The Theatre of Pina Bausch

The Theatre of Pina Bausch
Author(s): Raimund Hoghe and Stephen Tree

Source: The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 24, No. 1, German Theatre Issue (Mar., 1980), pp. 63-
74
Published by: The MIT Press
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Arien
Two jokes; a dream. "A man came to the circus manager and asked him if he
needed a bird imitator. 'No,' answered the circus manager. Then the man flew away
through the window." This and a second joke are told twice-in the first and in the
last part-in Pina Bausch's Arien (Aries). "Berlin. A man asks a cabdriver: 'Can you
tell me how I can get to the Philharmonic?' The cabdriver answers. 'Sure, man, that's
very easy: practice, practice, practice."' "They practiced and could fly for two
hours," someone noted after an Arien performance. In Pina Bausch's Macbeth
paraphrase there is the same dream. "How will you live?" Lady Macduff asks her
son. "As the birds do." It is cited twice.
During rehearsals, Pina Bausch watches. She is very reticent with explanations
to the performers. "I don't want to take your thoughts away from you," she says and
encourages individuals to have their own imagination, to be more like themselves, to
dare uncommon ways of thinking. "Just dare to think in all directions." "Do what
you thought of doing." "Just try it out." Interruptions in the flow of rehearsing are
seldom. Pina Bausch goes toward various individuals and starts talking to them. She
does this very softly. Her few verbal utterances very seldom reach those not directly
concerned. They refer to the individual she talks to and to their situation. They do
not consist of general proposals or general theories. Asked by a dancer whether a
scene is meant to be with text or only with ambiance, she answers: "One has to try it
out. I cannot tell theoretically."
64 THE DRAMA REVIEW/T85
The latest performances of the Wuppertal Dance-Theatre are almost completely

devoid of what is commonly considered dance. None of the company are against
dance. "But what I consider beautiful and important there, I do not want to touch for
the time being-because I think it is so important. You have to learn something dif-
ferent first," says Pina Bausch, "then perhaps you can dance again." Very cautious-
ly, she starts to learn dance again, looks for new formulations and definitions for
dancing, enlarges them, surmounts rigid barriers and advances to regions where
dancing begins. An inviting gesture, a gentle turn of the head, a glance, a walk
toward each other and a touch-everyday motions or already a dance? "A gentle
stroke can be like a dance, too." Dance:. perhaps a cipher for tenderness and an at-
tempt to come closer to oneself and to others.
Pina Bausch's performances refer to everyday actuality; they reflect reality.
"But compared with reality all this is nothing," she remarks. "Now they say very
often that people never ever behave the way they behave in my plays. They do not
laugh that way. They don't do these things. But if you just watch people crossing the
street--if you would let them all file across the stage, very simply-the public would
never believe it, that's how incredible it is. Compared with that, the things we do are
tiny." Her "tiny" specks of reality sharpen intellect, sensitivity and the eye for the
reality one often takes note of only diffusely, for a life lived without edges.
People cross the stage like a street. Diagonal crosses are among the elements
repeated over again in Pina Bausch's performances. What one can see are parades
of human behavior, insecurities, complexes, rituals. The men and women walking
Kontakthof
PINA BAUSCH 65
behind each other are tired and aggressive, embarassed and haughty, cramped-up
and friendly, courting and defensive, frightened and searching: visible reactions to
invisible situations. The seemingly personal or common movements are not packed
in a (theatre) story. They themselves constitute the story, refer to traces of life lived
and unlived. "Somehow we are very transparent, if we see each other like this. The
way somebody walks or the way people carry their necks tells you something about
the way they live or about the things that have happened to them," notes Pina
Bausch. "Somehow everything is visible-even when we cling to certain things. You
really can see where something is suppressed. There are spots where people don't
think about controlling themselves." Pina Bausch and her company present these
spots without denunciating rancor, without a wagging index-finger. With a great deal
of wit and (self-) irony they confront themselves.
