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Bausch Dance Theatre

‘Bausch’s work has established the stylistic and artistic parameters of European Postmodern Dance’.

This study will focus on the work of Pina Bausch and the Dance Theatre of Wuppertal. Born in 1940 in the small town of Solingen; Germany, she started her career as a dancer in Essen at the Folkwagen School. Centring on the development of a German style of dance from the early part of the twentieth Century, the essay will consider the contribution of early practitioners, Kurt Jooss and Mary Wigman in the development of Bausch’s work. The wider artistic and cultural context will be explored in order to assess the definition of the boundaries of European Postmodern Dance.

European Postmodern Dance may also be defined as Tanztheater; its literal translation meaning Dance-Theatre; drawing on the sociological, it has been described as a twist on an old form: German Expressionism,

“Taking ausdruckstanz as precedent, the choreographers of tanztheater elevate expression over form and view dance as a mode of social engagement.”

Manning, S. A. & Benson, M. 1986:30

This is far from the styles of previous dominant dance forms, German or otherwise, such as Ballet. Germany itself was never renowned for having any classical tradition and thus, many no longer considered Ballet an art form. Expressionist dance arose out of this revaluation of artistic principles, “[t]hey wanted to resume contact with the ‘primordial elements of Art’.” (Schlee, A. cited in Preston-Dunlop, V. & Lahusen, S. 1990:7). However, Expressionism is only one part of what we call today Postmodern Dance.

American Postmodern Dance formed around the same time as Tanztheater, however quite independently. This is reflected in the development of the style; although there is a certain similarity between the styles, the American Postmodernists were interested in the dance form itself, ‘motion, not emotion.’

This contrasts a view by German Postmodernists summed up in a statement made by Pina Bausch of how she was much less interested in how people move, but what moves them. (Servos, N. 1984:227). The stylistic features of European Postmodern Dance include a large-scale, epic theatre performance style, drawing on theatre practitioners Brecht and Stanislavsky, alongside the expressionist movement of Jooss and Wigman.

Bausch’s first piece to break away from Ausdruckstanz was Rite of Spring (1975). She began to widen the theatrical elements in the piece, which marks the conclusion to the period of traditional “continuous choreography”. Bausch’s three-part dance includes the first part; set to Stravinsky’s ‘Cantata’ and reveals the various roles and relations dictated between a set of people, emphasising a sense of separateness.

The second part confronts the issue of intimacy through a tragicomic, ‘Chaplinesque’ stylisation of a relationship between two people; man and wife. Bausch’s interpretation of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring concludes the piece, essentially following the narrative of the music. Focussing on the Sacrifice of Spring; a young woman, segregated from society in an inevitable battle between the sexes.

Bluebeard (1977) provides an important continuity of sustained development of dance theatre as a form of theatrical representation. This is reflected in its complete title; Bluebeard - While Listening to a Tape Recording of Bela Bartok’s Opera “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle”.

In the opera, the beautiful Judith comes to Duke Bluebeard’s magnificent enchanted castle and is given the keys to seven doors, the first six of which open in turn onto a torture chamber, an armoury, a treasure chamber, a garden of blood, a huge kingdom, and a sea of tears. The seventh door, which Bluebeard finally opens at Judith’s insistence, hides the sumptuously clothed bodies of the Duke’s previous wives, all of them murdered. Judith recognises her fate, submits passively to the Duke’s sadism and allows herself to be clothed and crowned before going patiently to her death.

Servos, N. 1984:53

Although Bausch’s Bluebeardretains elements of the fable, it has been transposed into contemporary settings, continuing the themes of battling sexes and a longing for love. Certainly, the narrative structure seen in Rite of Spring; the introduction, conflict, and solution, is forgotten and the music is very much led by the action. The programme notes made no reference to the term “ballet” as in Rite of Spring.

