Pina Bausch: 'She will be remembered as one of the great trailblazers'

Published on Wednesday 1 July 2009 20:28

THERE ARE few artists of the modern era who will prove to have been as influential as the great choreographer, dancer and performer Pina Bausch, who died on Tuesday, aged 68, in her home town of Wuppertal, Germany.

She was one of a select few modern artists – such as James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Ingmar Bergman and Samuel Beckett – whose work can be truly described, in the most profound sense, as transcendental.

Bausch's immense influence extended – and will continue to extend – far beyond her fellow dance and theatre makers, into film making and the visual arts. She was described so often as a "revolutionary artist" that the term became almost a platitude. Yet there is no other phrase which quite captures the impact of her deeply intelligent, humane, fearless and iconoclastic aesthetic.

Born in 1940 in Solingen, Germany, Bausch emerged as a top-class dancer at a very early age. Following studies in dance in Essen in her teenage years, she went to New York on a scholarship in 1959. There, she completed her studies before dancing with such companies as the New American Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera.

Returning to Germany in 1962, Bausch's first choreography, entitled Fragment, was staged by Folkwang Ballet of Essen in 1968. She became artistic director of the Essen company the following year, moving to a new role, at the helm of the Wuppertal Opera Ballet in west-central Germany, in 1972.

Bausch transformed Wuppertal into a Mecca for modern dance and theatre practitioners. Renaming the Opera Ballet the Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal, her promotion of the idea of a modernist, boundary-breaking "dance theatre" over the conventions of classical ballet began an earthquake in the worlds of dance and theatre, the aftershocks of which continue to be felt to this day.

The influence of "tanztheater" quickly became global, and was felt powerfully here in Britain. From DV8 Physical Theatre to Scotland's brilliantly errant son Michael Clark, there are few exponents of contemporary dance in the UK who would not cite Bausch as a major influence.

Of course, like other innovators of modern dance, Bausch freed her dancers from the tyranny of performing on points, and her work broke radically with the bourgeois fetters of ballet. However, her revolution went far beyond mere matters of form.

Like a great tragedian from antiquity or the Renaissance, she felt and understood the profound and unbreakable connection between sex and death, the deep, undeniable suffering which is inherent in the collective and singular human experience.

This anguished and dark element in her work saw Bausch's work denounced famously by critic Arlene Croce of the New Yorker for indulging in "the pornography of pain".

Bausch's detractors were far outnumbered by her legions of artistic admirers, however. In particular, her breaching of the boundaries between dance and other art forms opened up almost limitless possibilities to new generations of artists. Bausch brought language, and the techniques and imagery of cinema and visual art, into choreography in ways which simply had not been done by anyone else before her. In the theatre, a dizzying array of artists – from Belgian enfant terrible Jan Fabre, to Russian performance company Derevo and Norwegian dance theatre maker Jo Strmgren – have played in the fields that Bausch had helped to clear.

She had an equally great impact in the world of cinema. In 1983, Bausch played the role of La Principessa Lherimia in Federico Fellini's film And the Ship Sails On. She also starred in Pedro Almodovar's 2002 movie Talk to Her, which was inspired by her work. Bausch made her own contribution as a film director with her ambitious, dance-infused 1990 movie The Complaint of the Empress.

If Bausch was brilliantly careless of the supposed barriers between art forms, her geographical and cultural outlook was similarly broad. Influenced, perhaps, by her early years in the great cosmopolitan centre of New York City, she was a passionate internationalist. One of her last works, Bamboo Blues, reflected her lifelong admiration for India, whilst Nefs was inspired by time spent in Turkey, and Masurca Fogo was a deeply Portuguese work created for the Lisbon Expo of 1998.

Bausch will be remembered as a great trailblazer, but, crucially, one whose radicalism was equalled by her courage and imagination.

This, after all, is the artist who gave us dancers performing on real grass (in the 1980 show entitled, simply, 1980), a manic male dancer in a frock dancing among fake carnations and cardboard boxes (Nelken) and a chorus of dancers who looked more like a terrible premonition from a Greek tragedy than anything from a ballet stage (The Rite of Spring).

Few artists will ever leave such a mark on the cultural landscape as Pina Bausch. The consequences of her extraordinary contribution will continue to be seen for decades to come.