To ask oneself, to try out, to seek within oneself, perhaps finding something.
Themes, questions are proposed by Pina Bausch. Pairs in love walk across the street
and touch each other-how do they do it? Or: Spring-what kind of thoughts and
feelings are conjured up inside you? Or: We mark injurable parts on the body of the
partner and show why they are injurable. The author/choreographer/director gives
her 21 dancers/actors/authors time for the (self-) questioning initiated by her, time
to search for possible answers. Very concentrated, very quietly she follows the
quest of the group, the associations, proposals, histories of the various individuals.
"What I do-watch," she says. "Perhaps that's it. The only thing I did all the time
was watching people. I have only seen human relations or I have tried to see them and
talk about them. That's what I am interested in. I don't know anything more important."
"I wanted it like this," Pina Bausch says about the origin of a scene and im-
mediately corrects herself. "Wanted it-that is, it came into being somehow." Her
performances are not theoretically conceived. "For the last one there was a point of
Kontakthof
Kontakthof
departure somewhere, but where the whole thing is moving is developed in rehears-
als. It isn't planned-it just happens, through us all. The composition of the group is
crucial to many things we've experienced, or crucial to something somebody ought
to rehearse." The point of departure constantly changes during the working process.
It grows, circles, gets larger, becomes questionable. Like the point of departure in
her play Kontakthof (Contacting Square): "Tenderness. What is it? How does one do
it? Where does it go? And how far does tenderness go at all? When isn't it
tenderness any more? Or is it still tenderness?"
Kontakthof exercises in tenderness, experiments in tenderness, quests for
tenderness. An old record: "Zieh' mich an dich, wir wollen Tango tanzen" ("Draw me
close to you, we want to dance the Tango"). Friendly smiling pairs stand opposite
each other and touch each other. A man takes the hand of a woman and bends her
fingers backward. A woman approaches a man and bites his ear. One pinches the
partner underneath the arms, closes his eyes, draws out a single hair, takes away his
chair, and they leave the stage arm in arm. Later the touches are continued. Only
after the frontier has actually been crossed does one note with surprise that the
gestures of advance have become something different. Tender gestures become
blows. The transitions are fluid. At the end of the play men touch a woman (Meryl
Tankard). They cover her body with touches. Hands stroke across hair, eyes, brow,
mouth, nose, chin, ears, neck, arms, legs, breast, stomach, back-until the woman
collapses underneath what is understood (by men) as "tenderness."
Sometimes something like tenderness seems possible only from afar. One of
the most tender Kontakthof scenes shows a pair separated by a wide distance. A
man and a woman (Gary Austin Crocker and Viviene Newport) sit at the two opposite
ends of the big empty room furnished only with simple wooden chairs. They smile
timidly at the distant partner. Bashfully they take off single pieces of clothing. They
look at each other shyly. Slowly they undress before and offer, as the saying goes,
"bare spots" to one another. Across the protective space they get very close to each
other; the outward distance remains the same.
In another part of the performance there is a similar situation with a far less
careful approach. Again women and men find themselves opposite each other. This
time they are in groups, in a situation reminiscent of a ballroom-dancing lesson. The
men cross the big Kontakthof square with their chairs. Loudly and with demanding
gestures, they approach the women waiting with their backs to the wall. They con-
quer the distance between them. They reach out impatiently for the women, who try
to avoid them in vain. But they cannot get hold of the females shrinking back from
their possessive touch.
PINA BAUSCH 67
A woman sinks to the floor in a melodramatic way. Before this she says: "I pre-
tend wanting to be all alone-but actually I want somebody to come." Later on, a
man has heavy iron weights dropped on his chest. Another one crushes piano lids on
his fingers. A woman sets up four chairs, walks around them, and throws them over
with her hips. A woman in a pink cocktail dress lifts her dress, jumps up the walls,
and is rewarded with applause. These are acts in the hall of Kontakthof, a perfor-
mance where Pina Bausch comes back once more to one of the central themes of
her work: "Wanting to be loved, or all the things we do to make somebody like us."