Bausch development of the themes and tools of dance theatre are fully established in the piece 1980 - A Piece by Pina Bausch (1980). The opening section of the piece looks at childhood games and rituals. However, it is not easy to separate this piece into specific sections as Bausch’s piece is completely devoid of structure; scenes tacked together in a seemingly arbitrary order. 1980 deals with loneliness and grief, its marks the transition from birth to death, recording personal moments and exposing the compulsions of everyday life. The final section intensifies the previous, interrogating the performers physically and mentally.

[Bausch’s] pieces deal with love and fear, longing and loneliness, frustration and terror, man’s exploitation of man (and, in particular, man’s exploitation of women in a world made to conform to the former’s ideas), about remembering and forgetting. They are aware of the difficulties of human co-existence and seek ways to reduce the distance between two (or more) individuals.

Servos, N. Cited in Kozel, S. 1993/94:49

These ideas Bausch tackles are central to the philosophy of phenomenology. Bausch’s concern with what moves people, rather than how people move, reflects in phenomenological terms, with a concern for essences. Essences, are by nature, elusive, and not always pleasant, however, Bausch explores the human condition through movement, delving into the layers of socially constructed behaviours.

In Rite of Spring “[t]he motifs danced include existential pain and longing and the futility of the search for genuine intimacy in relationships.” (Servos, N. 1984:29) Cinematic devices reveal married life as a tragicomic scenario, exploring the antagonism between the sexes and ultimate alienation of the individuals. Bausch uses simple but effective techniques to challenge theatrical and social conventions, while at the same time portraying human pain and vulnerability.

The second principle of phenomenology includes a return to lived experience, which can quite clearly be seen in Bausch relentless physical compositions. Bausch’s dance theatre contains no simulation; the dancers have no need to act their growing exhaustion. “Her performers employ Method principles, infusing their interactions with the intensity and pain of remembered experience.” (Manning, S. A. 1986:61).

Bausch also challenges her audiences, with some performances lasting three hours, with few or no intervals, bringing real time into theatrical time. In this sense passive reception of her work is impossible, it relies on the audiences own personal association with and recognition of the performers’ challenges, both physically and mentally. In Bluebeard the character of Bluebeard forces on layers of other women’s clothing onto his new wife in order to impose on her the social obligations and roles she must assume. It is, however, only through our own experiences of being forced into stereotypical situations that we can relate to and bring meaning to this image.

Bausch exhibits “self-reflexivity,” the third principle of phenomenology. She not only questions social constructions and complexities, but also her own choreographical activities within dance and theatre. She brings the audiences focus in 1980 to the fact that it is merely a performance; she does this through a constant exchanging recognition between audience and performer, extending movement into the auditorium or having dancers run to the front of the stage to gaze on the audience. “[B]y baring the creative process and its tools to view, dance theatre destroys the slick theatrical illusion.” (Servos, N. Cited in Kozel, S. 1993/94:54). Further emphasising that theatre does not stand apart from reality, she challenges the essence of human relations in respect to choreography:

Why do we dance in the first place? There is a great danger in the way things are developing at the moment and have been developing in the last few years. Everything has become routine and no one knows any longer why they’re using these movements. All that’s left is just a strange sort of vanity which is becoming more and more removed from actual people. And I believe that we ought to be getting closer to one another again.

Bausch, P. Cited in Kozel, S. 1993/94:55

Bausch also utilises other methods or principles by which she works, for example, with the use of repetition in an overtly theatrical way. Repetition inherent in rehearsed laughter, “robs life of substance” (Banes, S. 1986:83); it illuminates the struggles of daily life.

Some of the most poignant images occur through Bausch’s use of repetition, as in Bluebeard “when the female lead is continually pushed down to the floor by the man, each time to have a lonely hand climb back up his body, seeking a possibility for her to rise back up again.” (Langer, R. 1984:52). Bausch uses repetition to intensify moments of violence. Her repetitions undercut emotional impact with the rehearsed, repeated and ‘make-believe’ behaviour. The acts of violence are neither conventional nor naturalistic, they exist only as metaphors.

