a start, but we need to go much further in order to understand the transnational currents linking Bausch and her Judson peers. After all, Bausch spent the years from 1960 to 1962 in New York, studying at Juilliard, performing with Antony Tudor, Paul Taylor, Paul Sanasardo, and Donya Feuer, and attending performances of the Living Theatre. How did her encounter with these artists—the master of psychological ballet from the 1940s, the young renegades who disdained psychodrama—inform her later choreography? This questioning can be multiplied many times over, for in each cultural capital where the company landed, Bausch encountered a distinct local dancescape. Consider one of many possible inquiries: How have the 11 visits of Tanztheater Wuppertal to Tokyo from 1986 and 2008 altered the local dancescape? Conversely, how have these many visits altered the company’s dynamics? What circumstances led to the commission of Ten Chi in 2004? Was this the spur for two dancers of Japanese descent, Kenji Takagi and Azusa Seyama, to join the company, or did their paths to Wuppertal owe more to their experiences in Germany and the US? (see Birmingham 2008). How has their participation subtly altered the multinational ensemble that has constituted Tanztheater Wuppertal from its inception? A similar range of questions could be posed about Bausch and cultural capitals around the globe, from Hong Kong to Istanbul to São Paulo, for the globalization of performance has shaped and been shaped by Pina Bausch. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that a colleague in Japan first alerted me to her passing.

—Susan Manning

References Banes, Sally. 1987. Terpsichore in Sneakers. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Birmingham, Lucy. 2008. “An Exciting Liquid Dance.” Japan Times, 13 March. http://search.japantimes. co.jp/cgi-bin/ft20080313a3.html (14 September 2009). Burt, Ramsay. 2006. Judson Dance Theater. New York: Routledge. Climenhaga, Royd. 2009. Pina Bausch. New York: Routledge. Daly, Ann. 1986. “Tanztheater: The Thrill of the Lynch Mob or the Rage of a Woman?” TDR 30, 2 (T110):46–56. Jowitt, Deborah. 2009. “In Memoriam: Pina Bausch (1940–2009).” Village Voice, 1 July. www.villagevoice. com/content/result/author:302453 (3 September). Kothari, Sunil. 2009. “Pina Bausch: A legendary dancer, choreographer passes away.” Online posting, 9 July. www.narthaki.com/info/profiles/profl107.html (14 September). Lin Ya-tin. 2009. “Mo(u)rning Pina.” Taiwan Cultural Portal. 14 July. www.culture.tw/index. php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1294&Itemid=157 (14 September). Manning, Susan. 1986. “An American Perspective on Tanztheater.” TDR: The Drama Review 30, 2: 57–79. Stöckemann, Patricia. 2001. Etwas ganz Neues muss nun entstehen: Kurt Jooss und das Tanztheater. Munich: K. Kieser Verlag. TDR. 1986. “What the Critics Say about Tanztheater.” TDR 30, 2 (T110):80–84. In Memory

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