Pina Bausch's performances concern themselves again and again with the
quest for tenderness, closeness, with the difficulty and fear of getting really close to
each other and of realizing tenderness and closeness only for a short moment. The
men and women in Kontakthof run around searching, look restlessly for a partner,
approach somebody who stands alone with outstretched arms as if petrified, accom-
modate to the embrace proposed by the stranger, become a pair, and separate im-
mediately afterward, looking for the next partner. It is as if in reality they could not
stand the dream about closeness after all, and as if they would be afraid of the big
feelings, the big stories, the uncontrollable and impossible ones.
In Pina Bausch's productions, one can see again and again efforts to fight the
slightness of words, pictures, situations, experiences-efforts at defense in a reali-
ty that very often escapes one. With so-called "objective means" the figures try to
win some safety in an unsafe surrounding. In Kontakthof, for instance, furniture and
props are registered and carefully noted into a book; intervals and distances between
pairs are measured. And, like in many Bausch performances, there is a lot of photo-
graphing. Women in their "petite black" and correctly dressed men pose for the photog-
rapher, adjust their pose, stare into the instant camera and-snap-change partners
and repeat the familiar ceremony, setting themselves up anew in the old arrangement.
Kontakthof
68 THE DRAMA REVIEW/T85
Something similar is performed by the dancer Jan Minarik in a scene from Kon-
takthof. With tape recorder and microphone he goes to the men and women facing
the audience and tunes in on their dialogs and soliloquies, their trivial love-and
life-stories that go on even when he tuned out long ago. Pina Bausch: "A play like
Kontakthof you could play on all through the night."
Theatre for Pina Bausch "has a lot to do with the things children do. The things
we do sometimes you can actually do only when you are a child-splash around in
the water, get greasy, paint yourself, play. That you can do this on stage once more
as a grown-up is great, I think." The liberated playing spaces for these grown-up
games are created by Rolf Borzik. They are big, wide spaces that do not seem to be
forced upon or superimposed on the player but develop instead with them and their
story. "We never say 'Now this is the set, and within it we make the play.' It gets
developed only within the actual work," says Pina Bausch. "I think that this is
beautiful: real things on stage-earth, leaves, water." For Arien, Borzik opened up
the opera stage as far back as the firewall and submerged the stage ankle-deep with
reflecting and purifying water. Once more he has created a "counter space" to the
synthetic stage-and living-spaces. It is a space to which people really want to,
and can, abandon themselves without being afraid of getting wet.
A very tender and strange, new, dance experiment is developed by Pina Bausch
and her company in Arien. By and by the dancers, all standing alone with closed
eyes, begin-with very strange, groping motions that seem hermetically shut and
are confined very close to the body-to let dancing be suspected as a possibility to
experience oneself and the surrounding space. It becomes a possibility not to dance
away from oneself but to come to oneself through dancing. But like all the other
dancing experiments from Arien-like rock and roll performed by the ensemble that
ends with a racing competition or like the exalted dancing movements of single in-
Arien
PINA BAUSCH 69
dividuals that end with sudden splashes into the water-this dance ends very sud-
denly. A loud sound from the outside ends it-and the self-inquiry that is as quiet as
it is utopian. The dancers open their eyes. A moment of alarm, of insecurity, the trou-
ble of finding again the old securities, of winning some distance from oneself and of
finding one's way in the strange thing called reality, which hardly permits any (self-)
exploration, interrupts the departure.
Words that keep one from getting lost, sentences one can cling to-Pina
Bausch's work denies such safety-anchors. On the long-crossed frontier between
drama and ballet, spoken theatre and musical theatre, it does not want to hand out
texts one can read afterward. In her performances, words are something slight,
fragmentary, and blurred. Only very seldom do they serve communication or a
mutual understanding. Only in exceptional cases do they reach other humans.