The use of repetition in this context alienates the audience; the repeated imagery can tease the spectator’s heightened sense of anticipation and expectation. This brings us to Bausch use of “theatre of cruelty,” undercutting the spectators sympathetic identification by presenting their role-playing as self-consciously theatrical. In 1980 one of the characters repeatedly tells us how, as a child, she used to cry out when she was alone in the dark, till her nanny would come and in “and turn on the light - and she would hit me, she would hit me, she would hit me.” After we have heard the story five times, it becomes poignantly clear that the pleasure of pain can become almost mechanical, automatic; we must listen again and again.

Bausch combines repetition with absence of activity, ‘emptiness’. Bausch was asked if she consciously encourages boredom in her pieces, she replied, “I don’t think of it as boredom at all; I think of it as emptiness. And I don’t find it boring at any time, but rather suspenseful.” (cited in Langer, R. 1984:52). The use of ‘emptiness’ alongside activity creates the emphasis required to view her startling images.

Bausch also uses mundane experience; in this sense, Bausch collapses the distinction between theatre and reality, however, she does not create ‘pedestrian’ pieces, as the American Post-Modernists were known for. She neither renders her dance theatre mundane, only calls to attention the theatrical qualities in conjunction with the incredible qualities of real life, and to the non-illusory side of dance theatre.

Bausch develops traditional musical forms, such as spoken theatre and opera, in Bluebeard especially, without fusing them together into a “total work of art” as defined by Ausdruckstanz. The tape recorder assumes an importance parallel to that of a performer; incorporated into the action, the music is played on a tape player that may be wheeled around on stage, developing boundaries for the performers.

Bluebeard himself sits at the player, repeating certain passages in order to reminisce; fragmenting the harmonious opera. The continual repetition causes a distortion, which reflects the distortion of the spoken word also utilised in Bluebeard. “The dancers scream, moan, groan, pant, giggle, laugh, screech, utter primal sounds.” (Servos, N. 1984:55). All forms of human verbal communication are challenged, thus destroying any means of contact between characters.

Bausch bring the ‘outside’ inside, reflecting the nature of her dancers’; bring their ‘inside’ out. In Rite of Spring the floor is covered in a layer of dirt, this affects the dancers physically as well as being a metaphor for the piece. As the work progresses the dancers mark, and are marked by their environment.

Their hair becomes entangled with mud; their skin becomes smeared with dirt. “The bodies rewrite the story of Rite in the earth. The initially smooth surface is at the end a desolate battle field. The dirt clings to the women’s thin dresses, is smeared on faces and covers the men’s bodies which are naked to the waist.” (Servos, N. 1984:30). The costumes often appear among the stage debris, marking the performers shift in roles. Bausch selects costumes from highly charged social situations; the bedroom, or the ballroom, “the thin layer of civilisation covering the heart of darkness”. (Kozel, S. 1993/94:51).

For Mary Wigman “the dance, like every other artistic expression, presupposes a heightened, increased life response.” (Wigman, M. cited in Cohen, S. J. 1977:149). Her dances embodied the spirit of expressionism, with emphasis on the outer expression of an inner emotion. Wigman’s movements were affected by her emotional states and life experiences, which draws a parallel to Bausch’s use of emotion memory.

This can also be seen in choreographer, Kurt Jooss’ works. Expressionism is the tendency of an artist to distort reality for an emotional effect; the Jooss dancer reproduces an experience which draws an uninhabited emotional response from the spectator. However, Jooss felt he had moved away from the early expressionism of Mary Wigman:

The creative adventures of expressionism lie behind us, also the convulsive cries of early jazz, the primeval tones of expressionist poetry, and the free-in-its-way-Barbaric-Ausdruckstanz. We are living in an age which is rediscovering artistic form.

Jooss, K. Cited in Partsch-Bergsohn, I. 1994:82

Jooss’ strikes a note of truth in his choreographies; this truth depends on his actions seeming absolutely natural. This idea of the natural was influenced by Stanislavsky and can be seen continued through to Bausch’s work. Jooss’ characters are merely roles according their social standing, they are not entirely realistic, however, Bausch’s characters are individuals whose social standing is unimportant; what matters to Bausch is to show something of the psychological complexities inherent.

Bausch develops both Wigman and Jooss’ ideas through the concept of Phenomenology. Only in the “lived experience” of Bausch’s pieces is one able to fully associate with the piece’s meaning in an entirely individual experience.

Mary Wigman opposed elitism and the belief that only a chosen few ‘professional’ dancers could communicate the spirit of the time through dance. “The same desire for artistic liberation... is also present in the non-professional dancer, and therefore gives him the right to seek for himself the intense expression of the dance.” (Wigman, M. cited in Cohen, S. J. 1977:150).

Wigman felt the formal qualities of Ballet would deny the expressive qualities of her dance because of its set vocabularies and style. Jooss, however, believed it would be a mistake to construct a new dance form without the use of ballet, this can be seen in his use of formally trained ballet dancers and his focus on form rather than meaning. This is illustrated in Jooss’ The Green Table (1932) and his use of a balletic second position of the legs.

Bausch again, utilises both forms of interpretation in the use of Ballet; while she uses formally trained dancers, the movements are far from Balletic. In 1992 Jooss’ The Green Table was performed by the Birmingham Royal Ballet proving its diverse qualities as both Expressionist and Balletic, “while no one would be likely to imagine that Peter Wright would want Pina Bausch to mount Cafe Muller on his Birmingham Royal Ballet.” (Nugent, A. 1992:41).

Bausch’s dancers do not dance as the do in Ballet; they walk, run, jump, fall, crawl and slide. Bausch does not preserve the myth that dance is graceful or effortless; she simply uses trained dancers for their abilities of endurance. Alfred Schlee believed “‘ballet’ technique gives a solid base to the performance along with a precision which is seldom met with in German dancers.” (cited in Preston-Dunlop, V. & Lahusen, S. 1990:8-9).

Wigman abhorred dance when it was formal and coded because it hid feeling; Jooss however, recognised that form could be turned into ‘intensified emotion’. Though many of Bausch’s works depend on everyday movement there is still an underlying fusion of skilled form. At the time that Jooss was working in Essen, Brecht was working in Berlin, and it is known that Jooss went to Berlin to see Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928).

Both Jooss and Brecht were establishing their own forms and styles with regard to dance and theatre, Jooss draws on many of Brecht’s techniques in alienating the audience, something reflected in Bausch’s works.

Jooss’ own views on his dance are hypocritical; he claims that his focus is on form and he doesn’t want to influence the audience. Yet his methods encourage the creation of a three-dimensional character because every movement is based on the exact psychological impulse governing behaviour; the movement sometimes expresses both physical action and the working of the character’s mind.

The confusion Jooss demonstrates between idea and reality in reflected in Brecht’s methodology; though their aim is to alienate the audience, you are not able to disconnect yourself from the individual emotions experienced. Wigman, in contrast has never claimed that she anything but Expressionist, it is therefore inevitable that Bausch has been influenced by the era of Ausdruckstanz, even if choreographers akin to Jooss are unable to identify themselves as such.

When talking about the training Bausch had received and the style she had come to accommodate in her early pieces, she once said:

I worked with many different teachers, many different styles. And for me there was always a problem; I never wanted to copy anyone, I did not want to do something I had learnt. It was very difficult: in my first piece I even thought a step is impossible - to try to go from here to there - because I did not want to use the steps I knew! I made myself very different. It was not like a style of ballet - it was really far away - but it was also very far away from all the styles I learnt. It was not a style from Jooss or from anybody else.

Bausch, P. Cited in Meisner, N. 1992:14

Tanztheater, or European Postmodern Dance, grew out of Expressionism, but utilises theatre as one of its fundamental building blocks. When Bausch was appointed director of the Wuppertal Ballet, it was not until two years later that it changed its name to Tanztheater Wuppertal. It was Bausch who made Tanztheater and without her success there would not have been Tanztheater.

Bausch’s contribution to dance, however, is a process, not a product; the work of choreographers Wigman, Jooss and Bausch should be labelled as ‘early’ (Wigman), ‘middle’ (Jooss) and ‘late’ (Bausch) Expressionism. Dance is in a constant state of change, utilising or rejecting what went before.