"Meine Ruh ist hin, mein Herz ist schwer; ich finde sie nimmer und nimmer." ("My
calmness is gone, my heart is heavy; I do not find it ever again"; part of the Gretchen
monolog from Goethe's Faust) recites a girl (Anne Martin) sitting in the water
downstage, near the footlights. She is as difficult to understand as the turned-on
pair reading laughingly from a book about the love life of insects. Somehow and
unspectacularly, these utterances stop-as do many other things in this theatre of
fragments, of sections.
Photographs-substitute pictures that are no substitute for an unlived
life-emerge again in Arien. Right at the beginning a tense holiday-making couple
asks to be photographed, to be recorded in a relaxed attitude. Their wish is fulfilled.
Jan Minarik photographs them jumping. Later he runs again through the scene with
tripod and cameras, tries to look for contact and to make pictures. He aims the lens
at singles, pairs, groups, and at last at himself. He photographs himself with a self-
timer. He joins groups that are strange to him (and stay strange to him), releases the
self-timer, and has a "real" group picture-proof of something that does not exist.
Arien
Arien
Close to the footlights, a row of chairs is set up. With tired, serious faces, the
women walk toward it. Some are in such a state of sadness that they seem to be on
the way to an execution, probably their own. Gradually they sit down on the chairs.
They give themselves up to the men. To the sounds of Mozart's "Little Night Music",
they are changed by the men. They are dressed in old clothes, colorful wraps, pastel-
shaded girly dresses. Their faces are painted in gaudy colors. They are handed
bizarre props-until nothing reminds one of what they were. To many this makeup
and dressing scene seemed to be a clear reference by Pina Bausch to the situation
of women who are forced into certain stereotypes, are adapted to the dominant male
imaginations and robbed of their identity by men, so that they are only wrapped-up
objects in the end. The point of departure, reminds Pina Bausch, was entirely dif-
ferent. "It was connected in a way with the fact of these many unhappy girls being
around. We decided to have them painted because we thought: 'Perhaps the paint-
ing will help them to get happy again.'"
One of the "impossible" (love-) stories told in Arien is between a woman
(Josephine Ann Endicott) and a hippopotamus. The hippo was a shy man in a gray
suit (Hans Dieter Knebel). That a human can take the part of a hippopotamus, that a
monster is human, and that the relationship between a man and a woman is
sometimes just as impossible as a relationship between a human and a hip-
popotamus can be seen in Arien and other performances by Pina Bausch. When the
woman, after a glance in the mirror, sees the hippopotamus approaching her for the
first time, she laughs very loudly and forcedly-and shies away from the impossible
at first. Slowly and clumsily, the sensitive pachyderm moves back into the darkness
of the stage, moves back into the distance and gropes carefully forward again later.
The impossible is only one possibility among others-a possibility that remains,
even when one tries to fight against it.
The difficulties of an often desperately attempted togetherness-her perfor-
mances do not hide them. They show pairs attracting and repulsing each other, clinging
together, and not fitting one another. One of them is Beatrice Libanoti and Lutz
Forster in Arien. When the very big blond man carries the very small black-haired
woman stiffly across the stage, lifts her up to himself and kisses her mouth, her feet
reach just about to his knees. She is swept off and cannot stand on her own feet.
When her counterpart lets go, she slides down along him and sinks into the water at
his feet.
Men and women constituting two groups stand opposite each other and shout
admonitions on how to move heads, shoulders, arms and legs. They work
Arien
Pina Bausch, Some Data
Born 1940 in Solingen, a small the Folkwang Ballet; she becomes
town between Cologne and Wuppertal. director in 1969. Four years later she
First contacts with theatre people are becomes director of the ballet theatre
in her parents' small restaurant. At 15 of Wuppertaler Buhnen (Wuppertal
she begins to study dance at the Folk- Stages). After her dancing soiree Fritz
wangschule, Essen; director Kurt in Wuppertal, she choreographs
Jooss. 1959: finals in stage-dancing, Iphigenie Auf Tauris (Iphigenia in
classical and modern, and pedagogical Tauris), a dance-opera with music by
examination; stipend from the German Gluck; Adagio-Funf Lieder Von
-Academic Exchange (DAAD) for further Gustav Mahler (Adagio, Five Songs for
studies in the USA. Special student at Gustav Mahler); and Ich
the Juilliard School of Music, New Bring Dich Um Die Ecke (I Lay You
York: at the same time, member of the Down Under), a ballet in which she lets
Dance Company of Paul Sanasardo and the dancers sing old hit-tunes, used by
Donya Feuer. 1961: engagements with her for the first time. 1975: she realizes
the New American Ballet and at the Orpheus Und Eurydike (Orpheus and
Metropolitan Opera, New York. Euridice), a dance-opera with music by
1962: returns to Germany, where she Gluck; and Fruhlingsopfer (the Rites of
becomes soloist of the newly founded Spring), three ballets by Pina Bausch to
Folkwang Ballet Company. Since 1968 the music of Stravinsky. With Die Sie-
her choreography, in the repertory of ben Todsunden (The Seven Deadly
themselves up to a more and more aggressive tone, until the words arrive at the
other side like lashes of a whip. Even when Pina Bausch shows such "confrontation-
situations" again and again-situations where the sexes oppose each other like
adversaries on a battlefield, react hurt and hurting to one another, and try to assert
themselves-she does not want to judge these fights, and she does not want to con-
demn. "Afterward I notice sometimes: Somehow I am always a kind of 'counsel for
the defense.' I always have the position of the defender. Somehow at these points,
where one ordinarily says, 'This is uncomfortable' or 'This isn't right,' or whatever-
there I try to understand somehow why it is as it is. And in this instant I am a
defender, of course, when I try to understand how it happens, after all, that people
behave in a certain way."
Pina Bausch addresses herself and her theatre to the doubts and insecurities,
to the corners and edges one can run into, opening up wounds. "I'd never smooth
that over" -for instance, for the sake of some "message." "I couldn't do it," she
believes. Her plays pose questions. Answers stay open. To give them "would be con-
ceited." "I just can't say: 'That's how it goes,'" declares Bausch. "I am watching
myself. I'm just as lost as all the others."
Her work is far more open than it is interpreted by some observers. Pina
Bausch: "I never ever thought: 'That's how it is'." She shuns unequivocal interpre-
tations. "I often thought of something completely different, meant something dif-
ferent-but not only that, yQu see." She does not want her very clear and often
repeated pictures to be placed into certain pigeon holes. If, for example, in her pro-
ductions women are very often treated like dolls, this-according to her-can be
seen in various ways. "Take, for instance, the perfomance Renate Wandert Aus
(Renate Emigrates). There you have those men that put the girls somewhere and
then embrace them. You can think lots of things about it-not only that there is a
man who simply grabs a woman, carries her away and then embraces her. You can
think that a man wishes for a situation where a girl behaves herself quietly. You can
see it like this or like that. It just depends on the way you watch. But the single-
Sins)-music by Weill, texts by Der Hand Und Fuhrt Sie In Das
Brecht-she leaves the old forms, for Schloss, Die Ande Ren Folgen (He
the time being, definitely behind and Takes Her by the Hand and Leads Her
moves assuredly between ballet, to The Castle; the Others Follow).