Wigman’s work was raw in that it grew out of an emotional state stemming from her own personality. Jooss’ choreography on the other hand was objective and his characters grew from archetypes with particular roles in the community. Bausch is concerned with private emotional identities, evolved from the social and cultural mores of her time. This results in a blend of objective distancing and intimate subjectivity.

In the labelling of these choreographers, we fall into the hazards of definition; limiting their work to a set of “stylistic and artistic parameters.” There is ambivalence in the very concept of ‘definition,’ it professes to inform us of what something represents or embodies; what it ‘means’.

The development of a particular dance style relies on its historical past; it is about flux and change. Yet it is defined through our perception of these past histories and what is relevant to us today. This indicates Bausch’s success in her ability to utilise the opportunities made available to her by her predecessors; Wigman and Jooss. It is through Bausch’s self-identification as a choreographer of Tanztheater that allows us to make sense of her contemporary ideas and beliefs.

Bibliography

Books

Birringer, J. (1991) Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Bremser, M. (1999) Fifty Contemporary Choreographers, London: Routledge.

Brown, J. M. (1980) The Vision of Modern Dance, London: Dance Books.

Cohen, S. J. (1977) Dance as a Theatre Art, London: Dance Books.

Partsch-Bergsohn, I. (1994) Modern Dance in Germany and the United States: Crosscurrents and Influences, Chur: Harwood Academic.

Partsch-Bergsohn, I. & Bergsohn, H. (2003) The Makers of Modern Dance in Germany: Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, Kurt Jooss, Hightstown, New Jersey: Princeton Book Co.

Preston-Dunlop, V. & Lahusen, S. (1990) Schrifttanz, London: Dance Books.

Servos, N. (1984) Pina Bausch - Wuppertal Dance Theater, or, The Art of Training a Goldfish: Excursions Into Dance, Köln: Ballett-Büchnen-Verlag.

Journals

Banes, S. (1986) What the Critics Say About Tanztheater. The Drama Review, 30 (2), pp. 80-84.

Daly, A. (1986) Tanztheater: The Thrill of the Lynch Mob or the Rage of a Woman? The Drama Review, 30 (2), pp. 46-56.

De Marigny, C. (1991) Theatre of Despair and Survival. Dance Theatre Journal, 9 (2), pp. 14-15.

Kozel, S. (1993/94) Bausch and Phenomenology. Dance Now, 2 (4), pp. 48-55.

Langer, R. (1984) Compulsion and Restraint, Love and Angst: The Post-War German Expressionism of Pina Bausch and Her Wuppertal Dance Theater. Translated by Richard Sikes. Dance Magazine, 58 (6), pp. 46-49.

Leask, J. (1995) Pictures from Childhood. Dance Now, 4 (3), pp. 82-85.

Manning, S. A. (1986) An American Perspective on Tanztheater. The Drama Review, 30 (2), pp. 57-79.

Manning, S. A. & Benson, M. (1986) Interrupted Continuities: Modern Dance in Germany. The Drama Review, 30 (2), pp. 30-45.

Meisner, N. (Nov. 1992) Come Dance With Me. Dance and Dancers, pp. 12-16.

Nugent, A. (1992) The Green Table and Cafe Muller. Dance Now, (1) 3, pp. 34-41.

Sikes, R. (1984) A Commentary on the Place of Pina Bausch in Contemporary Dance: “But is it Dance...?” Dance Magazine, 58 (6), pp. 50-53.

Video

Rite of Spring (1975) Choreographed by Pina Bausch. Performed by Dance Theater Wuppertal [DVD] Off-air recording: BBC2 (1982).

Bluebeard (1977) Choreographed by Pina Bausch. Performed by Dance Theater Wuppertal [DVD] Off-air recording: Channel 4 (1989).

1980 (1980) Choreographed by Pina Bausch. Performed by Dance Theater Wuppertal [DVD] Off-air recording: Channel 4 (1994).

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