drama and show business; she works Afterward in Wuppertal the short play,
with dancers, singers, actors. From Cafe Mueller (The Coffee Shop
now on her work seems to be a single Mueller), with music by Purcell, and
work-in-progress. 1977: Blaubart-Beim Kontakthof where, amongst others,
Anhoeren Einer Tonbandaufnahme Von music by Charles Chaplin, Anton
Bela Bartoks Oper "Herzog Blaubarts Karas, Jean Sibelius and German hits
Burg" (Bluebeard-While Listening to from the 1930s are used. Her latest
a Tape Recording of Bela Bart6k's work: Arien, developed like the
Opera Count Bluebeard's Castle); preceding plays only during rehearsal
Komm Tanz Mit Mir (Come Dance with (music: amongst others Beethoven,
Me), making use of old songs; Renate Mozart and old Italian arias sung by
Wandert Aus (Renate Emigrates), an Benjamino Gigli). In all productions
opera by Pina Bausch with popular cooperation with Rolf Borzik (stage,
songs and perennial favorites. At the costume, director of makeup, photog-
Bochum Playhouse (Schauspielhaus raphy, video). Many performances and
Bochum) she directs, as a guest, her tours inside and outside the Federal
Macbeth paraphrase: Er Nimmt Sie Bei Republic.
stranded thinking that they interpret into it simply isn't right." Because: "You can
always watch the other way."
The possibility of watching the other way can be followed through very clearly
in and with her performances-not least through the element of repeating single ac-
tions that is often used by her. A Kontakthof scene, for instance, is once played in
light clothes and once in dark clothes. Or the same pictures are realized within dif-
ferent constellations. Actions, carried out before by men, are repeated in another
way by women. Thus the Kontakthof scene of the woman stroked down to the floor
by men reminds one of a scene from Blaubart (Bluebeard). There a man is surrounded
only by women grouping around him and touching him, smothering him with strokes
and leaving him as lifeless as the woman that could not be reached by the so-called
tenderness.
In the theatre of Pina Bausch one can experience many ways of looking, of
becoming aware of one's subjective way of watching humans, relations, situations,
and one can note that there are many different ways of seeing something within one-
self as well as within others. Take, for instance, the nursery games and the social
games cited on stage. At first, undertakings like Die Reise Nach Jerusalem (Journey
to Jerusalem) or Kommando Pimperle (Commando Pimperle) seem to be very brutal
and hard, reminiscent of ruthless gang-fights and "you're out" situations. In other
performances, the same games seem much less belligerent and injuring, less
oriented to competitive behavior. They seem rather like shared experiments of peo-
ple trying to pass the time somehow while perhaps trying to regain part of a time
long past, perhaps part of their childhood.
If one tries to talk to Pina Bausch about the "difference" of her theatre, she
answers, "It certainly has something to do with myself-with the fact of me being a
woman. But in the end I can't judge it, and I don't have to." A theoretical analysis of
female esthetics is not her concern. And with feministic argumentation she has dif-
ficulties, she confesses. "'Feminism'-perhaps because it has become such a
fashionable word-and I retreat into my snail-shell. Perhaps also because they very
Kontakthof
often draw such a funny borderline there that I don't really like. Sometimes it sounds
like 'against each other' instead of 'together.'"
"The human being is the model," says Pina Bausch when asked about models
for her work. She says it as if convinced, unemphatically, without demonstrative
gestures, without big explanations-with the same simplicity that determines her
performances, a simplicity that has nothing to do with simplification. Pina Bausch
sees and shows people in their multiplicity and their inconsistency, with or without
masks. In Arien, for instance, Jan Minarik takes away the paint from the theatre
characters in the end. While the men and women of the ensemble walk along the
downstage footlight edge and stroke their partners across the back or play with their
hands, he frees them from the colored varnish, from the painted masks. With the
uninhibited view of their faces, the meeting with and between humans becomes
possible again.
Translated from German by Stephen Tree
Raimund Hoghe lives in Dusseldorf, West Germany and writes about theatre, art and social
themes for Theater heute, Die Zeit and various radio stations.

The Theatre of Pina Bausch - HOGHE

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Author(s): Raimund Hoghe and Stephen Tree

The latest performances of the Wuppertal Dance-Theatre are almost completely

Translated from German by Stephen Tree

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